could be effected by being believed in.
He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.
He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his own way for three years—in believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed in as much as he liked.
The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in his face.
He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.
By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation—a Public Service Corporation—that had a soul, and consequently worked.
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip—drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
CHAPTER I
SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD
It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.
Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.
But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is.
I want to be good.
And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and live all alone on an island in the sea.
I go a step further.
I believe that the crowds want to be good.
But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite agreement on our two main points.
1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful, squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new, clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith, Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to people about goodness.
We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some.
Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But the trouble always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know it, or at least one does not know which it is. The best we can do with goodness, some of us, if we want it to show more quickly or to hurry people along in goodness more, is to show them other people's.
I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin slowly but surely to be a very different place.
My plumber is a genius.
CHAPTER II
