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As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing house—­marking off rooms—­sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of stones on the ground.  When I came up they had just taken hold of a big stone they wanted to lift over into line a little.  They were tugging on it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge.  I picked up a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for them, and went on with my walk.  When I came back after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house.  And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around—­every one that was the right size—­seemed subtly out of place.  The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.

They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.

I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys’ first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!

I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a crowbar lifts.  I never know figures very well.  But I know people and I know that a man with only three day’s worth of things ahead to live for does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and inspiring him.  And I know that the man who does his work with a longer lever still, with thirty or forty years worth’ of things he wants, all crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a new size and a new kind of man.

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The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him twice as much wages.

Efficiency is based on news.  Put before a man’s life twenty times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well—­twice as much work.

If a man has a big man’s thing or object in view, he can do three times as much work.  If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute.  It makes it easier to do it because it seems big.

The little man becomes a big man.

From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who is the man of economic sense.  The employer who can put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.