his desire before he attains it. But like breeds like, and he will get a new desire in time to prevent him losing the old fetter. He is obedient, and he is the backbone and prop of all tyrannies and Systems of tyranny: on thy belly shalt thou go, and, God help us! our heads are full of bellies.
Sometimes he had the trouble which he understood, and looked for and circumvented; for humanity is flawed; but in almost all cases the oil of dismissal could smooth any troubled water; and after it there would remain no ripple or wimple on the surface of the business. He smoothed and smoothed and smoothed endlessly; that is he discharged ruthlessly every mam who did not absolutely suit him; but all clockwork and interchangeable parts get tired and get rusty and stick, and there is no let to one's supervision. Thus in keeping the machine in order he became a tyrant not of cruelty but of efficiency; and was himself as much a slave to the system as any timid underling in the lower office; and was the veriest tool of the circumstances which he seemed to control. The donkeyman tending his engine does not know that he is the engine; and he, overlooking, planning, combining, in an endless wakefulness of energy and readiness and sacrifice, overlooked all and was obedient as a dog because he was known to himself, and was called by others, the Manager.
If he had known that he was enslaved would he have been more efficient or not efficient at all? It is a question of whether he had or had not a character; that is, a moral basis to his nature and an intellectual consciousness of his own being apart from his acts. He had a will, but it swirled into one narrow, habitual passage and there swept everything before it: he had a culture, that is, an immediate perception, for other things are knowledge, but this instancy is culture; so he saw a thing mentally; and oh the very point and tipping of vision he saw business or no business, and proclaimed infalllbly that it was or it was not "worth while."
But there are an hundred cultures, and we have to learn all of them before we can dream of measuring our bulk against the meek who inherit the earth. We have to be tried searchingly, rigorously, and no man has been tried until he has attained to eminence and has gone back again into obscurity.
Every man who is something more than a mineral deposit or a bog gets an instalment towards conversion almost as often as he gets a cold in the head. If we had the knowledge we could say at what
