Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months old bear chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-five years to make a tree furnish its first chestnut before.  About the same time that Luther Burbank had succeeded in doing this with chestnuts a similar type of man, who was not particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to do something with human nature, who believed that human nature could really be made to work, found a certain staple article that everybody needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market.  The producers were not making anything on it.  The wholesalers dealt in it without a profit, and the retailers sold it without a profit, and merely because the other things they sold were worthless without it.

——­, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best position to act, pointed out that, if the business was organized and everybody in it would combine with everybody else and make it a monopoly, the price could be made lower, and everybody would make money.

Of course this was a platitude.

It was also a platitude that human nature was not good enough, and could not be trusted to work properly in a monopoly.

——­ then proceeded to invent a monopoly—­a kind of monopoly in which human nature could be trusted.

He used a very simple device.

He began by being trusted himself.

Having personally and directly proved that human nature in a monopoly could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he had to do was to capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use the enormous market value of the trust people had in him to gather people about him in the business who had a good practical business genius for being trusted too and for keeping trusted:  everybody else was shut out.

The letter with which the monopoly was started (after dealing duly with the technical details of the business) ended like this: 

“... the soundest lines of business—­viz., fair prices, fair profits, fair division of profits, fair recognition of service, do as you would be done by, money back where it is practicable, one’s profit so small as to make competition not worth while, open dealing, and open books.”

He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and which the people trusted.  He was a Luther Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts.  He raised the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way for human nature to work.

CHAPTER VI

THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS

The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic forms: 

1.  Imagination about the unseen or intangible—­the spiritual—­as especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane:  a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.