It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.
And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.
And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a church—let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other churches!
People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind of weak, pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls, as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce, splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history, trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go. These are ideals! This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they make a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for, to make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With the men who are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as an everyday matter of course.
I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what he lives for, as his motive powers. They generally speak of motives in a man as if they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or clock-hand on him or map of his soul. The motives and desires in a man are the motors or engines in him, the central power house in a man, the thing in him that makes him go.
All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big life is to have suddenly a big motive.
Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive, ever tried working a little happiness for other people into what he is doing for himself, for instance, if he stopped to think about it and how it worked and how happy it made him himself, would never do anything in any other way all his life. It is the big motives that are efficient.