And why should not all workmen know what a few thousand workmen who have been trained under Frederick Taylor to work under better conditions and with more wages, know?
If I were an inspired millionaire the first thing I would do to-morrow would be to supply the funds and find the men who should take up what Lord Grey knows about employers, and what Frederick Taylor knows about workmen, and put it where all who live shall see it and know it. I would spend my fortune in proving to the world, in making everybody know and believe that the mutual-interest business man and the mutual-interest workman have been produced and can be produced and shall be produced by the human race.
The problem of the fate of the world in its essential nature and in its spiritual elements and gifts—has come to be in this age of the press a huge advertising problem—a great adventure in human attention.
The most characteristic and human and natural way, and the only profound and permanent way to handle the quarrel between Capital and Labour is by placing certain facts—certain rights-of-all-men-to-know, into the hands of some disinterested and powerful statesman of publicity—some great organizer of the attention of a world. He would have to be a practical passionate psychologist, a man gifted with a bird’s-eye view of publics—a discoverer of geniuses and crowds, a natural diviner or reader of the hearts of men. He shall search out and employ twenty men to write as many books addressed to as many classes and types of employers and workers. He shall arrange pamphlets for every dooryard that cannot help being read.
He shall reach trades unions by using the cinema, by having some master of human appeal take the fate of labour, study it out in pictures—and the truth shall be thrown night after night and day after day on a hundred thousand screens around a world. He shall organize and employ wide publicity or rely on secret and careful means on different aspects of the issue according to the nature of the issue, human nature and common sense, and organize his campaign to reach every type of person, every temperament, and order of circumstance, each in its own way.
What Lord Grey knows and what Frederick Taylor’s workmen know shall be put where all who live shall see it where every employer, every workman, every workman’s wife and every growing boy and girl that is passing by, as on some vast billboard above the world, shall see it—shall see and know and believe that employers that are worth believing in—and that workmen who can work and who are skilled and clever enough to love to work—can still be produced by the human race.
If I were a newspaper man I would start what might be called Pull Together Clubs in every community, men in all walks of life, little groups of crowdmen or men in the community who could not bear not to see a town do team work.
I would use these Pull Together Clubs in every community as means of gathering and distributing news—as local committees on the national campaign of touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital.