The windows on the right contained three big purple hats with blue feathers, and some pink parasols.

The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-headed canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to.

Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual.

Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions, phonographs, big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing machines, and Morris chairs.  Only a few hands took their Mondays off after this.

All the mills began running all the week.

* * * * *

Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats and blue feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather shoes.  But if people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty days, or sixty days ahead, instead of three days ahead, by purple hats and blue feathers and white waistcoats, and if it is necessary to use purple hats and blue feathers to start people thinking in months instead of minutes, or to budge them over to where they can have a touch of idealism or of religion or of living beyond the moment, I say for one, with all my heart, “God bless purple hats and blue feathers!”

* * * * *

The great problem of modern charity, the one society is largely occupied with to-day, is:  “What is there that we can possibly do for our millionaires?”

The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.

The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a great business merely to make money.  They will find it more interesting, harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable employers.  When our millionaires once begin to enter into competition with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease.

Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare, and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because they cannot really think of anything to live for.

Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working for.

The industrial question is not an economic question.  It is a question of supplying a nation with ideals.  It is a problem which only an American National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle.  The very first moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.