BOOK FOUR

      CROWDS AND HEROES


      CHAPTER IX
      WHO IS AFRAID?

      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.

      As it is, hardly a day passes but one sees new little nobodies
      everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking
      to it—to the French Revolution—grabbing it calmly, and
      then using it deliberately before our eyes as a general free-for-
      all analogy for anything that comes into their heads. The
      Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the World have had
      the use of it last. The fact that the French Revolution
      was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years
      ago and with a Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a
      kind of first rough sketch, or draft of just what a rev-
      olution might be for once, and what it would have to get
      over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to have
      occurred to many people. One sees them rushing about the
      world trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas
      of a revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world
      put quietly away in the attic seventy years ago. The real
      world, and all the men in it who are facing real facts to-day,
      are getting what they want in precisely the opposite of the
      violent, theatrical French-Revolution way. The fact that [338]
      people are quite different now, and that it is more effective and
      practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping their
      heads on than it is by taking their heads off—some of us seem
      to have passed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with
      our new explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology,
      bacteriology, our new storage batteries, our habit of getting
      everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly
      and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having
      a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and
      then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional
      revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year
      by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together,
      become scientific, and see things as they are—has gone by.

      We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may
      be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or
      revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution all together, suit
      us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing men almost
      being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of
      thought—by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to
      have of making ourselves look at things at which we would
      rather not look, until we see them as they are. The man of
      scientific spirit, the quiet-minded, implacable man who gets
      what he wants for himself and for others by merely turning
      on the light, who makes a new world for us by just showing
      us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.

      There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they
      are particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-
      minded, romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior
      people. The real adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder
      of living in the twentieth century, lies in the high, patient,
      slow, quiet, silent enterprise of seeing facts as, they are, and
      without any fuss, and inexorably and with good cheer, acting on
      them. The human race has a new temperament. The way
      to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to
      look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or [339]
      bring the enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with
      cooperation, with understanding him and being understood by
      him, by being impregnably, obstinately his brother, by piling
      up huge happy citadels of good-will, of services rendered, ser-
      vices deserved, and services returned. We had an idea once
      that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of
      him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by
      getting inside first and then dealing with outside things
      together.

      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 William 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.

      A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas,
      deserts, chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God [340]
      and of his right to share with God in the creating of His
      world.

      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 along-
      side 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 cooperating all day,
      every day, with him and the other partners, to make the busi-
      ness 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 be-
      ings, 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.

      The Trades Unions passed a resolution that it was safer for
      the men in dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being [341]
      gorillas.

      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.

      One knows a hero first by his originality. He invents a new [342]
      kind and new size of man. He finishes off one sample. There
      he is.

      The next thing one notices about this man (when he is in-
      vented) 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 sud-
      denly 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.
 


      CHAPTER X

      RULES FOR TELLING A HERO—WHEN ONE SEES ONE

      WHEN Christ turned the other cheek, the last thing He
      would have wanted anyone 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 origi-
      nal, 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 adven-
      turesomeness of spirit, in every single one of the qualities
      that always have, and always will, make every true man a
      fighter.

      We contend that fighting, as at present conducted, is based
      on fear and lazy-mindedness; that it is lacking in the manlier
      qualities, that the biggest and newest kind of men are not [344]
      willing to be in it, and that it does not work.

      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 them-
      selves with gunpowder, but they will merely be set one side
      after this, where they will not be in a position to spoil the fight-
      ing 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, radi-
      antly 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 anyone ever have sup-
      posed 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."

      It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one's
      enemy and cooperate with him than it does to do a little, [345]
      simple, thoughtless, outside thing like stepping up to him and
      knocking him down.

      Cooperating 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.