If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting what I am doing for him—­if I once get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can get down.  No one else can get down for him and no one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get down.  Why should a man bother with T.P.’s Weekly or with Horatio Bottomley or with the Daily Mail or the Times, with a score of other people’s by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his back?

There is a very simple rule for it.

The way to lift one’s employer off one’s back is to make one’s back so efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.

The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself.  And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my employer’s hiring engineers to make me efficient.  I would try to get my trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.

This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good.  I would be so good that he could not afford not being good too.

If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human nature, and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the House of Commons to butt in and pension him.  It seems to me that I would be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could.  And I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve it.  I could do it quietly by myself.

In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he is.  In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n-th power, in what might be called a kind of larger syndicalism.

The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, “We will take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves,” is going to say, “We will make ourselves fit to run the factories ourselves.”