“Fight for yourselves.  Your masters hate you.  They would shoot you down like rabbits, but they need your labour for their huge profits.  Don’t go in till you get your minimum.  No Royal Commission, no promise in the future.  Leaders only want your votes; they will sell you.  They lie.  Parliament lies, and will not help you, but is trying to sell you.  Don’t touch a tool till you get your minimum.  Win, win, win!  It is up to all workers to support the miners.”

If a man happens to be an employer, and happens to know that he is not this sort of man, and finds that he cannot successfully carry on his business unless he can make five hundred men in his factory believe it, what can he do?  How can he touch their imaginations?  What language is there, either of words or of action, that will lead them to see that he is a really a fair-minded, competent employer, a representative of the interests of all, a fellow-citizen, a Crowdman, and that his men can afford to believe in him and cooeperate with them?

If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it is because they have not the remotest idea what he is really like.  They have not noticed him.  They have no imagination about him, have not put themselves in his place.  How can he get their attention?

CHAPTER XI

THE SUCCESSFUL

A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a Woman’s Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre.  Leaving her cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with her.  I came upon her several times.  The Louvre did not interest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could.  Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see—­it was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it there—­on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo—­until....

I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it inside.

The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the London Times, and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and steer heads inside.

This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a successful and permanent business.  It is hard to believe how largely, for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the real key of the labour problem—­this art of steering people’s heads inside.