standing on the other side against them, battling for our world, another small but mighty group made up of the labourer who loves his work more than his wages, and the capitalist who loves the thing he makes more than the profit.  In other words, the fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things.

It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers the problem of living in one world or the other.  If we are to take our choice between living in a world run by tired men and a world run by inspired ones, most of us will have little difficulty in deciding which we would prefer, and which one we are bound to have.  I have been moved to come forward with the idea of inspired employers—­or, as I have called it, “Inspired Millionaires”—­because it would seem to me inspired employers are the very least we can ask for; for certainly if even our employers cannot be inspired or rested and strong, we cannot expect their overworked workmen to be.  There is no hope for us but to write our books and to live our lives in such a way as to help put the world in the hands of the Strong, and to help keep its institutions and customs out of the hands of the overworked.  Overworked mechanical employers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the problem of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean, resentful, temporary way.

And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides.  I will not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical men.  Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the machines mow down their souls?  The first thing I have come to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine—­whether it is a machine called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation—­is, Is he tired? I have cast my lot once for all—­and as it seems to me, too, the lot of the world—­with those men who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in their imaginations, great men—­men who are not driven to being self-centred or driven to being class-centred, who can be world-centred and inspired.

* * * * *

When one has made this decision, that one will work for a world in control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought face to face with a fact in our machine civilization which probably is quite new, and which the spirit of man has never had to face in any age before.