Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our industrial machines.
All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are not like us.
Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the Americans and as if we were the machines.
Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?
All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business") all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed on by machines, will cease.
We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machines must have our American temperament.
If an American employer were to insist on butting his American temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's temperament to be like?
The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the American people, in its goods and in itself.
The typical American business man of the highest class—the man who is expressing his American temperament best in his business—is the one who is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts on them with nonchalance.