Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader?  You have observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people (making fun of you, for instance), the assumption almost always is, that you are trying to be like the Standard Person, and that this (they look at you pleasantly as you go by) is as near as you can get to it!  If an employer wishes to make his clerk an especially valuable clerk, if he wishes to make his clerk an expert in human nature or a good salesman, one who sees a customer when he comes along as he really is, and as he is trying to be, he will only be able to do it by touching something deep down in the clerk’s nature, something very like his religion—­his power of putting himself in the place of others.  He can only do it by making a clerk feel that this power in him of doing as he would be done by, and seeing how to do it, i.e., the religion in him, is what he is hired for.

It is visionary to try to run a great department store, a great machine of twenty-five hundred souls, a machine of human emotions, of five thousand eyes and ears, a huge loom of enthusiasm, of love, hate, covetousness, sorrow, disappointment, and joy without having it full of clerks who are experts in human nature, putting themselves in the place of crowds of other people, clerks who are essentially religious.

So we watch the men who are ahead driving one another into goodness.  The man who is not able to create, distribute or turn on, in his business establishment, goodness, social insight, and customer-insight in it, can only hope to-day to keep ahead in business by having competitors as inefficient as he is.

The man who is ahead has discovered himself.  Everything the man ahead is doing eight hours a day, is seen at last narrowing him down, cornering him into goodness.

Of course as long as people looked upon goodness as a Sunday affair, a few hours a week put in on it, we were naturally discouraged about it.

It is still a little too fresh looking and it may be still a little too clever for everybody, but slowly, irrevocably, we see it coming.  We can look up almost any day and watch some goodness—­now—­at least one specimen or so, in every branch of business.

We watch daily the men who are ahead, pulling on the goodness of the world and the Crowds pushing on it.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CROWDS PUSH

The men who are ahead make goodness start, but it is the crowds that make it irresistible.

The final, slow, long, imperious lift on goodness is the one the crowd gives.  Of course, for the most part, modern business is largely done with crowds.  Crowds are doing it and crowds are nearly always watching it.

The factory is slower than the department store in being good because the men in it deal with crowds of things and crowds of wheels and not with crowds of people.