long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into
machines themselves--as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization
out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers
as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood.

In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing--partly by
competition and partly by combination and by experience--employers who
are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe
in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours,
the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most
valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly
good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as
the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. These
employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live
men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones. If the great
slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not
mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them
categorically the little platitude (which even people who have observed
cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead,
and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead
ones.

But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments
or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business;
for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and
creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the
employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to
crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only
get and keep mechanical-minded ones.