For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most power to change the conditions of labour and to free the mechanical-minded slaves.  It is they who are standing to-day on the great strategical ground of our time.  They hold the pass of human life.  People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds.  Crowds are too unwieldy and too inconvenient to act quickly.  The people can only concentrate their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people, shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have for themselves.  If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle out from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all that they can in labour unions and in the press and at the polls to keep the machines in this world out of the hands of tired and mechanical-minded owners.

But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or mechanicalness in machines is not going to come from the employers on the one hand or the employees on the other, but from having the employees in the Trades Unions and the employers in the directors’ meetings combining together to keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all men, whether directors or employees, who do not work harder than they have to, and who have not the brains to do their work for something besides money.  The men who are like this will of course be pitied and duly considered, but they will be kept where they will not have power to control other men, or where by force of position or by mere majority they will be able to bully other men to work as mechanically as they do.  Workmen who do not want to become machines can only better conditions by combination with so-called inspired employers—­employers who work harder than they have to, who dote on the great human difficulties of work, who choose not the easiest but the most perfect way of doing things, who are never mechanical themselves, and will not let their men be if they can help it.  I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires.  I would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour and the will of the people be accomplished.  When the machines are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men—­men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every hand around us as the engines of war against evil, against slavery, the whirling weapons of the Spirit.

Even now, in dreams have I stood and watched them—­the will of the people like a flail in their mighty hands—­this vast army of machines—­go thundering past, driving the uninspired and mechanical off the face of the earth.