The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to Cogs.
The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels about being a Cog.
If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons—watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails—watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,—the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be.
He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine.
What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient.
A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a Cog worth while.
The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it.
The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work—something that the rest of the Cog—the whole man in the Cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work.
This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time.
These two main points—getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats—getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog, know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work—are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method—a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it.