its hole up through the employers, all the best and most powerful employers in the world to-day will help it.

The moment a nation, instead of butting around with its eyes shut, on the bottom of things, and in the material muck of things it wants for the moment and wants for itself, begins staving its hole at the top of the world, all the best and the most powerful nations in the world to-day will help it.

The world is quarrelling with Germany to-day because Germany has aimed her hole too low.

It is because there is too much in Germany's hole about herself. It is because it is a one-nation-sized hole in the world Germany is trying to make that she is having such a hard time in making it. And when she calms down a little and gets out from under the scared generals who have driven her into an almost insane congestion or paroxysm of self-defense and of self-interest, there is no one that will be quicker to criticise the German hole than Germany herself.

The lines of procedure upon which one nation is to get out from under other nations or upon which one class is to get out from under other classes, are implacably drawn in the modern man's vision of our coöperative, organized modern life. The nations are going to find their places in the new and better way as the classes in the nations are already finding theirs.

No one class is ever going to be able to stave a hole through this world, from this day on, if it cannot show it is doing it in the interests of all of us and in an essentially disinterested way. The class that is disinterested first is going to be believed in first. And the class that gets believed in by other classes first, will naturally be the class that looks up from its own work and from its own point of view the most, and thinks of the other classes and understands the other classes the best. The next thing labour is going to fight for is the right to think of others. The next thing each nation is going to fight for and fight with, and hold its own with, is its genius for thinking of other nations.

Even if all that nations want to-day is to get what they need

for themselves, they will have to think of others to get it. They will have to be disinterested. They will have to study those about them and above them. They will have to look up.

As I have said before, this world is a world without any hole at the bottom except the grave.

Disinterested men and disinterested nations are going to run the world. The nations that are really interested in the world will be driven to run it. A world conducts itself like any other thing in nature, when it is being run. The people who are the most interested in a world, and who are most in the habit of noticing it and gearing their lives to it, get control of it.

Because Germany is holding her labour down the world is now trying to hold Germany down.

A nation that is professionally engaged in holding down one of its own classes, and in keeping under even its own people, cannot be trusted to be placed in the leadership of the world, and of the interests of other people besides its own.

It is as necessary for a world to be provided with leader-nations among nations as it is for a country to have leaders among men. The nation that succeeds in giving a chance to its labouring men for a noble self-expression first will be the nation that shall be selected by all of us for the industrial, political and material and spiritual leadership of the world.

The nation that shall first develop its creative inspired millionaires or employers, that shall therefore be first in a position to command loyal, big-hearted or essentially inspired labour, shall lead the nations. It shall loom up among the thoughts of men in a hundred years-shall make itself at once the great central Market Square of the world and the Cathedral of all men's souls.

IV

WHAT MAKES A NATION WORK

There are two gears of team-work or of We-efficiency a nation can adopt.

One is a low-gear or military gear and is based on having one set of men say what other men are for and ordering them to fit into what they are for, whether the men see it is what they are for or not.

The other is dramatic or high-gear and is based on having one set of men put themselves in the place of other men, touch their imaginations and their souls, their sense of freedom and power and let them work with a daily vision of what they are for, a daily working sense of their own personal power and their power through others, themselves.

Low-geared team-work is team-work through propelled men. High-geared team-work, giving at least 30 per cent. better material results, is team-work through self-propelled men.

From our point of view in writing the confession of faith we propose to use with Germany, we would be obliged to find some way of expressing our friendly challenge and our grave concern as to the way, as it seems to us, she is engaged (and with no one to interrupt her or rouse her) in solemnly trifling with the fate of the world.

In our confession of faith toward Germany, in our attempt to sketch the foreground and background of our American belief, our interpretation of what we want Germany to know about us in return for what we hope to learn from her, we would be obliged to say very plainly that from our point of view Germany is making, under her present régime, for the time being, a very serious

and threatening mistake, one which threatens her and which threatens us all. As it seems to us, Germany is trying to get a civilized state through overriding the individual. America and Henry Ford and others are trying to produce great states through the individual's developing himself.

America and Germany will try to think this matter through together.

Germany's low-gear efficiency, while it is glib and prompt, of course, is not really, as it seems to us, quite as wonderful as it looks. The low-gear efficiency Germany has chosen is a kind of efficiency that any other strong nation could have worked up in thirty years, or one generation, by beginning with babies, and by jerking people's lives around enough, if it had wanted to. Any nation that gains its unity by force would have been bound to forge ahead, for a time, of a democratic nation, like ours, which, owing to its more difficult, and its more spiritually thorough and more permanent method could hardly hope to have gained by this time its unity at all.

We shall have to find some way of expressing to Germany our theory, or hope about our being an efficient nation. As it seems to us, America is not skipping and hurrying over people's souls and holding under people's wills in getting its unity, and Germany is. American life may or may not be a higher form of life than German life. It remains to be seen. In the meantime we do know, and Germany knows, that on general principles our way could hardly be expected not to take us longer, and we want Germany and other countries to wait to reckon with us and with our way in the fullness of time, and to try how it works in the long run. In the meantime while we are modest as to the loose slow way it works at the moment, or in a violent sudden military crisis, Nature makes us hopeful. All the higher forms of life take longer to develop between conception and birth than the lower

ones.

While we have to admit we have not finished off, in America, as many Henry Fords as we might, we have already made one

point with our method. We have proved once for all to ourselves, in Ford's vast experiment station in Detroit and in a thousand smaller and less known ones, that an organization of self-propelled men can do a third more work in a day than an organization of propelled men can.

While nothing on earth apparently will persuade Henry Ford to put self-starters in the Ford car, he has put self-starters into all his men, and the result is an efficiency that America most earnestly wishes the iron-levered Prussian minds, swinging out into control of Germany to-day, would take note of in time. We think it can be shown that Prussian efficiency, based on industrial-military genius and on ordering men about and on jamming men down into their places, must result in Germany as it does in America, in hordes of plodders, that it cannot but stop short of producing the highest quality and amount of work among labouring men, and we believe that Ford efficiency, based on dramatic genius, on imagination about men, and on drawing men out, gains inevitably the most tremendous material result. The present momentary disadvantage of the rest of the world, in its huge, believing, sprawling, adolescent, hopeful, tentative inefficiency, as it stands in the presence of a magnificent and a compact Germany, is due to the fact that the rest of us had made up our minds definitely to the slow, democratic method, that the rest of us were trying for our higher-gear efficiency and had hoped and supposed that Germany was trying for it, too. We do not believe in America, that one principle of getting work out of men applies to German men and another to American men. We believe that if a soul in an American makes him do a third more work, a soul in a German would make him do a third more work. There cannot be any real difference between a soul in an American and a soul in a German. And it has seemed to us that the only way to save our souls in our modern life is to use them all day and pay for them all day.

Germany, in fitting up fifty million people to work like pumps, can naturally get her work in a finished state sooner than Amer