The Crowd has come to see that the present owners—judging from current events, and taking them as a whole, and speaking impersonally and historically—have proved themselves, on the whole, incompetent to control industries with skill and efficiency, because they have treated labour as the natural enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it. It sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or otherwise, are incompetent to own and control and manage industry because they propose to treat capital as the natural enemy of the workers. There has been but one conclusion possible. If Civilization or the Crowd Syndicate has a right to have its industries managed in the interests of all, and if the present owners have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent to control industry because they fight labour, and if the present labourers as a class have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent because they propose to fight capital, there is naturally but one question the crowd syndicate is asking to-day, namely, "Are there any mentally competent business firms at all in the world, any firms whose owners and labourers have thought out a way of not fighting?" From the point of view of the Crowd, the men who are competent, who know how to do their work, do not have to lay down their tools and find out all over again how to do their work. They know it and keep doing it.
So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, "Are there or are there not any competent business establishments in our modern life? Which are they, and where are they?" We want to know about them. We want to study them. We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see how they do it.
The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont Morgan and the next Tom Mann are for.
What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for us who the competent employers are—the employers who can get twice as much work out of their labour as other employers do—recognize them, stand by them and put up money on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also who the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out against them, and unless they have brains enough or can get brains enough to coöperate with their own workmen, refuse to lend money to them.
This would make a banker a statesman, would make banking a great and creative profession, shaping the destinies of civilizations, determining with coins back and forth over a counter the prayers and the songs, the very religions of nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the world.
The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary transitional movement, a hero in the business world because of a certain moral energy there is in him. He has insisted in expressing his own character in business. He would not send money to capitalists fighting capitalists, and in a general way he has compelled capitalists to coöperate. The new hero of the business world is going to compel capital not merely to coöperate with capital, but to coöperate with labour and with the public. And as Morgan compelled the railroads of the United States to coöperate with one another by getting money for those that showed the most genius for coöperation, and by not getting money for railroads that showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont Morgan will throw the weight of his capital at critical times in favour of companies that show the largest genius for building the mutual interests of capitalists, employees, and the public inextricably into one body. He is going to recognize as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical, and competent employers are those whose business genius is essentially social genius, the genius for being human, for discovering the mutual interests of men, and for making human machinery work.
There is a great position ahead for this hero when he comes. And I have seen in my mind to-day thousands of men, young and old in every business, in every country of the world, pressing forward to get the place.
It is what the next Tom Mann is for—to find out for the Trades Unions and for the public who the most competent workmen are in every line of business, the workmen who are the least mechanical-minded, who have shown the most brains in educating and being educated by their employers, the most power in touching the imaginations of their employers with their lives and with their work, and in coöperating with them.
When the next Tom Mann has searched out and found the workmen in every line of business who are capable of working with their superiors, and of becoming more and more like them, he will make known to all other workmen and to all other Trades Unions who these workmen are, and how they have managed to do it. He will see that all Trades Unions are informed, in night-schools and otherwise, how they have done it. He will see that the principles, motives, and conditions that these men have employed in making themselves more like their superiors, in making themselves more and more fit to take the place of their superiors, in making their work a daily, creative, spirited part of a great business, are made so familiar to all Trades Unions that the policies of all our labour organizations everywhere shall change and shall be infected with a new spirit; and labouring men, instead of going to their shops the world over, to spend nine hours a day in fighting the business in which they are engaged, to spend nine hours a day in trying to get themselves nothing to do, nine hours a day in getting nobody to want to employ them, will work the way they would like to work, and the way they would all work to-morrow morning if they knew the things about capital and about labour that they have a right to know, and that only incompetent employers and incompetent labor leaders year by year have kept them from knowing.