al about each other and who will look hard into each other's eyes
will be the people whose ideas will first come to pass. Everything we
try to do or say or bring to pass in England or America is going to
begin after this, not in talking, but in listening. If social reformers
and industrial leaders had been good listeners, the social
deadlock--England with its House of Lords and railroads both on strike
and America with its great industries quarrelling--would have been
arranged for and got out of the way over twenty years ago.

We have overlooked the first step of industrial reform, the rather
extreme step of listening. The most hard-headed and conclusive man to
settle any given industrial difficulty is the man who has the gift of
divining what is going on in other people's minds, a gift for being
human, a gift for treating everybody who disagrees with him as if they
might possibly be human too, though they are very poor, even though they
are very rich. Practical psychology has come to be not only the only
solution but also the only method of our modern industrial questions.
Being so human that one can guess what any possible human being would
think is the one hard-headed and practical way to meet the modern labour
problem.

The first symptom of being human in a man is his range and power of
shrewd, happy toleration, or courage for people who know as little now
as he knew once.

A man's sense of toleration is based primarily upon the range and power
of his knowledge of himself, upon his power of remembering and
anticipating himself, upon his laughing with God at himself, upon his
habit in darkness, weariness or despair, or in silent victory and joy,
of falling on his knees.

Toleration is reverence. It is the first source of courage for other
people.

CHAPTER XV

CONVERSION

Some people think of the world as if it were made all through, people
and all, of reinforced concrete, as if everything in it--men, women,
children, churches, colleges, and parties, were solidly, inextricably
imbedded in it.

Every age in history has had to get on as well as it could with two sets
of totally impracticable people, our two great orders of Philistines in
this world, the people who put their trust in Portland Cement and the
people who put their trust in Explosives.

There has not been a single great movement in history yet that every
thoughtful man has not had to watch being held up by these people--by
millions of wo