If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it is because they have not the remotest idea what he is really like. They have not noticed him. They have no imagination about him, have not put themselves in his place. How can he get their attention?
A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not interest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could. Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see--it was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it there--on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo--until....
I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it inside.
The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the _London Times_, and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and steer heads inside.
This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a successful and permanent business. It is hard to believe how largely, for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the real key of the labour problem--this art of steering people's heads inside.
We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good deal of time in finding fault with labouring men for thinking too much about themselves and about their class, and for emphasizing their wages more than their work, and for not having more noble and disinterested characters. Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their thoughts to higher things.