A great many wise things have been said to Labour--masterpieces, miles of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their walls.
And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial.
It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more terrible than that--that he is starving inside, that his soul is starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting something to eat--if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very lightly.
And it is the most important thing in the world. The one thing now necessary to society, to industry, is to get hold of the men who are in it, one by one, and touch their imaginations about themselves. We have millions of men working without their thoughts and expectations being ventilated or passed along, year after year.
One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands of factories, doing their work without any draught. We already have tall chimneys for our coal furnaces; we have next to see the value of tall chimneys, great flues to the sky, on the lives and thought and the inner energies of men. The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get him to glow up and work is to cut through an opening in the top of his life.
Just where to cut this opening, and just how to cut it in each man's life--each man considered as a problem by himself--is the Labour problem.
There are certain general principles that might be put down in passing. To begin with, we must not feel ashamed to begin implacably with the actual man just as he is, and with the wants and the motives that he actually has. We should feel ashamed rather to begin in any other way. It would not be bright or thoughtful to begin on him with motives he is going to have; and it certainly would not be religious or worthy of us to try to make him begin with ours. Perhaps ours are better--for us. Perhaps, too, ours will be better for him when he is like us (if we can give him any reason to want to be). In the meantime, what is there that can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is and in allowing a sliding scale of motives in people? Starving people and slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful, _i.e._, not really quite bright toward others, who impute mean, inaccurate motives to them, can only be patiently expected to have a very small area or even mote of unselfishness at first. A cross-section of our society to-day represents the entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years. We need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go down the street. All history is here this minute.