SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS—TOLERATION

After making an address on inspired millionaires one night before the Sociological Society in their quarters in John Street, I found myself the next day—a six-penny day—standing thoughtfully in the quarters of the Zoölogical Society in Regent's Park.

The Zoölogical Society makes one feel more humble, I think, than the Sociological Society does.

All sociologists, members of Parliament, eugenists, professors, and others, ought to be compelled by law to spend one day every two weeks with the Zoölogical Society in Regent's Park.

All reformers who essay to make over human nature, all idealists, should be required by law to visit menageries—to go to see them faithfully or to be put in them a while until they have observed life and thought things out.

A GREEN BENCH, THE ZOO, REGENT'S PARK, 1911.

For orienting a man and making him reasonable, there is nothing, I find, like coming out and putting in a day here, making one's self gaze firmly and doggedly at the other animals.

We have every reason to believe that Noah was a good psychologist, or judge of human nature, before he went into the ark, but if he was not, he certainly would have come out one.

There is nothing like a menagerie to limber one up.

Especially an idealist.

And the camel with his lopsided hump. "Why, oh, why," cries the idealist, wringing his hands. "Oh, why——?"

I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me, after spending half a day looking calmly at peacocks, at giraffes, at hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this stretch or bird's eye view—this vast landscape of God's toleration—to criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like inside.

Possibly what each man stands for is well enough for him to stand for. It is only when what a man says, comes to being repeated, to being made universal, to being jammed down on the rest of us, that the lie in it begins to work out.

Let us let everybody alone and be ready to find things out just for ourselves.

Here is this big, frivolous, gentle elephant, for instance, poking his huge, inquiring trunk into baby carriages. He is certainly too glorious, too profound, a personage to do such things! It does seem a little unworthy to me, as I have been sitting here and watching him from this park bench, for a noble, solemn being like the elephant—a kind of cathedral of a beast, to be as deeply interested as he is in peanuts.

He looms up before me once more. I look up a little closer—look into his little, shrewd eyes—and, after all, what do I know about him?

And I watch the camels with the happy, dazed children on their backs, go by with soft and drifting feet. Do I suppose I understand camels? Or I follow the crowd. I find myself at last with that huge, hushed, sympathetic congregation at the 4 P.M. service, watching the lions eat.

Possibly people are as different from one another inside—in their souls at least—as different as these animals are.

It is true, of course, that as we go about, people do have a plausible way in this world—all these other people, of looking like us.

But they are different inside.

If one could stand on a platform as one was about to speak and could really see the souls of any audience—say of a thousand people—lying out there before one, they would be a menagerie beside which, O Gentle Reader, I dare to believe, Barnum and Bailey's menagerie would pale in comparison.

But in a menagerie (perhaps you have noticed it, Gentle Reader) one treats the animals seriously, and as if they were Individuals.

They are what they are.

Why not treat people's souls seriously?

It is true that people's souls, like the animals, are alike in a general way. They all have in common (in spiritual things) organs of observation, appropriation, digestion and organs of self-reproduction.

But these spiritual organs of digestion which they have are theirs.

And these organs of self-reproduction are for the purpose of reproducing themselves and not us.

These are my reflections, or these try to be my reflections when I consider the Syndicalist—how he grows or when I look up and see a class-war socialist—an Upton Sinclair banging loosely about the world.

My first wild, aboriginal impulse with Upton Sinclair when I come up to him as I do sometimes—violent, vociferous roaring behind his bars, is to whisk him right over from being an Upton Sinclair into being me. I do not deny it.

I remember the pelican.

Thus I save my soul in time.

Incidentally, of course, Upton Sinclair's insides are saved also.

It is beautiful the way the wild beasts in their cages persuade one almost to be a Christian!

Of course when one gets smoothed down one always sees people very differently. In being tolerant the rub comes usually (with me) in being tolerant in time. I am tempted at first, when I am with Upton Sinclair, to act as if he were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs and of course (anybody would admit it) if he really were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs he would have to be wiped out. There would be nothing else to do. But he is not and it is not fair to him or fair to the world to act as if he were.

The moment I see he is confining himself to just being Upton Sinclair I rather like him.

It is the same with Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It is when I fall to thinking of her as if she were, or were in danger of being, a whole world of Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes that I grow intolerant of her. Ella Wheeler Wilcox as a Tincture, which is what she really is, of course, is well enough. I do not mind.

The real truth about a man like Upton Sinclair, when one has worked down through to it, is that while from my point of view a class-war socialist—a man who proposes to put society together by keeping men apart—is wrong and is sure to do a great deal of harm to some people, there are other people to whom he does a great deal of good.

There really are people who need Upton Sinclair. It may be a hard fact to face perhaps, but when one faces it one is glad there is one. Some of the millionaires need Sinclair. There are others whose attention would be attracted better in more subtle ways.

Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make rich, tired, mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechanical-minded people wake up enough to feel hateful has performed a public service. The hatefulness is the beginning of their being covetous for other things than the things they have. If a man has a habit of hunger he gets better and better hungers as a matter of course; bread and milk, ribbons, geraniums, millinery, bathtubs, Bibles, copartnership associations. And in the meantime the one precious thing to be looked out for in a man, and to be held sacred, is his hunger.

The one important religious value in the world is hunger and to all the men to-day who are contributing to the process of moving on hungers; whether the hungers happen to be our hungers or not or our stages of hunger or not, we say Godspeed.

There are times when the sudden sense one comes to have that the world is a struggle, a great prayer toward the sun, a tumult and groping of desire, the sense that every kind and type of desire has its time and its place in it and every kind and type of man, gives a whole new meaning to life. This sense of a now possible toleration which we come to have, some of us, opens up to us always when it comes a new world of courage about people. It makes all these dear, clumsy people about us suddenly mean something. It makes them all suddenly belong somewhere. They become, as by a kind of miracle, bathed in a new light, wrong-headed, intolerable though they be, one still sees them flowing out into the great endless stream of becoming—all these dots of the vast desire, all these queer, funny, struggling little sons of God!

The trades unions and employers' associations, extreme socialists and extreme Tories have so far been very bad psychologists. If the Single Tax people were as good at being intuitionalists or idea-salesmen as they are at being philosophers in ideas they would long before this have turned everything their way. They would have begun with people's hungers and worked out from them. They would have listened to people to find out what their hungers were. The people who will stop being theoretical and logical about each other and who will look hard into each other's eyes will be the people whose ideas will first come to pass. Everything we try to do or say or bring to pass in England or America is going to begin after this, not in talking, but in listening. If social reformers and industrial leaders had been good listeners, the social deadlock—England with its House of Lords and railroads both on strike and America with its great industries quarrelling—would have been arranged for and got out of the way over twenty years ago.

We have overlooked the first step of industrial reform, the rather extreme step of listening. The most hard-headed and conclusive man to settle any given industrial difficulty is the man who has the gift of divining what is going on in other people's minds, a gift for being human, a gift for treating everybody who disagrees with him as if they might possibly be human too, though they are very poor, even though they are very rich. Practical psychology has come to be not only the only solution but also the only method of our modern industrial questions. Being so human that one can guess what any possible human being would think is the one hard-headed and practical way to meet the modern labour problem.

The first symptom of being human in a man is his range and power of shrewd, happy toleration, or courage for people who know as little now as he knew once.

Toleration is reverence. It is the first source of courage for other people.

CONVERSION

Some people think of the world as if it were made all through, people and all, of reinforced concrete, as if everything in it—men, women, children, churches, colleges, and parties, were solidly, inextricably imbedded in it.

Every age in history has had to get on as well as it could with two sets of totally impracticable people, our two great orders of Philistines in this world, the people who put their trust in Portland Cement and the people who put their trust in Explosives.

There has not been a single great movement in history yet that every thoughtful man has not had to watch being held up by these people—by millions of worthy, simple, rudimentary creatures who consent to be mere conservatives or mere radicals.

One set says, "People cannot be converted so we will blow them up."

The other set says, "We are going to be blown up, so let us put on Plaster of Paris as a garment, we will array ourselves before the Lord in Portland Cement."

Both of these classes of people believe alike on one main point.

They do not believe in Conversion.

If the conservatives believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Portland Cement. If the radicals believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Explosives.

They admit that in our modern life men are not made of reinforced concrete. We may move, but we move as wheels move, they tell us. We arc whirlingly imbedded. We are cogs and wheels in an Economic Machine.

I would like to consider for a moment this Whirling Unbelief.

There was a time once when I took the Economic Machine very seriously.

I looked up when I went by, at the Economic Machine as the last and the most terrific of the inventions among the machines. The machine that mocked all the other machines, that made all our machines look pathetic and ridiculous, was the Economic Machine. There were days when I heard it or seemed to hear it—this Economic Machine closing in around my life, around all our lives like the last hoarse mocking laugh of civilization.

I said I will love every machine that runs except the Economic Machine—the machine for making people into machines.

But one day when I had waited or dared to wait, I know not why, a little longer than usual before the Whirling Unbelief, I heard the hoarse mocking laugh die away. I became very quiet. I began to think, I reflected on my experiences. I began to notice things.

I noted that every time I had found myself being discouraged about people, I had caught myself thinking of people as Cogs and Wheels.

Were they really Cogs and Wheels?

Possibly it was merely the easiest, most mechanical-minded thing to do to think of people (with all this machinery around one) as cogs and wheels in an economic machine.

Then I stood quietly and calmly for days, for weeks, for years before it. I watched it Go Round.

I then discovered under close observation that what had looked to me like an economic machine was not an economic machine at all.

The modern economic world has innumerable mechanical elements in it, but it is not an economic machine.

It is a biological engine.

It is the biology in it that conceives, desires, and determines the machinery in it.

The most important parts of the machine are not the very mechanical parts. They are the very biological parts.

The economic machine is full of made-people, but it does not make very much difference about the made-people. I find that as a plain, practical matter of fact I do not need to watch the made-people so very much to understand the world, or to get ready for what is happening to it.

In prospecting for a world, I watch the born people.

I watch especially the people who have been born twice.

As one watches the way the world is going round one finds that what is really making it go round, is not its being an economic machine, but its being a biological engine.

Industrial reform is a branch of biology.

The main fact of biology as regards a man is that he can be born.

The main fact of biology as regards society—that is, the main fact of social biology—is that a man can be born twice.

As long as a man is born to go with a father and a mother it is well enough to have been born once, but the moment a man deals with other people or with the world, he has to be born again.

The main fact about the Engine is the biology in it.

Every other fact for a man has to be worked out from this—that is: out of being born once if one wants to belong merely to a father and mother, and out of being born twice if one wants to belong to a world.

A man does not need to enter again into his mother's womb and come out a child. He enters into the World's Womb and comes out a man.

The world is being placed to-day before our eyes in the hands of the men who are born twice.

Not all men are cogs and wheels.

The first day I discovered this and believed this I went out into the streets and looked into the faces of the men and the women and I looked up at the factories and the churches and I was not afraid.

I do not deny that cogs and wheels are very common.

But I do not believe that an economic system or industrial scheme based on the general principle of arranging a world for cogs and wheels would work. I believe in arranging the world on the principle that there are now and are going to be always enough men in it who are born, and enough who are born twice to keep cogs and wheels doing the things men who have been born twice, who have visions for worlds, want done, and to keep people who prefer being cogs and wheels where they will work best and where they will help the running gear of the planet most—by going round and round, in the way they like—going round and round and round and round.

It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be converted. There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a few particular men's being born again. It is worse than that. What seems to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new generation's being born again. It is going to be just like this one, they tell us, the new generation—the same old things the same old foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not worked—Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around and around again. They must be planned for. All these young men of wealth about us who read the papers and who are ashamed of their fathers are going to be just like their fathers. The atheists, the socialists, and the single taxers, missionaries and evangelists have given up their last loophole of hope in the new business generation and they trust only to machines to save us, or to professors, or to paper-treatises on eugenics!

And yet, after all, if we were going to start an absolute, decisive, and practical scheme of eugenics to-morrow with whom would we begin, with which particular people would we begin? We would have to go back, Bernard Shaw and the bishops and all of us, to the New Testament—to the old idea of being born again.

There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can be educated.

We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted.

We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted.

I speak for a thousand, thousand men.

In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men—for all of us. We are not cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can be born again.

Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and say that human nature will not change.

We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.

The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth—the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.

Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful, believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons' lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it, if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in the vise of our hopes.

Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in them that they get them.

If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.

It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true, steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the vision, the expectation of a great nation.

There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what it is to get over a small motive. We have seen, when we looked back, what it was that happened.

The way to get over a small motive is to let it get lost in a big one.

A man does not stop to pick up a penny or a million dollars when he is running to save his life.

A man does not stop to pick up two pennies, or two thousand dollars, or two million dollars when he is running to save ten thousand lives or running to save ninety million lives, when he is running to save a city or a nation.

This is Conversion—entering into the World's Womb, the world's vision or expectation and being born again.

It is not for nothing that I have seen the sun lifting up the faces of the flowers, and crumbling the countenances of the hills. And I have seen music stirring faintly in the bones of old men. And I have heard the dead Beethoven singing in the feet of children.

And I have watched the Little Earth in its little round of seasons dancing before the Lord.

And I have believed that music is wrought into all things, and that the people I see about me have not one of them been left out.

I believe in sunshine and in hothouses. I believe in burning glasses. I believe in focusing light into heat and heat into white fire, and turning white fire into little flowing brooks of steel.

And I believe in focusing men upon men.

I believe in Conversion.

I stand and look at this stone and believe it is all rubber and whalebone inside.

But what of it?

It does not get true.

While I am looking at a man and believing a certain thing about the man, it gets true.

What is going on in my mind while I look at him effects actual mechanical changes in him, affects the flow of blood in his veins. A look colours him, whitens him, twists and turns the muscles and tissues in his body. I draw lines upon his inmost being. I lay down a new face upon his face. A moment after I look upon the man's face it has become, as it were, or may have become, a new little landscape. I have seen a great country opened up in him of what he might be like. While I look I have been ushered softly, for a second, into the presence of a man who was not there before.

Such things have happened.

Beatrice looked at Dante once. Ten silent centuries began singing.

A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man named Paul. Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two thousand years.

EXCEPTION

A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and seven inches.

There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches.

But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches.

The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine out of ten business firms.

My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths on my fingers, by numbering grains of sand, men, and mountains, bombs, acorns and marbles alike.

Which truth matters?

Which man is right?

Where is Nazareth?

Nazareth is our only really important town now. I will see what is going on in Nazareth. On every subject that comes up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions. All the inventors flock there—the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the man—the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.

Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all night, do their living.

Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds. One can see a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go up and down the streets there with their new worlds in their eyes.

Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and working on them.

I regret to record that professors of political economy, social philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty, invisible little town that rules the destinies of men.

Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day.

All these things that people are saying to me are mere history. I have seen the one live exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it. It kept turning round and round with us until we did.

INVENTION

If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them.

The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would be far less desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but it is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all classes who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds.

I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at Hendon—those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one—that imperturbable happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast countenance of the future—watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of times I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid.

One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got it.

The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the street.

Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies in the box.

The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the Times saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was missing.

He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people—to anybody Who Happened Along the Strand—to a Foundling Hospital.

The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human nature. He thought he ought to encourage me.

I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion.

On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would have been missing—I hope.

And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand.

There are two ways to get relief from this story.

First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear little foundlings got them—the letter in the Times said. They were presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand.

Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the Times and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in the Times to come out at the other.

Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off.

But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon.

If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it. It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like.

The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United States.

The crowd in the Strand, of course, like any other real crowd, was a stew of development, a huge laboratory of people. All stages of experience were in it.

Some of the people in the crowd that day had a new refreshing thought, when they saw those pennies rolling around everybody. They thought they would try and see what stealing a penny was like. Then they did it.

Others in the crowd thought of stealing a penny too, and then they had still another thought. They thought of not stealing it. And this second thought interested them more.

Others did not think of stealing a penny at all because they had thought of it so often before had got used to it and had got used to dismissing it.

Others thought of stealing a penny and then they thought how ashamed they were of having thought of it. Others looked thoughtfully at the pennies and thought they would wait for guineas.

But whatever it was or may have been that was taking place in that crowd that day—they all thought.

I would like to see shillings tried next time.

Then guineas might be used.

A box of guineas dumped in the street would do more good than a box of pennies because there are many people who would think more with the guineas rolling around out of sight around a man's legs than they would with a penny's doing it.

In this way a box of guineas would do more good.

Thousands of men and women that we have sent to India from this Western World have been trying with Bibles, and good deeds, and kind faces, and Sunday-schools to get the Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin to kill the rats and stop the bubonic plague.

Nothing came of it.

In due time General Booth-Tucker appeared on the scene.

He came too, of course, with a Bible and with his kind face like the others, and of course, too, he went to Sunday-school regularly.

And while he was watching the bubonic plague sweeping up cities, he tried too, like the others, to tell the people about a God who would not be displeased if they killed the rats and stopped the plague.

But he could not convince anybody, or at best a few here and there.

The next thing that was known about General Booth-Tucker's work in India was, that he had (still with his Bible, of course, and with his kind look) slipped away and established in the south of France a factory for the manufacture of gloves.

He offered the people so much apiece for the skins of the rats.

The poorest and most desperate of the natives then began killing the rats secretly and bringing in the skins.

They waited for the wrath of Heaven to fall upon them. Nothing happened, then they told others. The others are telling everybody.

General Booth-Tucker's factory to-day in the south of France is very busy making money for the Salvation Army, turning out Christian gloves for the West and turning out Christians or the beginnings of Christians for the East, and the ancient, obstinate theological idea of the holiness of the rats which the Hindoos have had is being ceaselessly, happily, and stupendously, all day and all night, disproved.

Incidentally the little religious glove factory of General Booth-Tucker's in the south of France is giving India the first serious and fair chance it has ever had to stop being a pest house on the world, and to bring the bubonic plague with its threat at a planet to an end.

General Booth-Tucker's Bible was just like anybody else's Bible. But there must have been something about the way he read his Bible that made him think of things. And there must have been something about his kind look. He looked kindly at something in particular, and he was determined to make that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had the gloves, and he had the Hindoo's—and he made them do, and before he knew it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became a saviour or inventor.

In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had wedged in a God.

One of the pennies might have been missing.

I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics, its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering, is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug, proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never running a risk, his moral anæmia, he blocks all progress in churches, in legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the moment they are grown up.

They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of Never Making a Mistake.

Then I would let them try.

I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them respectabilize.

Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in—to do what they were told.

Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy.

Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But what is the matter with them would be useful.

And everybody would be happy.

When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting out the people who should die from the people who should live—if one was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die.

No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable one that could have been made.

But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship's officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die than a difference in organs of reproduction.

But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's children would do for the world if they lived no one would have quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die.

Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making a kind of world where Titanic disasters could not happen, would have chosen on the deck of the Titanic that night, very much the way God would.

From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a woman.

The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man who had invented a ship that could not sink.

There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.

If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?

The women who are with child.

And the men who are about to have ideas.

And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's name and in the name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who are about to have ideas.

We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have more time to think.

What would we try to do if we took the time to think? Would there be any way of fixing upon an order for saving people on a world? What would be the most noble, the most universal, the most Godlike and democratic schedule for souls to be saved on—on a world?

I think the man that would save the most other people should be saved first. It would not be democratic to save an ordinary man, a man who could just save himself, just think for himself, when saving the man next to him instead would be saving a man who would save a thousand ordinary men, or men who have gifts for thinking only of themselves.

Of course one man who thinks merely of himself is as good as another man who thinks merely of himself, but from the point of view of a democracy every common man has an inalienable right—the right to have the man who saves common men saved first.

And the moment we get in this world, our first democracy, the moment the common man really believes in democracy, this aristocracy or people who save others (the common man himself will see to it) will be saved first.

But if the world is not a Titanic, and if we have on the average thirty-five years apiece to decide about men on a world and put them where they belong, it might not be amiss to try to unite for the time being on a few fundamental principles. What would seem to us to be a few fundamental principles for the act of world-assimilation, that vast, slow, unconscious crowd-process, that peristaltic action of society of gathering up and stowing away men—all these little numberless cells of humanity where they belong?

No one cell can have much to say about it. But we can watch.

And as we watch it seems to us that men may be said to be dividing themselves roughly and flowingly at all times into three great streams or classes.

They are either Inventors, or they are Artists, or they are Hewers.

Of course in classifying men it is necessary to bear in mind that their getting out of their classifications is what the classifications are for.

And it is also necessary to bear in mind that men can only be classified with regard to their emphasis and may belong in one class in regard to one thing and in another class with regard to another, but in any particular place, or at any particular time a man is doing a thing in this world, he is probably for the time being, while he is doing it, doing it as an Inventor (or genius), as an Artist (or organizer), or as a Hewer. Most men, it must be said, settle down in their classifications. They are very apt to decide for life whether they are Inventors or Artists or Hewers.

But as has been said before, being on a world and not on a Titanic, we have time to think.

On what principles could we make out a schedule or inventory of human nature, and decide on world-values in men?

I can remember many days standing beneath it as a small boy (my small insides full of butternuts, a thousand more butternuts up on the tree), and I used to look up in its branches and wonder about it, wonder how it could keep on so with its butternuts and with its leaves, with its winters and with its summers, its cool shadows and sunshines, still being a butternut tree, with that huge hollow in it.

I have learned since that if a few ounces or whittlings of wood in a tree are chipped out in a ring around it under the bark, cords of wood in the limbs all up across the sky would die in a week—if one chips out those few little ounces of wood.

Cords of wood can be taken out of the inside of the tree and it will not mind.

It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the juice runs up to the sun that makes the tree alive or dead.

The part that must be saved first and provided for first is that slippery little shiny streak under the bark.

Perhaps Men are valuable in proportion as it would be difficult to produce promptly other men to perform their functions, or to take their places.

If we cut away in society men of genius, leaves, and blossoms, in trees, men who reach down Heaven to us, they grow out again.

If we cut away in society great masses of roots, common men who hew out the earth in the ground and get earth ready to be heaved up to the sky—the roots grow out again.

But if we cut a little faint rim around it of artists, of inventive men-controllers, of the Sap-conductors, the men who make the Hewers run up to the sky and who make the geniuses come down to the ground, the men who run the tree together, who out of dark earth and bright sunshine build it softly—if we destroy these, this little rim of great men or men who save others, a totally new tree has to be begun.

It is the essence of a democracy to acknowledge that some men for the time being are more important in it than others, and that these men, whosoever they are, in whatever order of society they may be—poor, rich, famous, obscure—these men who think for others, who save others and invent others, who make it possible for others to invent themselves, these men shall be saved first.

One always thinks at first that one would like to make a diagram of human nature. It would be neat and convenient.

Then one discovers that no diagram one can make of human nature—unless one makes what might be called a kind of squirming diagram will really work.

Then one tries to imagine what a flowing diagram would be like.

Then it occurs to one, one has seen a flowing diagram.

So I am putting down on this page for what it may be worth, what I have called A Family Tree of Folks.

Read across:

THE MAN WHO PULLS THE WORLD TOGETHER

The typical mighty man or man of valour in our modern life is the Organizer or Artist.

If a man has succeeded in being a great organizer, it is because he has succeeded in organizing himself.

A man who has organized himself is a man who has built a personality. The main fact about a man who has succeeded in being an organized man or personality is, that he has ordered himself around.

Naturally, when other people have to be ordered around, being full-head-on in the habit of ordering, even ordering himself, the hardest feat of all, he is the man who has to be picked out to order other people. As a rule the man who orders himself around successfully, who makes his whole nature or all parts of himself work together, does it because he takes pains to find out who he is and what he is like. If he orders other men successfully and makes them work together it is because he knows what they are like.

A man knows what other people are like and bow they feel by having times of being a little like them and by being a big, latent all-possible, all-round kind of man.

Leadership follows.

Modern business consists in getting Inventors' minds and Hewers' minds to work together. The ruler of modern business is the man who by experience or imagination is half an Inventor himself, and half a Hewer himself. He knows how inventing feels and how hewing feels.

Incidentally he has what might be called a northern exposure which keeps him scientific, cool, and close to the spirit of facts.

And there has to be something very like a western exposure in him too, a touch of the homely seer, a habit of having reflections and afterglows, a sense of principles, and of the philosophy of men and things.

If I were to try to sum up all these qualities in a man and call it by one name, I would call it Glorified-commonsense.

If I were asked to define Glorified-commonsense I would say it is a glory which works. It belongs to the man who has a vision or coinage for others because he sees them as they are, and sees how the glory buried in them (i.e., the inspiration or source of hard work in them) can be got out.

Everywhere that the Artist in business, or Organizer, with his Inventors on one side of him and his Hewers on the other, can be seen to-day competing with the man who has the mere millionaire or owning type of mind, he is crowding him from the market.

It is because he understands how Inventors and Hewers feel and what they think and when he turns on Inventors he makes them invent and when he turns on Hewers he makes them hew.

The Hewer often thinks because he is rich or because he owns a business, that he can take the place of the artist, but he can be seen every day in every business around us, being passed relentlessly out of power because he cannot make his Inventors invent and cannot make his Hewers hew as well as some other man. The moment his Inventors and Hewers think of him, hear about him, or have any dealing with him—with the mere millionaire, the mere owner kind of person, his Inventors invent as little as they can, and his Hewers hew as softly as they dare.

This is called the Modern Industrial Problem.

Only the man who has kept and saved both the inventing and hewing spirit in himself can save it in others—can be a saviour or artist.