He named something that everybody knows.
Then I remembered suddenly who he was. He was one of the men I had first been told about in England, and the name had slipped from me. He had managed to do and do together the three things one goes about looking for everywhere in business—what might be called the Three R's of great business (though not necessarily R's). (1) He had raised the wages of his employees. (2) He had reduced prices to consumers. (3) He had reduced his proportion of profit and raised the income of the works, by inventing new classes of customers, and increasing the volume of the business.
He had found himself, one day, as most men do, sooner or later, with a demand for wages that he could not pay.
At first he told the men he could not pay them more, said that he would have to close the works if he did.
He was a very busy man to be confronted with a crisis like this. The market was trouble enough.
One morning, when he was up early, and the house was all still and he was sitting alone with himself, the thought slipped into his mind that there had been several times before in his life when he had sat thinking about certain things that could not be done. And then he had got up from thinking they could not be done and gone out and done them.
He wondered if he could not get up and go out and do this one.
As he sat in the stillness with a clear road before his mind and not a soul in the world up, the thought occurred to him, with not a thing in sight to stop it, that he had not really trained himself to be quite such an expert in raising wages as he had in some other things.
Perhaps he did not know about raising wages.
Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting higher wages for his workmen as he had in those early days years before on making over all his obstinate raw material into the best cases of —— on earth, he might find it possible to get more wages for his men by persuading them to earn more and by getting their coöperation in finding ways to earn more.