Perhaps he did not know about raising wages.

Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting higher wages for his workmen as he had in those early days years before on making over all his obstinate raw material into the best cases of ——­ on earth, he might find it possible to get more wages for his men by persuading them to earn more and by getting their cooeperation in finding ways to earn more.

As he sat in the stillness, gradually (perhaps it was the stillness that did it) the idea grew on him.

He made up his mind to see what would happen if he worked as hard at paying higher wages for three months as he had for three years at making raw material into cases of the best——­on earth.

Then things began happening every day.  One of the most important happened to him.

He found that higher wages were as interesting a thing to work on as any other raw material had ever been.

He found that a cheap workman as raw material to make a high-priced workman out of was as interesting as a case of——.

A year or so after this, there was a strike (in his particular industry) of all the workmen in England.  They struck to be paid the wages his men were paid.

He had been able to do three things he thought he thought he could not do.  He had succeeded in doing the first, in raising the wages of his employees, by thinking up original ways of expressing himself to them, and of getting them to believe in him and of making them want to work a third harder.  At the same time he succeeded in doing the second, in reducing the prices to consumers, by inventing new by-products out of waste.

He had succeeded in doing the third, in reducing his per cent. of profits and increasing his income from the works at the same time, by thinking up ways of creating new habits and new needs in his customers.

He had fulfilled, as it seems, the three requisites of a great business career.  He had created new workmen, invented new things for men and women to want, and had then created some new men and women who could want them.

Incidentally all the while, day by day, while he was doing these things, he had distributed a large and more or less unexpected sum of money among all these three classes of people.

Some of this extra money went to his workmen, and some to himself, and some to his customers, but it was largely spent, of course, in getting business for other manufacturers and in getting people to buy all over England, from other manufacturers, things that such people as they had never been able before to afford to buy.

* * * * *

All these things that I have been saying and which I have duly confided to the reader flashed through my mind as I stood with my back to the fire, realizing suddenly that the man who had done them was the man with whom I was talking.

Possibly some little thing was said.  I do not remember what.  The next thing I knew was that, with his five grown sons around him, he returned to his attack on his house.