GERALD STANLEY LEE

1862

IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT?

Chapter II of Book II of "Crowds "1

PERHAPS it will seem a pity to spoil a book-one that might have been really rather interesting-by putting the word "goodness" down flatly in this way in the middle of it.

And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with 5 business.

I would not yield first place to anyone in being tired of the word. I think, for one, that unless there is something we can do to it and something we can do to it now, it had better be dropped.

But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it.

ΙΟ

I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and swearing softly, I regret to say) when it 15 affected me like a Hymn Tune.

And there is Non, too.

I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M-in North 20 Carolina. The first thing he said was, when we were

seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that afternoon, and he had faithfully promised to 5 be there. But a week-end in North Carolina appealed to him, and afternoon tea-well, he explained to me, crossing his legs and beaming at me all over as if he were a whole genial, successful afternoon tea all by himself—afternoon tea did not appeal to him.

ΙΟ

He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person. As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every minute all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we heard from him), we called him the Non15 Gregarious Person, and every time he piled on one more story, we reminded him how non-gregarious he was. We called him Non-Gregarious all the way after that-Non for short.

This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has 20 been Non ever since.

I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who let them25 selves go, a very serious person. When he talked about his business, he was even religious. Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of business-his own business-that almost startled me at first. He always 30 seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself.

21-29: W.

Now Non is a builder or contractor.

For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house. No better arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in more kinds of 5 people at once and for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house. No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this world, until he has built a house. I submit this proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to anyone who is going to try it. There is not a single kind 10 or type of man who sooner or later will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You enter the door, you walk inside and 15 brood over them. Everything you come upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any man who is sensitive to houses 20 and to people and who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door, and never enter that house again.

This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their houses, and how they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt hateful about the world.

25

I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found he was not as good as some people are at talking 30 about himself, but the subject was interesting. He began his career building houses for people, as nearly everyone 1: b. 2-28: w, a (cf. 201, 21-203, 4). 29-216, 29 : v, k.

does. The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man has charged the 5 other man. Every house that got built in this way seemed to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done by. Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man. He merely noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person that he had 10 dealings with, from the bottom to the top of the house, seemed to make him feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be, a grafter. He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a better man, and 15 studying on how it could be managed. His own first houses made him see things. They proved to be the making of him, and if similar houses have not made similar men, it is their fault. It might not be reassuring to the men who are now living in these first houses to dwell too much on 20 this (and I might say he did not build them alone), but it

seems necessary to bring out the most striking thing about Non in his first stage as a business man, viz.: He hated his business. He made up his mind he either would make the business the kind of business he liked or get out of it. I 25 did not gather from the way he talked about it that he had any idea of being an uplifter. He merely had, apparently, an obstinate, doggedly comfortable idea about himself, and about what a thing would have to be, in this world, if he was connected with it. He proposed to enjoy his business. 30 He was spending most of his time at it.

Other people have had this same happy thought, but they seem to manage to keep on being patient. Non could not fall back on being patient, and it made him think harder.

29, 30: b. 26-217, 6: g.

The first thing he thought of was that doing his business as he thought he ought to, if he once worked his idea out, and worked it down through and organized it, might pay. He almost had the belief that people might pay a man a little extra, perhaps, for enjoying his business. It cannot 5 be said that he believed this immediately. He merely wanted to, and merely contrived new shrewd ways at first of being able to afford it. Gradually he began to notice that the more he enjoyed his business, the more he enjoyed it with his whole soul and body, enjoyed it down to the very 10 toes of his conscience, the more people there were who stepped into his office and wanted him to enjoy his business on their houses. It was what they had been looking for for years—for some builder who was really enjoying his business. And the more he enjoyed his business in his 15 own particular way-that of building a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and for less money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end of it-the more his business grew.

I do not know that there would be any special harm in 20 speaking of Non's idea of just doing as you would be done by-in more moral or religious language, but it is not necessary. And I find I take an almost religious joy in looking at the Golden Rule at last as a plain business proposition. All that happened was that Non was original, saw some- 25 thing that everybody thought they knew, and acted as if it were so. Theoretically one would not have said that it would be original to take an old platitudinous law like the law of supply and demand, and act as if it were so; but it was. At the time Non was beginning his career there 30 was nothing in the building-market people found harder to buy than honesty. Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy and important men who did not have 1-19: m, o, q (cf. 97, 6-33). 25-27: 1. 23-32: w. 32-218, 12:0.