Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

We have a Frederick Taylor for furnishing brains to labour.

We are going to have a Frederick Taylor to attend to the brain-supply of millionaires, to idea-outfits for directors.

Every big firm is going to have a large group of specialists working on the problem of how to make millionaires—its own particular millionaires think, devising ways of keeping idle and thoughtless capitalists out of the way. If the experts fail in making millionaires think, they may be succeeded by experts in getting rid of them and in finding thoughtful money, possibly made up of many small sums, to take their place.

The real question the Artist or Organizer is going to ask about any man with capital will be, "Is it the man who is making the money valuable and important or is it the money that is making this man important for the time being and a little noticeable or important-looking?"

The only really serious question we have to face about money to-day is the unimportance of the men who have it. The Hewers or Scoopers, or Grabbers, who have assumed the places of the Artist and the Inventor because they have the money, are about to be crowded over to the silent, modest back seats in directors' meetings. If they want their profits, they must give up their votes. They are going to be snubbed. They are going to beg to be noticed. The preferred stock or voting stock will be kept entirely in the hands of the men of working imagination, of clear-headedness about things that are not quite seen, the things that constitute the true values in any business situation, the men who have the sense of the way things work and of the way they will have to go.

Mere millionaires who do not know their place in a great business will be crowded into small ones. They will be confronted by the organized refusal of men with brains to work for their inferiors, to be under control of men of second-rate order. Men with mere owning and grabbing minds will only be able to find men as stupid as they are to invest and manage their money for them. In a really big creative business their only chance will be cash and silence. They will be very glad at last to get in on any terms, if the men of brains will let their money edge into their business without votes and be carried along with it as a favour.

It is because things are not like this now, that we have an industrial problem.

Managers who have already hired labour as a matter of course are going to hire the kind of capital they like, the kind of capital that thinks and that can work with thinking men.

There will gradually evolve a general recognition in business on the part of men who run it and on the part of managers, of the moral or human value of money. The successful manager is no longer going to grab thoughtlessly at any old, idle, foolish pot of money that may be offered to him. He is going to study the man who goes with it, see how he will vote and see whether he knows his place, whether he is a Hewer, for instance, who thinks he is an Inventor. Does he or does he not know which he is, an Inventor, an Artist, or a Hewer?

Capitalists will expect as a matter of course to be looked over and to be hired in a great business enterprise as carefully as labourers are being hired now.