Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Gerald Stanley Lee
page 58 of 630 (09%)
page 58 of 630 (09%)
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together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human happiness,
lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day and night. If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under the machines, we can only bring it to pass by doing everything we can in directors' meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or as journalists--whatever we may be--to keep the trust-machines in this world out of the hands of the tired, weak, and mechanical-minded men. And the things that have been happening to the trust-machines, or are about to happen to them, have happened and are beginning to happen before our eyes to the machines themselves. The machines of flame and iron wheels and men in monstrous factories which the philosophers and the poets and the very preachers have doomed our world with are passing through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall be seen at last through the dim struggle yielding themselves, bending their iron wills to the same indomitable human spirit, the same slow, stern, implacable will of the soul of man. They shall be inspired machines. Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees mechanical-minded. The men have not been able to work without machines to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them, their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them |
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