So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, “Are there or are there not any competent business establishments in our modern life? Which are they, and where are they?” We want to know about them. We want to study them. We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see how they do it.
The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont Morgan and the next Tom Mann are for.
What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for us who the competent employers are—the employers who can get twice as much work out of their labour as other employers do—recognize them, stand by them and put up money on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also who the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out against them, and unless they have brains enough or can get brains enough to cooeperate with their own workmen, refuse to lend money to them.
This would make a banker a statesman, would make banking a great and creative profession, shaping the destinies of civilizations, determining with coins back and forth over a counter the prayers and the songs, the very religions of nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the world.
The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary transitional movement, a hero in the business world because of a certain moral energy there is in him. He has insisted in expressing his own character in business. He would not send money to capitalists fighting capitalists, and in a general way he has compelled capitalists to cooeperate. The new hero of the business world is going to compel capital not merely to cooeperate with capital, but to cooeperate with labour and with the public. And as Morgan compelled the railroads of the United States to cooeperate with one another by getting money for those that showed the most genius for cooeperation, and by not getting money for railroads that showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont Morgan will throw the weight of his capital at critical times in favour of companies that show the largest genius for building the mutual interests of capitalists, employees, and the public inextricably into one body. He is going to recognize as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical, and competent employers are those whose business genius is essentially social genius, the genius for being human, for discovering the mutual interests of men, and for making human machinery work.