In a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen is an instance of what is really the essential issue in every strike.  The bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated simply, was that they did not believe in their employers.  They believed that, if the precise figures were known, their employers were getting more than their share.  On the other hand, the bottom fact about the employers was that they did not and could not believe that, if the precise figures were known, the cabmen were not getting more than their share.  They insisted that the cabmen should publish, or make known, the precise figures of their extras.  The cabmen declined to do it, and it made them look for the moment perhaps as if they were wrong.  But were they necessarily wrong?  Was it really true that they had any more reason to trust their employers than their employers had to trust them?  The cabmen might quite honestly and justly have said to the owners:  “What we want is an honest, impeccable little dividend-recorder fastened on the back of every owner, as well as on our machines and on us.  Then we will publish our extras.”

The determining and important fact of economics in the last analysis always turns out to be some human fact, some fact about people.  It is really true that just now, in the present half-stage of machine-industry, employers should nearly all be compelled to go about in this world with fare-recorders on their backs.  Employees too.  This would be the logical thing to do; and as it is impracticable, and as every business must have certain elements of secrecy in it in order to be competent, the only alternative is to have in charge men with enough genius for being believed in and for taking measures to be believed in—­to keep employees believing in them, in spite of secrecy.  Under these conditions, it cannot be long before we will see in every business the men being put forward on both sides who have a genius for being believed in.  Managers and superintendents will be put in office everywhere who see the cash value, the economy, of the simple, old-fashioned power in a man of a genius for being believed in; employers with the power of inspiring more and better work from their workmen; Labour men with the power of inspiring employers to believe in them, of inspiring their employers to put up money, stock, or profits on their belief—­on the belief that workmen are capable of the highest qualities of manhood:  hard work, loyalty, persistence, and faith toward a common end.  I have preferred to have this inspired employer a millionaire, because the more capital he has the more men he can employ, and the more rapidly the other kind of millionaire, the blind, old-fashioned butter of Labour, will be driven out of business.