ho are born twice.

Not all men are cogs and wheels.

The first day I discovered this and believed this I went out into the
streets and looked into the faces of the men and the women and I looked
up at the factories and the churches and I was not afraid.

I do not deny that cogs and wheels are very common.

But I do not believe that an economic system or industrial scheme based
on the general principle of arranging a world for cogs and wheels would
work. I believe in arranging the world on the principle that there are
now and are going to be always enough men in it who are born, and enough
who are born twice to keep cogs and wheels doing the things men who have
been born twice, who have visions for worlds, want done, and to keep
people who prefer being cogs and wheels where they will work best and
where they will help the running gear of the planet most--by going round
and round, in the way they like--going round and round and round and
round.

But why is it, one cannot help wondering, that the moment a man rises up
suddenly in this modern world and bases or seeks to base an industrial
or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in
the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being
put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on
conversion--why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies,
politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and
descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead
millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him
with mere history, argue him with statistics, and thunder him with
sermons out of the world--if he puts up a faint little chirrup of hope
that men can be converted?

It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops
and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be
converted. There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a
few particular men's being born again. It is worse than that. What seems
to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial
reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new
generation's being born again. It is going to be just like this one,
they tell us, the new generation--the same old things the same old
foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not
worked--Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around
and around aga