All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful personality—­the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other ages—­had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in business.  He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in poetry or more easy and conventional ways.

If he could not have made the electric light business say the things about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he would have had to make some other business say them.

One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that could be effected by being believed in.

He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, “being believed in did not pay,” it must be because ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.

He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his own way for three years—­in believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed in as much as he liked.

The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in his face.

He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.

By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation—­a Public Service Corporation—­that had a soul, and consequently worked.

BOOK TWO

LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD

TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

    They stay not in their hold
    These stokers,
    Stooping to hell
    To feed a ship. 
    Below the ocean floors. 
    Before their awful doors
    Bathed in flame,
    I hear their human lives
    Drip—­drip.

    Through the lolling aisles of comrades
    In and out of sleep,
    Troops of faces
    To and fro of happy feet,
    They haunt my eyes. 
    Their murky faces beckon me
    From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
    Their fitful bodies away against the skies.

CHAPTER I

SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD

It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.

Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.