BOOK FOUR

      CROWDS AND HEROES


      CHAPTER XI

      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.

      Courage consists in seeing so clearly something that one [347]
      wants to get that one is more afraid of not getting it than one
      is of anything that can get in the way.

      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 lib-
      erated 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 to-
      gether 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. Capi-
      tal 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.

      The world belongs to the men of vision—the men who are [348]
      not afraid—the men who see things that they have made up
      their minds to get.

      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.
 


      CHAPTER XII

      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.

      I felt the same way both mornings at first when I held my [350]
      paper in my hand and thought about what I had read, about
      the government's going down on its knees, and about God's
      striking Lord Devonport dead.

      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 sym-
      pathize 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 seri-
      ously, that can be acted on, will be the opinions of those who
      get over being scared and hateful first.

      Then I stood up for myself. [351]

      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.

      But if men who have not enough to eat are so half-dead and
      so worthless that they can feel calm and reasonable about it, [352]
      and can always be precisely right and always say precisely
      the right thing—if, with their wives fainting in their arms and
      their babies crying for food, all that those dockers had character
      enough to do, up on Tower Hill, was to make a polite, smooth,
      Anglican prayer to God—a prayer like a kind of blessing
      before not having any meat, and not that awful, fateful, husky
      cry to Heaven, a roar or rending of their hearts up to the black
      and empty sky—what would such men have been good for?
      What hope or courage could anyone have for them, for such
      men at such a time, if they would not, if they could not, come
      thundering and breaking into His presence, fifty thousand
      strong, to get what they want?

      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.

      I, too, in my hour of deepest trial, with no silk hat, with no
      gloves, with no gilt prayer-book, as I should, have flashed out
      my will upon my God. I, too, have cried with Paul, with Job,
      across my sin—my sin that very moment heaped up upon [353]
      my lips—have broken wildly in upon that still, white floor
      of Heaven!

      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 pos-
      sible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, per-
      haps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to God next
      time.

      Perhaps nothing the dockers could do in the way of being
      violent could be more stupid and wicked than having all these
      sleek, beautiful, perfect people, twenty-six million of them, [354]
      all expecting them not to be violent.

      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 beau-
      tiful 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 anyone else. Every-
      body 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.

      Which is there of us who, if we had not begun our own
      hungering and thirsting for righteousness, our tugging on God,
      in this old, lonely, preoccupied, selfish-looking way; would ever [355]
      have grown up, would ever have wanted enough things to
      belong to a Church of England, for instance, or to a Congrega-
      tional Home Missionary Society?

      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 want-
      ing 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 some-
      thing to eat, to arrange gradually to have his hungers move
      on.