You tell a man the news, the true news that his employees are literally and honestly finding increased pay or promotion, either in their own establishment or elsewhere for every man they employ, as fast as he makes himself fit, and you have created a man three times his own size before your own eyes, all in a minute.  And he begins working for you like a man three times his own size, and not because he is getting more for it, but because he suddenly believes in you, suddenly believes in the world and in the human race he belongs to.

To make a man work, say something to him or do something to him which will make him swing his hat for humanity, and give three cheers (like a meeting of workmen the other day):  “Three cheers for God!”

There is a well-known firm in England which has the best labour of its kind in the world, because the moment the Firm finds that a man’s skill has reached the uttermost point in his work, where it would be to the Firm’s immediate interests to keep him and where the Firm could keep on making money out of him and where the man could not keep on growing, they have a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere, finding him a better place and sending him to it.  This is a regular system and highly organized.  The factory is known or looked upon as a big family or school.  There are hundreds of young men and young women who, in order to get in and get started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory, would offer to work for the firm for nothing.  The Factory, to them, is like a great Gate on the World.

It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.

And ideals are news.  Ideals are news to a man about himself.  News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.

And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a church—­let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other churches!

People have a fashion of speaking of a man’s ideals in a kind of weak, pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls, as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce, splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history, trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go.  These are ideals!  This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they make a man feel when he is working on them.  It is what they are for, to make him feel like this, when he is working on them.  With the men who are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as an everyday matter of course.