Part 12 (1/2)

I do not deny that I do lose a sentence now and then in sermons; and while, as every one knows, the sermons I have been provided with in the old stone church have been of a rare and high order, there have, I do acknowledge, been bad moments--little sudden bare spots or streaks of abstraction--and I do not deny that there have been times when I could not help feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning to the parsonage--my plumber. One could not help thinking what Dr. ---- if he once got started on a plumber like B---- (had had him around working all the week during a sermon) could do with him.

I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers. I imagine he would point up their sermons a good deal--if they had his shoes on.

Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon to-day as const.i.tuting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual forces of our time.

At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised.

CHAPTER IX

TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS

A man's success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.

Success in business, in the last a.n.a.lysis, turns upon touching the imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this present generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a cla.s.s are more close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the imaginations of crowds.

When one considers what it is that touches a crowd's imagination and how it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a city anywhere which has not hundreds of men in it who could do more to touch the imagination of crowds with goodness than any clergyman could. A man of very great gifts in the pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal clergyman, could be outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of crowds with goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in any one of several hundred of our modern business occupations.

There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do not like to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults as the rest of us are with ours. But I do not think it would be too much to say that this particular nation I have in mind--and I leave the reader to fill in one for himself, has been determined in its national character for hundreds of years, and is being determined to-day--every day, nearly every minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep--by a certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights--a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next--a kind of national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, and talking excitedly and with little flourishes. It is a nation that is always shrugging its shoulders, that almost never seems to be capable of doing a thing with fine directness, with long rhythms of purpose or sustained feeling; and all because every man, woman, and child in the country--scores of generations of them for hundreds of years--has been taught that the great spiritual truth or principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully buying a turnip is to begin by saying that you do not want a turnip at all, that you never eat turnips, and none of your family, and that they never would. The other man begins by pointing out that he is never going to sell another turnip as long as he lives, if he can help it. Gradually the facts are allowed to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off G.o.d knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two s.h.i.+llings'

worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot, or a battles.h.i.+p, or a war, or a rumour of a war, with somebody.

The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this. But it might have been.

In the United States some forty years ago, being a new country, and being a country where everything a man did was in the nature of things, felt to be a first experiment, everybody felt democratic and independent, and as if he were making the laws of the universe just for himself as he went along.

There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of thread and bit of dress goods--everything that people wore on their bodies or put in their months, and everything that they read, came up and had to be considered as an original first proposition, as if there never had been a spool of thread before, as if each bit of dress goods was, or was capable of being, a new fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on it; and before we knew it a moral nagging and edging and hitching had set in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and fixing itself by daily repet.i.tion upon the imagination of the people.

The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psychologist's point of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevocable, most implacable meter there can ever be of the religion a country really has.

There was no clergyman in America who could have made the slightest impression on this great national list or trend of always getting things for less than they were worth--this rut of never doing as one would be done by. What was there that could be done with an obstinate, pervasive, unceasing habit of the people like this?

What was there that could be done to touch the imagination of the crowd?

Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A.T. Stewart's great store on Broadway at that time. A.T. Stewart announced to New York suddenly in huge letters one day, that from that day forward there should be one price for everything sold in his store, and that that price would be paid for it by everybody.

A.T. Stewart's store was the largest, most successful, original, and most closely watched store in America.

The six thousand women became one thousand.

Then two thousand. Some of them had found that they finished their shopping sooner; the better cla.s.s of women, those whose time was worth the most, and whose custom was the largest, gradually found they did not want to shop anywhere else. The two thousand became three thousand, four thousand, six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand.

Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to come to them. They announced the one price.

Hardware stores did it. Groceries announced one price. Then everybody.

Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sunday for months, could have done very much in the way of seriously touching the imagination of the crowd on the moral unworthiness, the intellectual degradation, the national danger of picking out the one thing that nearly all the people all do, and had to do, all day, every day, and making that thing mean, incompetent, and small. No one had thought out what it would lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would always be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they were selling--taking a spool of thread, for instance--and packing it, or packing their action with it, as full of adulterated motives and of fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they could think up--a little innocent spool of thread--wreaking all their sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments on it as an offering....