Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN

Christ said once, "He that is greatest among you let him be your servant."

Most people have taken it as if He had said:

"He that is greatest among you let him be your valet.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your butler.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your hostler, porter, footman."

They cling to a mediæval Morality-Play, Servant-in-the-House idea, a kind of head-waiter idea of what Christ meant.

This seems to some of us a literal-minded, Western way of interpreting an Oriental metaphor. We do not believe that Christ meant servanthood. It seems to us that He meant something deeper, that He meant service; that He might have said as well:

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Duke of Wellington.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Lincoln.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Edison, your Marconi."

At all events, it is extremely unlikely that He meant looking and acting like a servant.

He meant really being one, whether one looked like a servant or not. If looking independent and being independent makes the service better, if defying the appearance of a servant makes the service more efficient, we believe the appearance should be defied.

We are not willing, if we ever have any relations with the public, to be Czars and look like servants.

We would prefer to look like czars and be servants.

We are inclined to believe that no man who is rendering his utmost service to the crowd ever thinks in the ordinary servant sense of being obedient to it. He is thinking of his service, and of its being the most high and perfect and most complete thing that he can render—the thing that he, out of all men, could think of and do, and that the crowd would want him to do. He is busy in being obedient to the crowd, in fulfilling daily its spirit, and not in taking orders from it.

The reason that the larger number of men who go into politics to-day are inefficient and do not get the things done that crowds want, is that they are the kind of men who feel that they must talk and act like servants. Even the most independent-looking and efficient men, who look as if they really saw something and had something to give, often prove disappointing. When one comes to know a man of this type more intimately, one is apt to find that he is really a flunkey in his thoughts; that he feels hired in his mind; that he is the valet of a crowd, and often, too, the valet of some particular crowd—some little, safe, shut-in crowd, party, or special interest that wants to own, or to keep, or to take away a world.

Whichever way to-day one looks, one finds this illusion as to what a public servant really is, for the moment, corrupting our public life.

But Christ did not say, "He that is greatest among you, let him be your valet."

The man who is greatest among us, neither in this age nor in any other, ever will or ever can be a valet. He faces the crowd the way Christ did—with his life, with his soul, with his God.

He will be the Greatest, he will be a Servant.

In the meantime—in the hour of the valets, only the little crowds, speak. The People wait.

The Crowd is dumb, massive, and silent. There seems to be no one in the world to express it, to express its indomitable desire, its prayer, to lay at last its huge, terrible, beautiful will upon the earth.

It is the classes or little crowds—the little pulling and pushing, helpless, lonely, mean, separated crowds—blind, hateful, and afraid, who are running about trying to lay their little wills upon the earth.

The Crowd waits and is not afraid.

The little, separated crowds are afraid.

The world, for the moment, is being interpreted, expressed, and managed by People Who Are Afraid.

It is the same in all the nations. In the coal strike in England one finds the miners in the trades unions afraid to vote except in secret because they are afraid of one another. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the men under them and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the mine-managers and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the mine-managers afraid of one another, afraid of their stockholders, afraid of the miners' leaders, and afraid of the newspapers and afraid of the Government.

One finds the Government afraid of everybody.

Everybody is afraid of the Government.

Everybody fights because everybody is afraid.

And everybody is afraid because everybody sees that it is mere crowds that are running the world.

There is another reason why everybody is afraid. Everybody is afraid because everybody is shut in with some little separated crowd.

A world that is run by little shut-in crowds is necessarily a world that is run by People Who Are Afraid.

And so now we have come to the fulness of the time. The cities and the nations, the prairies, and the seas and the mines, the very skies about us can be seen by all to-day to be full of a dull groping and of a great asking, "Who Are The Men Who Are not Afraid?"

The moment these men appear who are not afraid, and it is seen by all that they are not afraid, the world (and all the little blind, helpless crowds in it) will be placed in their hands.

AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN

I am aware that Tom Mann is not a world figure. But he is a world type. And as the editor of the Syndicalist, the leader of the most imposing and revealing labour rally the world has seen, he is of universal interest. Those of us who believe in crowds are deeply interested in finding, recognizing, creating, and in seeing set free out of the ranks of men the labour leaders who shall express the nobility and dignity of modern labour, who shall express the bigness of spirit, the brawny-heartedness, the composure, the common-sense, the patriotism, the faithfulness and courage of the People.

I indict Tom Mann before the bar of the world as not expressing the will and the spirit of the People.

I do this as a labouring man. I decline, because I spend my time daily tracing out little crooked lines on paper with a pen, because I have wrought day and night to make little patterns of ink and little stretches of words reach men together round a world, because I have sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought out at last my little faith for a world ... I decline not to be numbered with the labourers I see in the streets. I claim my right before all men this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled among the toilers of the earth.

I speak as a labouring man. I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true leader of Labour.

First, employers are all alike;

Second, none of them ever work;

Third, they are all the enemies of Labour.

Tom Mann is incompetent to grapple with Capital in behalf of Labour as any great labour leader would have to do, because he has his facts wrong about Capital, is simple-minded and rudimentary and undiscriminating about the men with whom he deals, and sees them all alike.

This is a poor beginning even for fighting with them.

The third reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is that he is unpractical and full of scorn. And scorn, from the point of view of the practical-minded man, is a sentimental and useless emotion. We have learned that it almost always has to be used by a man who has his facts wrong, that is, who does not see what he himself is really like, and who has not noticed what other people are really like. No man who sees himself as he is, feels at liberty to use scorn. And no man who sees others as they are, sees any occasion for it. Tom Mann uses hate also, and hate has been found to be, as directed toward classes of persons as a means of getting them to do things, archaic and inefficient. It is not quite bright. It need not be denied that hate and scorn both impress some people, but they never seem to impress the people that see things to do and who find ways to do them. And the people who use scorn are all too narrow, too class-bound, and too self-regarding to do things in a huge world problem like the present one.

The fourth reason that Tom Mann as a labour leader is incompetent is that he is afraid; he is afraid of capital, so afraid that he has to fight it instead of grappling with it and coöperating with it. He is afraid to believe in labour—so afraid that he takes orders from it instead of seeing for it, and seeing ahead for it. He is afraid of his employers' brains, of their having brains enough to understand and to to be convinced as to the position of the labourer. He is afraid to believe in his own brains, in his own brains being good enough to convince them.

So he backs down and fights.

And what D.A. Thomas expresses for Capital is its fear of Labour.

There are thousands of capitalists and hundreds of thousands of labour men who have something better they want expressed by their leaders, than their Fear.

Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen.

THE MEN WHO LOOK

During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world, heroes abounded.

The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were.

Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. Mr. Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in the House of Commons, rose in his might—and before the face of the nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class.

Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the men.

He was called a traitor to his class.

He was called a traitor to his class.

I am an unwilling and unfit person, as a sojourner and an American, to take any position on the merits of the question as to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. But when I saw Bishop Gore standing up and looking unblinkingly at facts or what he thought were facts which he would rather not have seen and which were not on his side, and when I saw him voting deliberately for the disestablishment of his own Church, I greeted with joy, as if I had seen a cathedral, another traitor to his class. I almost believe that a Church that could produce and supply a man like this for a great nation looking through every city and county year by year for men to go with it ... a Church that could produce and keep producing Bishop Gores, would be entitled, from a great nation to anything it liked.

Men seem to be capable of three stages of courage. Courage is graded to the man.

There is the man who is so tired, or mechanical-minded, that he can only think of himself.

There is the man who is so tired that he can only think of his class.

And there is the man that one has watched being moved over slowly from a Me-man into a Class-man, who has begun to show the first faint beginnings of being a Crowd-man.

One man has courage for himself because he knows what he wants for himself. Another has courage for his class because he knows what he wants for his class. Another has courage for God and for the world because there are things he sees that he wants for God and for the world, and he sees them so clearly that he sees ways to get them.

I hold no brief for Bishop Gore.

I know there must be others like him who voted on the other side.

I know there are hundreds of thousands of employers who in their hearts are like him. I know there are hundreds of thousands of men in the trades unions who are like him.

I am not sure that Bishop Gore, on the merits of the case, was right. I wish this day I knew that he was wrong. I wish that I had spent the last six months in fighting him, in fighting against his vision, that I might be more free to-day to point to him with joy when I go up and down the streets with men and look at the churches with men—the rows of churches—and try to tell them what they are for. I have seen that the cathedrals scattered about under the sky in England are but God's little tools to make great cities on the earth, and to build softly out of the hearts of men and women men who shall be cathedrals too—men buttressed against the world, men who can stand alone.

But England knows it too.

I have seen thousands of men in England in their dull brown clothes pass by me in the street who know and respond to the spirit that is in Bishop Gore, and who have the courage to show it themselves. And the vision is in them, but it is not waked. The moment it is waked we will have a new world. It is because Tom Mann and D.A. Thomas are not leaders of men who have this spirit that they are about to be dropped as typical leaders of Labour and Capital in modern times. No man will be accepted by the Crowd to-day as a competent leader of his class who is afraid of the other classes. No man will be said to be a true leader, to be competent to make things move in the world, who does not have three gears of courage: courage for himself, courage for his own people, courage for other people; and who does not dare to deal with other people as if they really might be dealt with, after all, as fellow human beings capable of acting like fellow human beings, capable of finer and of truer things, of more manly and patient, more shrewdly generous, more far-sighted things, than might appear at first.

Was Mr. Josiah Wedgewood right when he called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class?

I do not want to judge Davy McEwen. Such things are matters of personal interpretation, and of standing with a man face to face for a moment and looking him in the eyes.

Of course, if I had done this, I might have been tempted and despised him.

If I found that this was true, as it might well be, and often is, I would say that Davy McEwen was a traitor to his class. But if I found Davy McEwen going past hills-ful of workmen because he had a larger, fairer vision of what his class is than they had, if it proved to be true that the crowd-man in him was keeping the class-man in place, and holding true his vision for his class, I would say that it was his class that was being a traitor to him; I would say that sooner or later his class would see in some quiet day that it had been a traitor to him and to the world, and a traitor to itself.

If socialism and individualism cannot work together, and if (like the masculine and feminine in spirit) each cannot make itself the means and the method of fulfilling the other, there is no reason why either of them should be fulfilled.

In the meantime, there is a kind of self-will that seems to me, as its shadow comes across my path, like God himself walking on the earth. And I have seen it in the rich and I have seen it in the poor, and in people who were being wrong and in people who were being right.

It is like hearing great bells in the dark, singing in the solemn night to so much as hear of a man somewhere, I might go and see, who stands alone.

If we want to stand together, let us begin with these men who can stand alone.

Or we might call it the beginning of individualism. He died for the principle of doing what he thought was right before anybody else did it, and whether anybody else did it or not. The self-will of Jesus was half the New Testament. He crucified himself, his mother, and a dozen disciples that His own vision for all might be fulfilled. Socialism itself, what is good in it, would not exist to-day if Jesus, the Christ, had not practised socialism, in the best sense, by being an individualist.

If we are going to get to socialism by giving up individualism, by abolishing heroes, why get to it?

This more glorious self-will is not, of course, of a kind that all men can expect to have. Most of us have not the vision that equips us, and that gives us the right, to have it. But we can exact of our leaders that they shall have it—that they shall see more for us than we can see for ourselves, that they shall hold their vision up before us and let us see it, and let us have the use of it, that they shall be true to us, that they shall be the big brothers of the people.

RULES FOR TELLING A HERO—WHEN ONE SEES ONE

I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who could protect the French Revolution. What we need most of all just now in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it.

We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.

The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a kind of chemistry.

Hercules is a bust now.

We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph Lister, or like Wilbur Wright—the courage that faces material facts, that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.

When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are the most difficult facts to face in people?"

They are:

The facts about how they are different from us. The facts about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do about it.

So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can be made to go together.

A man's courage is his sense of identity.

His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations. He sees the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.

There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works where thousands of workmen day and night pass in and pass out.

Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he was. He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and coöperating all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the business a success.

He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it, with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his partners, or who did not want to be.

He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of the works. Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow human beings, did not interest him.

He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent gorillas, any more than he did.

Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it worked.

The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try. Even if it worked very well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the Trades Unions thought. They took the ground that it was safer to have all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not.

They instructed the men to strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Company was almost closed up, but it did not yield.

Sir George Livesey took the ground that if the Trades Unions believed that his men were not good enough for him, and that he was not good enough for his men, he would wait until they did.

The bronze statue of Sir George Livesey that the men have raised, and that thousands of men go by every day, day after day, and look up to at their work, was raised to a man who had stood out against his workmen for weeks to prove that they were as good as he was, and could be trusted to be loyal to him, and that he was as good as they were, and that he could be trusted to be loyal to them.

He had the courage to insist on being, whether anybody wanted it for the moment or not, a new kind and new size of man. He preferred being allowed to be a new kind and new size himself, and he preferred allowing his men to be new kinds and new sizes of men, and he made a shrewd, dogged guess that when they tried it they would like it. They were merely afraid to be new sizes, as we all are at first.

There are possibly three ways in which, in the confusion of our modern world, one can tell a hero when one sees one.

The next thing one notices about this man (when he is invented) is his humility. He never seems to feel—having invented himself—how original he is. The more original people think he is, and the more they try to set him one side as an exception, the more he resents it.

And then, of course, the final way one knows a man is a hero is always by his courage, by his masterful way of driving through, when he meets a man, to his sense of identity with him.

One always sees a hero going about quietly everywhere, treating every other man as if he were a hero too.

He gets so in the habit, from day to day (living with himself), of believing in human nature, that when he finds himself suddenly up against other people he cannot stop.

It is not that he is deceived about the other people, though it might seem so sometimes. He merely sees further into them and further for them.

Has he not invented himself? Is he not at this very moment a better kind of man than he thought he could be once? Is he not going to be a better kind to-morrow than he is now?

So, quietly, he keeps on year by year and day by day, treating other people as if they were, or were meant to be, the same kind of man that he is, until they are.

WHO IS AFRAID?

When Christ turned the other cheek, the last thing He would have wanted any one to think was that He was backing down, or that He was merely being a sweet, gentle, grieved person. He was inventing before everybody, and before His enemies, promptly and with great presence of mind, a new kind and new size of man. It was a more spirited, more original, more unconquerable and bewildering way of fighting than anybody had thought of before. To be suddenly in an enemy's presence a new kind and new size of man—colossal, baffling—to turn into invisibility before him, into intangibility, into another kind of being before the enemy's eyes, so that he could not possibly tell what to do, and so that none of the things that he had thought of to do would work.... This is what Christ was doing, it seems to some of us, and it is apparently the way He felt about it when He did it.

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

The last thing that many of us who are interested in the modern world really want is to have war, or fighting, stop. We glory in courage, in the power of facing danger, in adventuresomeness of spirit, in every single one of the qualities that always have made, and always will make, every true man a fighter.

We would rather see the world abolished than to see war abolished.

We want to see war brought up to date.

The best way to fight was invented some two thousand years ago, and the innocent, conventional persons who still believe in a kind of routine, or humdrum, of shooting, who have not caught up with this two-thousand-year-old invention, are about to be irrevocably displaced in our modern life by men who have a livelier, more far-seeing, more practical, more modern kind of courage. From this time on we have made up our minds, we, the people of this world, that the only men we are going to allow to fight for us are the men who can fight the way Christ did.

Men who have not the courage to fight the way Christ did are about to be shut up by society; no one will harm them, of course, innocent, afraid persons, who have to protect themselves with gunpowder, but they will merely be set one side after this, where they will not be in a position to spoil the fighting of the men who are not afraid.

And who are the men who are not afraid?

To search your enemy's heart, to amputate, as by a kind of spiritual surgery, the very desire for fighting in him, to untangle his own life before his eyes and suddenly make him see what it is he really wants, to have him standing there quietly, radiantly disarmed, gentle-hearted, and like a child before you; if you are able, Gentle Reader, or ever have been able, to do this, you are not afraid! Why should any one ever have supposed that it takes a backing down, giving up, teary, weak, and grieved person to do this?

Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in effect: "Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

Coöperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is, winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him and fight him.

It is also more practical. The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most afraid. And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them. He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare to do. They wonder what such a man thinks. If he dares stand up before them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking?

What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have some man-stuff in it. They prefer to wait and see what he thinks.

Courage consists in not being afraid of one's own mind and of other people's minds. When men become so afraid of one another's minds and of their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and fight. They are cowards.

They do not know what they think.

They do not know what they want.

THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE

I have never known a coward.

I have known men who did cowardly things and who were capable of cowardly thoughts, but I have never known a man who could be fairly and finally classified as a coward.

Courage is a process.

If people are cowards it is because they are in a hurry.

They have not taken the pains to see what they think.

The man who has taken the time to think down through to what he really wants and to what he is bound to get, is always (and sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly) a courageous man.

It is the man who is half wondering whether he really wants what he thinks he wants or not, or whether he can get it or not, who is a coward.

The coward is a half man. He is slovenly minded about himself. He gets out of the hard work of seeing through himself, of driving on through what he supposes he wants, to what he knows he wants.

So, after all, it is a long, slow, patient pull, being a courageous man. Few men have the nerve to take the time to attend to it.

The first part of courage consists in all this hard work one has to put in on one's soul day after day, and over and over again, doggedly, going back to it. What is it that I really want?

The second, or more brilliant-looking part of courage, the courageous act itself (like Roosevelt's when he is shot), which everybody notices, is easy. The real courage is over then.

The first thing that society is ever able to do with the lowest type of labouring man seems to be to get him to want something. It has to think out ways of getting him waked up, of getting him to be decently selfish, and to want something for himself. He only wants a little at first; he wants something for himself to-day and he has courage for to-day. Then perhaps he wants something for himself for to-morrow, or next week, or next year, and he has courage for next week, or for next year. Then he wants something for his family, or for his wife, and he has courage for his family, or for his wife.

Gradually he sees further and wants something for his class. His courage mounts up by leaps and bounds when he is liberated into his class. Then he discovers the implacable mutual interest of his class with the other classes, and he thinks of things he wants for all the classes. He thinks the classes together into a world, and becomes a man. He has courage for the world.

When men see, whether they are rich or poor, what they want, what they believe they can get, they are not afraid.

The next great work of the best employers is to get labour to want enough. Labour is tired and mechanical-minded. The next work of the better class of labourer, or the stronger kind of Trades Union, is to get capital to want enough. Capital is tired, too. It does not see really big, worth-while things that can be done with capital, and has no courage for these things.

The larger the range and the larger the variety of social desire the greater the courage.

The problem in modern industry is the arousing of the imaginations of capitalists and labourers so that they see something that gives them courage for themselves and for one another, and courage for the world.

Who are the men to-day, in all walks of life, who want the most things for the most people, and who have made up their minds to get them?

There is just one man we will follow to-day—those of us who belong to the crowd—the man who is alive all over, who is deeply and gloriously covetous, the man who sees things he wants for himself, and who therefore has courage for himself, and who sees things he wants and is bound to get for other people, and who therefore has courage for other people.

This is the hardest kind of courage to have—courage for other people.

THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS

During the coal strike I took up my morning paper and read from a speech by Vernon Hartshorn, the miners' leader: "In a week's time, by tying up the railways and other means of transportation, we could so paralyze the country that the government would come to us on their knees and beg us to go to work on terms they are now flouting as impossible."

During the dockers' strike I took up my morning paper and read Ben Tillett's speech, at the meeting the day before, to fifty thousand strikers on Tower Hill. "'I am going to ask you to join me in a prayer,' Tillett said. 'Lord Devonport has contributed to the murder, by starvation, of your children, your women, and your men. I am not going to ask you to do it, but I am going to call on God to strike Lord Devonport dead,' He asked those who were prepared to repeat the 'prayer' to hold up their hands. Countless hands were held up, and cries: 'Strike him doubly stone dead!' The men then repeated the following 'prayer', word for word, after Tillett:

"'O God, strike Lord Devonport dead.'

"Afterward the strikers chanted the words: 'He shall die! He shall die!'"

There are times when it is very hard to have courage for other people.

It is when one watches people doing cowardly things that one finds it hardest to have courage for them.

The first feeling was one of profound resentment, shame—a huge, helpless, muddle-headed anger.

I had not the slightest trace of courage for the miners; I did not see how the government could have any courage for them. And I had no courage for the dockers, or for what could be expected of the dockers. I did not see how Lord Devonport could have any courage for them.

I repeated their prayer to myself.

The dockers were cowards. I was not going to try to sympathize with them, or try to be reasonable about them. It was nothing that they were desperate and had prayed. Was I not desperate too? Would not the very thought that fifty thousand men could pray a prayer like that make any man desperate? It was as if I had stood and heard fifty thousand beasts roaring to their god.

"They are desperate," I said to myself: "I will not take what they think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think."

Then I waited a minute. "But I am desperate, too," I said; "I must not take what I think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think."

I thought about this a little, and drove it in.

"What I think will matter more a little later, perhaps, when I get over being desperate."

"Perhaps what the dockers think will matter more a little later, too."

In the meantime are not their scared and hateful opinions as good as my scared and hateful opinions?

The important and final opinions, the ones to be taken seriously, that can be acted on, will be the opinions of those who get over being scared and hateful first.

I had a reason for being scared and hateful. They and their prayer drove me to be scared and hateful.

I thought again.

Perhaps they had a reason, too.

Then it all came over me. I became a human being all in a minute when I thought of it.

I became suddenly full of courage for the hateful dockers.

I thought how much more discouraging it would be if they had not been hateful at all.

I do not imagine God was sorry when He heard those fifty thousand dockers asking Him to strike Lord Devonport dead.

Not that He would have approved of it.

It was not the last word of wisdom or reasonableness. It was lacking in beauty and distinction as a petition, as being just the right form of prayer for those fifty thousand faultless dockers up on Tower Hill that afternoon (the whole of London listening, in that shocked and proper way that London has).

But I have not lost all courage for the dockers who made it.

They still want something! They still are men! They still stand up when they speak to Heaven! There is some stuff in them yet! They make heaven and earth ring to get a word with God!

This all means something to God, probably.

Perhaps it might mean something to us.

We are superior persons, it is true. We do not pray the way they pray.

We believe in being more self-controlled. We take our breakfasts quietly, and with high collars and silk hats, and with gilt prayer-books we go into the presence of our Maker. We believe in being calm and reasonable.

I may not know God, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not a precise stickler-god, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners, a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing their vast desires for Him out of darkness, and out of little foolish words, are trying to say to Him.

And perhaps we, too, do not need to be literal-minded about a prayer that we may hear, or that we may overhear, roaring its way up past our smooth, beautiful lives rudely to Heaven.

What is the gist of the prayer to God, and to us?

What is it that the men are trying to say in this awful, flaming, blackening metaphor of wishing Lord Devonport dead?

The gist of it is that they mean to say, whether they are right or wrong (like us, as we would say, whether we were right or wrong), they mean to say that they have a right to live.

In other words, the gist of it is that we are like them, and that they are like us.

And when the dockers break up through, fling themselves upon their God, what is it, after all, but another way of saying, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God...."

It may have been wicked in the dockers to address God in this way, but it would have been more wicked in them not to think He could understand.

I believe, for one, that when Jacob wrestled with the angel, God looked on and liked it.

The angel was a mere representative at best, and Jacob was really wrestling with God.

And God knew it and liked it.

Praying to strike Lord Devonport dead was the dockers' way of saying to God that there was something on their minds that simply could not be said.

I can imagine that this would interest a God, a prayer like the dockers' prayer, so spent, so desperate, so unreasonable, breaking through to that still, white floor of Heaven!

And it does seem as if, in our more humble, homely, and useful capacity as fellow human beings, it might interest us.

It seems as if, possibly, we might stop criticising people who pray harder than we do, pointing out that wrestling with God is really rather rude—as if we might stop and see what it means to God and what it means to us, and what there is that we might do, you and I, oh, Gentle Reader, to make it possible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, perhaps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to God next time.

In my own quiet, gentle, implacable beauty of spirit, in my own ruthless wisdom on a full stomach, I do not deny that I do most sternly disapprove of the dockers and their violence.

But it is better than nothing, thank God!

They want something.

It gives me something to hope for, and to have courage for, about them—that they want something.

Possibly if we could get them started wanting something, even some little narrow and rather mean thing, like having enough to eat—possibly they will go on to art galleries, to peace societies, and cathedrals next, and to making very beautiful prayers (alas, Gentle Reader, how can I say it?) like you—Heaven help us!—and like me!

I would have but one objection to letting the dockers have their full way, and to letting the control of the situation be put into their hands.

They do not hunger enough.

They are merely hungering for themselves.

This may be a reason for not letting the world get entirely into their hands, but in the meantime we have every reason to be appreciative of the good the dockers are doing (so far as it goes) in hungering for themselves.

It would be strange indeed if one could not tolerate in dockers a little thing like this. Babies do it. It is the first decency in all of us. It is the first condition of our knowing enough, or amounting to enough, to ever hunger for any one else. Everybody has to make a beginning somewhere. Even a Saint Francis, the man who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who rises to the heights of social-mindedness, who hungers and thirsts for everybody, begins all alone, at the breast.

It is true that the dockers are, for the moment (alas, fifty or sixty years or so!), merely wanting things for themselves, or wanting things for their own class. And so would we if we had been born, brought up, and embedded in a society which allowed us so little for ourselves that not growing up morally—keeping on over and over again, year after year, just wanting things for ourselves, and not really being weaned yet—was all that was left to us.

There is really considerable spiritual truth in having enough to eat.

Sometimes I have thought it would be not unhelpful, would make a little ring of gentle-heartedness around us, some of us—those of us who live protected lives and pray such rich, versatile prayers, if we would stop and think what a docker would have to do, what arrangements a docker would have to make before he could enjoy praying with us—falling back into our beautiful, soft, luxurious wanting things for others.

Possibly these arrangements, such as they are, are the ones the dockers are trying to make with Lord Devonport now.

The docker is trying to get through hungering for something to eat, to arrange gradually to have his hungers move on.

MEN WHO GET THINGS

All the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire. A vice is a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within reach, to control his little ones.

A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely Hunger—a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or a million dollars, runs away with him.

When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-control lies in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes of people, or hungering for themselves.

We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the world—not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken seriously.

I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of religion, would dare to do what they have done.

But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point.

And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:

First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive and imperative. It must be obeyed.

Second, I do not care what they think.

What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the act of being scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies, are not practical. What a man who despairs of everybody except himself thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work. The fact that the dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the employers' fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches, the schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever side in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be the side that will get the most control.

If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw materials, machinery, and management of modern industry out of the hands of the capitalists and run the world, the one shrewd, invincible way for Labour to do it is going to be to want more things for more people than capitalists can want.

There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of things—things like worlds into their hands. The me-man and the class-man, under our modern conditions, are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places, the me-places and class-places, by the men who want more things than they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others.

The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he wants.

But he does not get it. It is the class-man who gets it for him.

The class-man may see what he wants for his class clearly and may say what he wants.

But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him.

It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that God has worked it out!

It is one of His usual paradoxes.

The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.

He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he can—in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.

I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial world, as at present constituted in our coöperative age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other people.

If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.

Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day after.

And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause—a prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of Labour—that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to represent Labour.

It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring man, whether in America or England, is a coward; that he has no desire, no courage, for any one except for himself and for his own class. Mr. O'Connor of the Dockers' Organization in the East of Scotland, said at the time of the strike of the dockers in London: "This kind of business of the bureaucratic labour men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work all over the country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of England. It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it."

It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the World when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and that Labour alone can save the world. He knows that any scheme of social and industrial reform which leaves any class out, rich or poor, which does not see that everybody is to blame, which does not see that everybody is responsible, which does not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and expectation for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial.

The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are daily engaged, through competition and experiment and observation, in educating one another and finding out what they really want and what they can really do; and it is equally true that the great organizations of labour, in the same way, are educating one another.

The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational fight. And the fight is being conducted, not between Labour and Capital, but between the labouring men who have courage for Capital and labouring men who have not, and between capitalists who have courage for Labour and those who have not. To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day is between those who have courage and those who have not.

It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage and men who have not, which will win.

Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world will be the most safe in the hands of the men who have the most courage.

There are four items of courage I would like to see duly discussed in the meetings of the trades unions in America and England.

First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when the leaders of trades unions come to know employers better than the other men do and begin to see the other side and to have some courage about employers and to become practicable and reasonable, the unions drop them?

Third, A discussion of efficiency in a National Labour Party from the point of view of the trend of national efficiency in business. Apparently the most efficient and shrewd business men in England and America are the men who are running what might be called lubricated industries—who are making their industries succeed on the principle of sympathetic, smooth-running, mutual interests. If the successful modern business man who owns factories is not running each factory as a small civil war, is it not true that the only practical and successful Labour Party in England, the only party that can get things done for labour and that can hold power, is bound to be the party that succeeds in having the most courage for both sides, in seeing the most mutual interests, and in seeing how these interests can be put together, and in seeing it first and acting on it before any other merely one-sided party would be able to think it out?

Fourth, A discussion of the selection of the best labour leaders to place at the head of the unions.

Nearly every man who succeeds in business notably, succeeds in believing something about the people with whom he deals that the men around him have not believed before, or in believing something which, if they did believe it, they had not applied or acted as if they had believed before. If, in order to succeed, a business man does not believe something that needs to be believed before other people believe it, he hires somebody who does believe it to believe it for him.

In the meantime, whether among the labourers or the capitalists, however long it may take, it is not hard to see, on every hand to-day, the world about us slowly, implacably getting into the hands of the men, poor or rich, who have the most keen, patient courage about other people, the men who are "good" (God save the word!), the men who have practical, working human sympathies and a sense of possibilities in those above them and beneath them with whom they work—the men who most clearly, eagerly, and doggedly want things for others, who have the most courage for others.