fifty years. Having a soul in business pays, not because it affords a
fine motive power, but because it affords a practical and conclusive
method of driving the devil out of business. He is being driven out of
industry, one industry at a time, by men who get on better without him;
and this is going to go on until the ability to do this--to crowd out
the devil, to get the devil out of machines and factories, out of the
machinery of organization--the power to keep the devil out of things and
out of people, is recognized by everybody as the greatest, most subtle,
most victorious and universal market-value in the world. The men who can
be believed in most will get the most business, and, what is still more
important, the men who can make men believe in them most will be able to
hire the employees who can be believed in most, and will get a monopoly
of the efficiency of the world; and though the men who can be believed
in less may be able to continue for a time to do their work and go
through all their old motions as well as they can, with all their old
lumbering, pathetic machinery of watching each other and suspecting each
other and fighting each other humped up on their backs, they can never
hope to compete with free-moving, honest men, who deal directly and
openly and in a few words for their employees, jobbers, consumers, and
the public, without any vast machinery of suspicion to bother with. It
is a most curious, local, temporary, back-county idea, the idea that,
for sheer industrial economy, for simple cheap conclusive finance, there
is anything on earth in business that will take the place of
old-fashioned human personal prestige--the prestige of the man who has a
genius for being believed in.

In a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen is an
instance of what is really the essential issue in every strike. The
bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated simply, was that they did
not believe in their employers. They believed that, if the precise