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Contents |
BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
CHAPTER XIII
MEN WHO GET THINGS
ALL the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire,
A vice is a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand,
sternly within reach, to control his little ones.
A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let
himself drop into doing rows of half-things, or things which he
can only half do. He forgets, for the moment, what it really
is that he wants, or possibly that he wants anything. Then it
is that the one little, mean Lonely Hunger—a glass of liquor,
a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or a million dollars,
runs away with him.
When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-
control lies in maintaining checks and balances of desire, cen-
tripetals, and centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could
happen to the world would be to have it placed in the hands of
men who only have a gift of hungering for certain sorts of things,
or hungering for certain classes of people, or hungering for
themselves.
We do not want the man who is merely hungering for him-
self to rule the world—not because we feel superior
to him, but because a man who is merely hungering for
himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority on
worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority
on his own hunger. But what he thinks about everything
beyond that point cannot be taken seriously. What he
thinks about how the world should be run, about what other
people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken
seriously.
I will not yield place to anyone in my sympathy with the [357]
dockers.
I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the
same sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same
tincture of religion, would dare to do what they have done.
But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers,
with sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the
point.
And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the
dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:
First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation
as conclusive and imperative. It must be obeyed.
Second, I do not care what they think.
What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the
act of being scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes,
five months, or sixty years, who have given up their courage
for others, or for their enemies, are not practical. What a man
who despairs of everybody except himself thinks, does not work
and cannot be made to work. The fact that the dockers have
no courage about their employers may be largely the employers'
fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches, the
schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever
side in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage
for the other side, whichever side wants the most for the other
side, will be the side that will get the most control.
If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw
materials, machinery, and management of modern industry
out of the hands of the capitalists and run the world, the one
shrewd, invincible way for Labour to do it is going to be to
want more things for more people than capitalists can want.
The only people, to-day, who are going to be competent to
run a world, or who can get hold of even one end of it to try to
run it, are going to be the people who want a world, who have
a habit, who may be said to be almost in a rut, of wanting
things all day, every day, for a world—men who cannot keep
narrowed down very long at a time to wanting things for them- [358]
selves.
There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all
being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave
off an uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes
are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who
have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of
things-things like worlds into their hands. The me-man and
the class-man, under our modern conditions, are being more and
more kept back and held under in the smaller places, the
me-places and class-places, by the men who want more things
than they can want, who lap over into wanting things for
others.
The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may
say what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the class-man who gets it for him.
The class-man may see what he wants for his class clearly
and may say what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for
him.
It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that
God has worked it out!
It is one of His usual paradoxes.
The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get
things more than other people can get them is his margin of
unselfishness.
He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that
lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time
the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants;
how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to
make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe
or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast
setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he
can—in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.
The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself,
can get outside of himself into his class, who, in being a good [359]
class-man, can overflow into being a man of the world, is the
man who gets what he wants.
I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in
the industrial world, as at present constituted in our cooperative
age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out
of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive
outfits for wanting things for other people.
If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with
courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal
failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.
Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the
most spent and desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed
Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day
after.
And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them
their cause—a prayer that filled all England on the next day
with the rage of Labour—that a man like Ben Tillett, with
such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to
represent Labour.
In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike,
when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the
streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking
thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious
little banner, "No God and no Master"—it did one good, only
a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers,
thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing,
with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and
"One is our Master, even Christ"—thousands of men who
had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could
never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves
marching in a procession, snatching up these old and pious
mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to con-
tradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea that
the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial
Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed [360]
to represent for one moment the manhood and the courage,
the faithfulness and (even in the hour of their extremity) the
quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty and self-forgetfulness, the
moral dignity of the American workingman.
It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring
man, whether in America or England, is a coward; that he has
no desire, no courage, for anyone except for himself and for his
own class. Mr. O'Connor of the Dockers' Organization in the
East of Scotland, said at the time of the strike of the dockers in
London: "This kind of business of the bureaucratic labour
men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work all over the
country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of England.
It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement
with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it."
It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening
seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the
World when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and
that Labour alone can save the world. He knows that any
scheme of social and industrial reform which leaves any class
out, rich or poor, which does not see that everybody is to blame,
which does not see that everybody is responsible, which does
not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and expectation
for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not
do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial.
If we are going to have a society that is for all of us, it will take
all of us, and all of us together, to make it. Mutual expecta-
tion alone can make a great society. Mutual expectation, or
courage for others, persistently and patiently and flexibly
applied—applied to details by small men, applied to wholes
by bigger ones—is going to be the next big serious, unsenti-
mental, practical industrial achievement. And I do not believe
that for sheer sentiment's sake we are going to begin by rooting
up millionaires and, with one glorious thoughtless sweep, saying,
"We will have a new world," without asking at least some of
the owners of it to help, or at least letting them in on good [361]
behaviour. Nor are we going to begin by rooting up trade
unions and labour leaders.
The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are
daily engaged, through competition and experiment and obser-
vation, in educating one another and finding out what they
really want and what they can really do; and it is equally true
that the great organizations of labour, in the same way, are
are educating one another.
The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational
fight. And the fight is being conducted, not between Labour
and Capital, but between the labouring men who have courage
for Capital and labouring men who have not, and between cap-
italists who have courage for Labour and those who have not.
To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day is between
those who have courage and those who have not.
It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage
and men who have not, which will win.
Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world
will be the most safe in the hands of the men who have the
most courage.
There are four items of courage I would like to see duly dis-
cussed in the meetings of the trades unions in America and
England.
First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when
the leaders of trades unions come to know employers better
than the other men do and begin to see the other side and to
have some courage about employers and to become practicable
and reasonable, the unions drop them?
Second, Why is it that, in a large degree, the big employers,
when they succeed in getting skilled representatives or man-
agers who come to know and to understand their labouring men
better than they do, do not drop them? Why is it that, day
by day, on all sides in America and England, one sees the
employing class advancing men who have a genius for being
believed in, to at first questioned, and then to almost unques- [362]
tioned, control of their business? If this is true, does it not
seem on the whole that industry is safer in the hands of em-
ployers who have courage for both sides and who see both sides
than of employees who do not? Does not the remedy for
trades unions and employees, if they want to get control, seem
to be, instead of fighting, to see if they cannot see both sides
quicker, and see them better, than their employers do?
Third, A discussion of efficiency in a National Labour Party
from the point of view of the trend of national efficiency in
business. Apparently the most efficient and shrewd business
men in England and America are the men who are running
what might be called lubricated industries—who are making
their industries succeed on the principle of sympathetic,
smooth-running, mutual interests. If the successful modern
business man who owns factories is not running each factory
as a small civil war, is it not true that the only practical and
successful Labour Party in England, the only party that can
get things done for labour and that can hold power, is bound
to be the party that succeeds in having the most courage for
both sides, in seeing the most mutual interests, and in seeing
how these interests can be put together, and in seeing it first
and acting on it before any other merely one-sided party would
be able to think it out?
Fourth, A discussion of the selection of the best labour leaders
to place at the head of the unions.
Nearly every man who succeeds in business notably, succeeds
in believing something about the people with whom he deals
that the men around him have not believed before, or in believ-
ing something which, if they did believe it, they had not applied
or acted as if they had believed before. If, in order to succeed,
a business man does not believe something that needs to be
believed before other people believe it, he hires somebody who
does believe it to believe it for him.
Perhaps Labour would find it profitable to act on this prin-
ciple too, and to see to it that the leaders chosen to act for them [363]
are not the noisiest minded, but the most creative men, the
men who can express original, shrewd faiths in the men with
whom they have to deal—faiths that the men around them
will be grateful (after a second thought) to have expressed next.
. . . . . . .
In the meantime, whether among the labourers or the capital-
ists, however long it may take, it is not hard to see, on every
hand to-day, the world about us slowly, implacably getting
into the hands of the men, poor or rich, who have the most keen,
patient courage about other people, the men who are "good "
(God save the word!)., the men who have practical, working
human sympathies and a sense of possibilities in those above
them and beneath them with whom they work—the men who
most clearly, eagerly, and doggedly want things for others, who
have the most courage for others.
I have thought that if we could find out what this courage is,
how it works, how it can be had, and where it comes from, it
might be more worth our while to know than any other one
thing in the world.
I would like to try to consider a few of the sources of this
courage for others.
CHAPTER XIV
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—stand-
ing thoughtfully in the quarters of the Zoological Society in
Regent's Park.
The Zoological 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 Zoological 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.
Take a pelican, for instance. What possible personal ideal
was it that could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that
could ever have made a pelican take being a pelican seriously [365]
for one minute?
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
beasts, 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.
Everything does seem very much mixed up when one brings
one's Sociological Society dogmas, and one's little neat, im- [366]
peccable row of principles to the test of 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 thou-
sand 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.
Then I remember softly, suddenly, how I felt when I was [367]
watching the lions eat.
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 per-
suade 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.
The class-war socialist, though I may be at this moment in
the very act of trying to make him impossible, to put him out of [368]
date, has been and is, in his own place and his own time, I
gratefully acknowledge, of incalculable value.
Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make
rich, tired, mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechan-
ical-minded people wake up enough to feel hateful has per-
formed 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!
It has been overlooked that social reform primarily is not a
matter of legislation or of industrial or political systems, or of
machinery, but a matter, of psychology, of insight into human
nature and of expert reading and interpretation of the minds of
men. What are they thinking about? What do they think [369]
they want?
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 indus-
trial 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 every-
body 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.
A man's sense of toleration is based primarily upon the range
and power of his knowledge of himself, upon his power of remem- [370]
bering and anticipating himself, upon his laughing with God
at himself, upon his habit in darkness, weariness or despair, or
in silent victory and joy, of falling on his knees.
Toleration is reverence. It is the first source of courage
for other people.
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