Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Gerald Stanley Lee
page 76 of 630 (12%)
page 76 of 630 (12%)
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new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and
built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes. For three miles more--three miles farther up above the ground--there was a space where human beings would have to stop saying, "I can't," and "You can't," and "We can't." If people want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say it farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect. Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he had finished it. But the man had been invented--he invented himself. He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he did it himself--if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it. Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees 10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per cent. Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the |
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