Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees mechanical-minded.  The men have not been able to work without machines to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control.  He takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them, their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into machines themselves—­as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood.

In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing—­partly by competition and partly by combination and by experience—­employers who are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours, the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as the most important part of the working equipment of the factory.  These employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones.  If the great slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them categorically the little platitude (which even people who have observed cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead, and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead ones.

But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business; for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only get and keep mechanical-minded ones.

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It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the mechanical-minded ones.