“Without Vision the People perish.”

I would begin with spending five million dollars on a vision for the people.

What would I do with a five-million-dollar fund for touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital?

First:  preliminary announcement in all papers and in all public ways, asking names and addresses of workmen who have already proved and established their belief in copartnership.

Names and addresses of employers in the same way.

Second:  names and addresses of workmen who would believe in it if they could; who believe in the principle theoretically and would be interested in seeing how it could be practically and technically proved.

Names and addresses of employers in the same way.

Third:  selection of one firm in each industry, the best and most strategically placed to carry it out in that industry, and placing the facts before them.

Selection of the leading workmen out of all the workmen in the nation employed in that industry, who would be willing to work with such a firm.

Fourth:  a selection of travelling secretaries to visit trades unions and get provisional permission and toleration for these workmen so that they can take copartnership places under such a firm with the consent of their fellows and he set one side for experimental purposes, under the protection of the trades union rules.

Fifth:  I would find the most promising trades-union branch in each industry and I would try to get this branch to take it up with the other branches until all trades unions were brought to admit copartnership members on special terms.

Sixth:  after getting copartnership tolerated for certain workmen employed in certain firms I would try to make copartnership a trades-union movement.

I would then let the trades unions educate the employers.

Seventh:  I would prepare a list of apparent exceptions to copartnership as a working principle.  I would investigate and try to see why they were exceptions and why copartnership would not work, and I would find and set inventors at work, and find in what way the spirit that is back of copartnership could be applied.

CHAPTER XIV

NEWS-MACHINES

We want to be good and the one thing we need to do is to tell each other.  Then we will be good.  Our conveniences for being good in crowds are not finished yet.

We have invented machines for crowds to see one another with and to use in getting about in the dark.  One engine whirls round and round all night so that half a million people can be going about anywhere after sunset without running into each other.

Crowds have vast machines for being somewhere else—­run in somewhat the same way all from one unpretentious building they put up called a Power House.

A great many of our machines for allowing crowds of people to move their bodies around with have been attended to, but our Intelligence-Machine, our machine for knowing what other people really think, and what they are like in their hearts so that we can know enough to be good to them, and have brains enough to get them to be good to us, is not finished and set up yet.