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Contents |
BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
CHAPTER VI
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 mediaeval 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 look-
ing and acting like a servant.
He meant really being one, whether one looked like a ser-
vant or not. If looking independent and being independent
makes the service better, if defying the appearance of a ser-
vant makes the service more efficient, we believe the appear-
ance should be defied.
It troubles us when we see the Czar of Russia in the pres- [324]
ence of the civilized world, once a year taking such great
pains to look like a servant and to wash his peasants' feet.
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 thin king 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 partic-
ular 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, cor-
rupting 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 not be afraid of the Crowd. . . . [325]
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 indom-
itable desire, its prayer, to lay at last its huge, terrible, beauti-
ful 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-man-
agers 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 Gov-
ernment.
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. Every-
body is afraid because everybody is shut in with some little
separated crowd.
People who are never Outside, who only see a little way out [326]
over the edge of the little crowd in which they are penned
up, are naturally afraid.
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.
CHAPTER VII
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 express-
ing 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.
The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not
observe facts. He merely observes facts that everybody can
see, that everybody has seen for years. He does not observe
the new and exceptional facts about capital that only a few [328]
can see, the seeing of which, and the seeing of which first,
should alone ever constitute a man a true leader in dealing
with capital. He merely believes facts that nearly everybody
has caught up to believing—facts about human nature, about
what works in business. The crowd is not content with this.
It has become accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in
business, and who make others follow them, whether masters
or workmen, are men who do it by observing certain new and
exceptional facts and acting upon them. If these men can-
not observe them, we have seen them create them. It is
the men who make new things true wherever they go
that the crowd is coming to recognize and to take seri-
ously and permanently as the real leaders of Labour and of
Capital to-day. Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour
leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things
that he proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked
at on the outside, merely have or might be said to have a
true look:
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 second reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is, not
that he has his facts wrong and does not think, but that he car-
ries not-thinking about the employing class still further, has
come to make a kind of religion out of not-thinking about them.
And instead of thinking how to make labouring men think
better than their employers think, and making them think so
well that they can crowd their way into their employers' places,
he proposes to have labour get into their places without think- [329]
ing, and run a world without thinking. All that is necessary
in order to have workmen run the world, is to get workmen to
stop working, to stop thinking, and then as rapidly as possible
to get everybody else to stop thinking. Then the world will
fall into their hands.
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 use-
less 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-re-
garding 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
cooperating 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 con-
vince them.
So he backs down and fights.
If any reader who is interested to do so will kindly turn [330]
back at this point a page or so, and read this chapter we
have just gone through together. over again, and if he will
kindly, wherever it occurs, insert for Tom Mann, labour leader,
"D. A. Thomas, leader of mine-owners," he will save much
time for both of us, and he will kindly make one chapter in this
book which is already much too long, as good as two.
Tom Mann (unless he is changed) is about to be dropped
as a typical modern leader of Labour because he is afraid, and
what he expresses in the labouring class is its fear of Capital.
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.
CHAPTER VIII
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.
At the last moment in the coal strike, when the Government
had done its best, and when the labour leaders still proposed to
hold up England and defy the Government until they got their
way, Stephen Walsh, one of the leaders of the miners, stood up
in the face of a million miners and said he would not go on with
the others against the Government. "It is now time for the
trades union men to return to work. We have done what we [332]
could. Our citizenship should be higher than our trades union-
ship, and with me, as long as I am a trades union man, it will
be."
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
ever 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.
Lack of courage is a lack of vision or clear-headedness about [333]
what one wants. I do not know, but I can only say that it
bas seemed to me that Bishop Gore has a vision or clear-headed-
ness about what he wants for democracy, and that he uses his
vision of what he wants for democracy to true his vision for his
class. Perhaps also he has a vision for his class for the church
people that it is for the interest church people to be the class
that is, out of all the world, supremely considerate, big, leis-
urely, unfretful in its dealings with others. Perhaps also he
has a vision for himself and is clear-headed for himself, and
has seen that though the steeples fall about him, and though
the altars go up in smoke, he will keep the spirit of God still
within his reach. The gentleness, the grim hope for the world
and the patience that built the cathedrals, shall be in his
heart day and night.
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 thou-
sands 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.
And it has seemed to me that Tom Mann and D. A. Thomas
are (incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not
see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this. I [334]
am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to
a nation that is still the headquarters—the international
citadel—of individualism upon the earth. The world knows
if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most
characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought
against that England has produced.
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, when is not waked.
The moment it is waked we will have a new world. It is be-
cause Tom Mann and D. A. Thomas are not leaders of men
who have this spirit that they are about to be dropped as typi-
cal 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 gener-
ous, 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.
And I might now. The thing that I would have tried to [335]
look down through to in him, if I had looked him in the eye,
would have been something like this: "Are you or are you not,
Davy McEwen, standing out day after day against your class
because you can see less than your class sees, because you are
a mere me-man? Do you go by here grimly day by day, past
all these people lined up on the hills, sternly thinking of your-
self?"
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.
There is a sense in which Christ died on the cross because
He could find at the time no other way of saying this. There [336]
is a sense in which the decline of individualism is what he died
for.
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 cruci-
fied 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 prac-
tised 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.
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