THE MEN'S MACHINES
There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods stores could be human. They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls of the people who owned them.
When machinery was invented and when organization was invented—machines of people—drygoods stores became vast selling machines.
We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store with fifteen.
This problem has been essentially and in principle solved. At least we know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit—most of us—that it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature. What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores work—the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks—thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears itself.
But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground?
In a department store the employer expresses himself to his clerks through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle and stir their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to all of them through them all.
But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark hole in the ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of other holes men work, each with his helper, all alone. The utmost the helper can do is to grow like the man he works with, or like his own pick, or like the coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost the man who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his helper.
In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through the steel machine he works with—through its being a new, good, fair machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a foreman pacing down the aisles.
The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air, water and fire and silence to express myself to my workmen in. I have long monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron, strips of wood, bells, whistles, clocks—to express myself, to express my human spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as expressive of the human as a department store?"