OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS
But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people.
The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position.
The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they are like and what they want, and that business is another way.
Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses them where their being expressed counts the most?
The people have a Government. And the people have Business.
What is a Government for?
What is Business for?
Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of supplying them.
The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty thousand men and women, keep them at work eight or nine hours a day, five or six days in a week, finding out what the things are that the English people want and reporting on them and supplying them.
They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with and prefer to have prosper.
And the business men are not only in the most strategic and competent position to find out what the people who buy want, but to find out too, what the people who sell want. They are in the best position to know, and to know intimately, what the salesmen and saleswomen want and what they want to be and what they want to do or not do.
They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard to the conditions in the factories from which their goods come and with regard to what the employers, stockholders, foremen and workmen in those factories want.
What is more to the point, these same business men, when they have once found out just what it is the people want, are the only men who are in a position, all in the same breath, without asking anybody and without arguing with anybody, without meddling or convincing anybody—to get it for them.
Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be called, controlling business.
The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them?
If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to improve the conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not think I would want to take the time to wait several months, probably, to convince my member of Parliament, and then wait a few months more for him to convince the other members of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather deal directly with my employer.
If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting what I am doing for him—if I once get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s Weekly or with Horatio Bottomley or with the Daily Mail or the Times, with a score of other people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his back?
There is a very simple rule for it.
The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make one's back so efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.
The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself. And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.
This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be so good that he could not afford not being good too.
If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human nature, and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve it. I could do it quietly by myself.
In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the nth power, in what might be called a kind of larger syndicalism.
The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves," is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories ourselves."
What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation, begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the factories?
What is true of employers and employees in factories is still more true of the employers and employees in the great retail stores. If there is one thing rather than another the business men and women on Oxford Street, the managers, floor walkers and clerks all up and down the street are really engaged in all day all their lives, it is what might be called a daily nine-hour drill in understanding people. Why should employers and employees like these—experts in human nature—men who make their profession a success by studying human nature, and by working in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from the House of Commons and expect them to work out their human problems better than they can do it?
Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all the world most competent to study together the working details of human nature, to act for themselves in self-respecting man-fashion and without whining at a nation.
Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they want from, could know more about human nature than they do? Are they not the men of all others, all up and down that little strip of Oxford Street, who devote their entire time to human nature? They are in the daily profession of knowing the soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and about what people will probably think. They are intimate with their peccadillos in what they want to wear and in what they want to eat; they have learned their likes and dislikes in human nature; they know what they will support and what they will defy in human nature, in clerks, and in stores, and in storekeepers.
And these things that they have learned about human nature (in themselves and other people) they have learned not by talking about human nature but by a grim daily doing things with it.
These things being so, it would almost seem that these people and people like them were qualified to act, and as they happen to be in the one strategic position, both employers and employees alike, to act and to act for themselves and act directly and act together, it will not be very long, probably, before the nation will be very glad to have them do it.
It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour and all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and crying "Help!" and calling in some third person to settle family difficulties that can be better settled by being faced and thought out in private, is an inefficient and incompetent thing to do.
And for the most part it is going to be only in the more superficial, inefficient, thoughtless industry that men, either employers or employed, will be inclined to leave their daily work, run out wildly and drag in a House of Commons to help them to do right.
I am only speaking for myself but certainly if I were an employer or an employee, I would not want to wait for an election a year away or to wait for the great engineering problem of compelling my member of Parliament by my one vote to act for me.
Perhaps workingmen in England and America are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving conditions of workingmen. Possibly women are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving the conditions of working women.
Possibly a woman could do more behind a counter or by buying a store than by voting to have some man she has read about in a paper, improve business by talking about it in the House of Commons.
There is also a kind of program or vision of action one can use as a customer as well as an employer or employee.
I might speak for myself.
I have about so much money I spend every year in buying things. I have proposed to study with my money every firm on which I spend it. I propose to take away my trade from the firm that does the least as it should and give it to the firm that does the most as it should. I will vote with my entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of employers who can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep the kind of salesmen and saleswomen I choose to do business with.
All the year round, every firm with which I deal, I am going to study not only with my mind but with my money. I will proceed to take my trade away from the big employers who think that I want shoddy goods or who think that I want or am willing to trade with saleswomen who would let an employer impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford to impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with every penny I have in the world, and I will earn more that I may vote more, for the kind of employer with whom I like to trade. And there shall not be a man, woman, or child of my acquaintance, if I can help it, or of my family's acquaintance who shall not know who these employers are by name and by address, the employers that I will trade with and the employers that I will not.
This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public, of the way for a people to express itself and to get what it wants.
What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about me so far as I go, as one member of the public. As I am only one person every item of the news about me must be put where it works. I will deal directly with the news of what I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can give it to me when they know it.
News is the real government now and always of this world.
When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, obviously the best art-form for telling news to employers and business men—the news of what we want and what we do not want and of what we want in them as well as in the things they sell, is to tell them the news in the language they have studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars, and cents, and by trading somewhere else.
The gospel-bearing value, the news that one can get into a man's mind with one dollar, the news that he can be made to see and act on for one dollar—well, thinking of this some days, makes for me, at least, going up and down the Main Street of the World feeling my purse snuggling in my pocket, and all the people I can step up to with my purse and tell so many dollars' worth of news to, tell that dollar's worth of gospel to about the world—makes going up and down with a dollar on a big business street, and spending it or not spending it, feel like a kind of chronic, easy, happy, going to Church. One always has a little money in one's pocket that one spends or that one won't spend, and sometimes even not spending a dollar, practised by some people, at just the right moment and in just the right way, can be made to mean as much and do as much with a world as spending a thousand dollars would without any meaning put into it.
Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind of store I know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them look a minute at the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk out with it quietly.
I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall circulate in my money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion, my gospel or news for this world, news about what I want and about what I will have in a world, if I cannot make every dollar, every shilling I earn, go through the world and sing my own little world-song in it, may I never have another shilling or earn another dollar as long as I live!
The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once more, fills me with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what a bargain it is and how I can use it twice over, thinking of the dollar's worth of news, to say nothing of the dollar's worth of things that belong with a dollar!
For some generations, now, we have tried to make people good in a vague, general way, by using priests, sacraments and confessional boxes. For some centuries we have been trying to make people good with lawyers and juries and ballot boxes. We are now to try, at last, religion or gospel or news or ideals—practical, shrewd aimed ideals, that is, news to a man about himself or news about the man from the man himself to us. In everything a man does he is expressing to us this news about himself, and about his world, and about his God. We are all telling news about the world and about ourselves all the time and we are all in a position for news all the time.
What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do and we will not do?
This news about us is the religion in us.
The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of late as to just where his religion is located. He has come to see that real religion in a man, very conveniently located (immediately at hand in him and personally directed), is his own action, his own divine "I will" or "I won't."
He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured, godlike "I will" and "I won't "—or News about himself.