People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people—to make them peaceful....
The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages.
Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production.
The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders.
The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport—the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it.
The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by.
What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders—the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass.
A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, i.e., he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to—by paying higher wages than they can earn.
In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world.