in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours,
the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most
valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly
good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as
the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. These
employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live
men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones. If the great
slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not
mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them
categorically the little platitude (which even people who have observed
cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead,
and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead
ones.

But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments
or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business;
for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and
creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the
employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to
crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only
get and keep mechanical-minded ones.

* * * * *

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on
among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired
ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the
mechanical-minded ones.

For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most
power to change the conditions of labour and to free the
mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are standing to-day on the
great strategical ground of our time. They hold the pass of human life.
People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy
and too inconvenient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate
their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on
insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in
with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with
which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people,
shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for
themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have
for themselves. If our labouring men of