The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the public, had not been thought of a little while ago.

All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things.  It was an employer’s business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him.  It was their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they dared.

The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical Man.  And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he seemed the most successful.  Naturally there came to be a general impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great department stores.

I used often to go into ——­’s.  Everybody remembers it.  I went in, as a rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as a mere attache of the truly wise and good.  All I ever did or was expected to do was to stand by and look wise and discriminating a minute about dress goods, when spoken to.  I used to put in my time looking behind the counters—­all those busy, pale, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying to be human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs, crowds of women staring by them and picking at things.  Always that moving sidewalk of questions—­that dull, eager stream of consciousness sweeping by.  No sunlight—­just the crowds of covetousness and shrewdness.  I used to wonder about the clerks, many of them, and what they would be like at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of blue sky to go with them.  They used to seem in those days, as I looked, mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway of Things in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with his little study or trick or knack of appearances, standing there and selling people their good looks day after day at so much a yard.

To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops where one would get, standing and looking on idly, totally different impressions.  There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have made being a clerk a new thing in the world.  The public has already had its imagination touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a class, on a different level.