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BOOK FIVE
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
CHAPTER XV
NEWS-CROWDS
I HAVE tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of
tentative working vision or hope of what authors and of what
newspaper men can do in governing a country.
This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being.
Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find
out what plain human beings are like.
It does not matter very long what other things a government
gets wrong, if it gets the people right.
This suggests something that each of us can do.
I was calling on ____ ,Treasurer of ____, in his new bank,
not long ago—a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over
it and no windows on this wicked world—a kind of heavenly
minded way of being lighted from above. It seemed to be a
kind of Church for Money.
"This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built
it?"
____ mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had
never heard of him.
I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the
bank. He said he had wanted Non from the first, but that the
directors had been set against it.
And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the
more set they were. They kept offering a good many rather
vague objections, and for a long time he could not really make
them out.
Finally he got it. All the objections boiled down to one.
Non was too good to be true. If there was a man like Non in [528]
this world, they said, they would have heard about it before.
. . . . . . .
When I was telling ex-Mayor ____, in ____, about Non,
the first time, he interrupted me and asked me if I would mind
his ringing for his stenographer. He was a trustee and respon-
sible, either directly or indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and
he wanted the news in writing.
Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said,
but he wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of
its being true would be very important to him, he was going to
have it looked up.
Now ex-Mayor ____ is precisely the kind of man (as half
the world knows) who, if he had been a contractor, instead of
what he had happened to be, would have been precisely the kind
of contractor Non is. He has the same difficult, heroic blend
of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and getting what he
wants.
But the moment ex-Mayor ____ found these same motives
put up to be believed in at one remove, and in somebody else,
he thought they were too good to be true.
I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few
years of observation with a very singular and interesting fact
about business men.
Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives,
(in a rather bluff simple way, without particularly thinking
about it, one way or the other) seem to feel a little superior to
other people. They begin, as a rule, apparently, by feeling
a little superior to themselves, by trying to keep from seeing how
high their motives are, and when, in the stern scuffle of life,
they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how high
their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep
other people from suspecting it.
In ____'s factory in ____, the workers in brass, a few
years ago, could not be kept alive more than two years because [529]
they breathed brass filings. When ____ installed, at great
expense, suction machines to place beside the men to keep
them from breathing brass, some one said, "Well surely you will
admit this time, that this is philanthropy?"
"Not at all."
The saving in brass air alone, gathered up from in front
of the men's mouths, paid for the machines. What is more
he said that after he had gone to the expense of educating
some fine workmen, if a mere little sucking machine like
that could make the best workmen he had, work for him
twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to
let them die.
Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point,
until they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone
about business. One can talk with them for hours, for days at
a time, about their business—some of them, without being
able a single time to corner them into being decent or into
admitting that they care about anybody.
Now I will not yield an inch to ____ or to anybody else in
my desire to displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life.
I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a
religious point of view. I have believed that the big, difficult
and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius
for finding identities, for putting people's interests together
—you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and
help themselves.
And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly
every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this des-
perate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting
to seem mixed up in any way with goodness—either his own
or other people's?
In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our
governments everywhere are groping to find out what business
men are really like and what they propose to be like, if a man is
good (far more than if he is bad) everybody has a right to know [530]
it. The President has a right to know it. The party leaders
have a right to know it.
It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness
pay, but what is the man's real, deep, happy, creative, achiev-
ing motive in making goodness pay? What is it in the man that
fills him with this fierce desire, this almost business-fanaticism
for making goodness pay?
It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of
being in a human world, his passion for human economy, for
world efficiency and world-self-respect. This is what it is in
him that makes him force goodness to pay.
The business men of the bigger type who let themselves
talk in this tone to-day, do not mean it, they are letting them-
selves be insensibly drawn into the tone of the men around
them.
We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying
that we have none, that we have believed it. We all know
men finer than we are who say they have none. So we have
not, probably.
And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year
of going about the business world, at boards of trade and at
clubs and at dinners, and finding all this otherwise plain and
manly world, all dotted over everywhere with all these simple,
good, self-deceived blundering prigs of evil, putting on airs
before everybody day and night, of being worse than they
are!
It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not
deliberately lie about human nature. They merely say pianola-
minded things.
One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond
Street, or Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune
of business, clinging like a kind of street piano, through men's
minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-! Oh, SH-SH! Oh, do not let anybody
know I'm being good!"
II
I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues
or to keep up an appearance of having as low motives as other
people are trying to make me believe they have.
They have lied long enough.
I have lied long enough.
My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it.
And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got
the necessary brains to go with them) the better they have
worked.
Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has
been my fault.
Sometimes it is John Doe's fault.
I am going to speak to John Doe about it. I am going to tell
him what I am driving at. I have turned over a new leaf. In
the crisis of a great nation and as an act of last desperate
patriotism, I am going to give up looking modest.
For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and
stand up before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with
it and say what I think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister
threats against our having or getting a real national life in
America.
I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always
kept him wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-
looking coats and trousers. Except for a few moments a year
he never caught up. Nobody ever saw that boy and his long
shoes when he was not butting bravely about, stubbing his
toes on the world and turning up his sleeves.
It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he
grew up.
I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least
until our present national crisis is over in business and in
politics, like that boy.
There are millions of other men in this country who want
to be like that boy. Nations may smile at us if they want to. [532]
We will smile too—rather stiffly and soberly, but for better or
worse we propose from to-day on, to let people see what we are
trying to be daily, grimly, right along side of what we are!
I have come to the conclusion that the only way, for me, at
least, to keep modest and kind, is to have my ideals all on.
When one is going around in sight of everybody with one's moral
sleeves rolled up, and one's great wistful, broad trousers that
do not look as if they would ever get filled out, it is awkward to
find fault with other people for not filling out their moral clothes.
It may be a severe measure to take with one's self but the surest
way to be kind is to live an exposed life.
I propose to live the next few years in a glass house.
There are millions of other men who want to. We want to see
if we cannot at last live confidentially with a world, live naively
and simply with a world like boys and like great men and like
dogs!
What I have written, I have written. I propose to run the
risk of being good. When driven to it, I will run the risk of
saying I am good.
My motives are fairly high. See! here is my scale of one
hundred! I had rather stand forty-five on my scale than
ninety-eight on yours!
If there is any discrepancy between my vision and my action,
I am not going to be bullied out of my life and out of living my
life the way I want to, by the way I.look. Though it mock me,
I will not haul down my flag. I will haul up my life!
Here it is right here in this paragraph, in black and white. I
take it up and look at it, I read it once more and lay it down.
What I have written, I have written.
III
People do not seem to agree in the present crisis of our Ameri-
can industrial and national life, about the necessity of getting at
the facts and at the real news in this country about how good we [533]
are.
Last November in the national election, four and a half
million men (Republicans) said to Theodore Roosevelt, "Theo-
dore! do not be good so loud!"
Four and a half million other men, also Republicans, told
him not to mind what anybody said, but to keep right on being
good as loud as he liked, for as long as it seemed necessary.
They wanted to be sure our goodness in America such as we
had, was being loud enough to be heard, believed in, and acted
on in public.
The other set of men, last November (who were really very
good too, of course), were more sedate and liked to see goodness
modulated more. They stood out for what might be called a
kind of moral elegance.
The governing difference between the Roosevelt type and the
Taft type in America has not been a mere difference of tempera-
ment but a difference in news-sense, in a sense of crisis in the
nation.
Thousands of men of all parties, with the nicest, easiest stand-
pat Taft temperaments in the world, with soft, low voices and
with the most beautiful moral manners, have let themselves
join in a national attempt to shock this nation into seeing how
good it is. A great temporary crisis can only be met by a great
temporary loudness.
This is what has been happening in America during the last
six months. At last, all men in all parties are engaged in
trying to find out: Is it true or not true that we want to be
good?
We are trying to get the news through. It may not be very
becoming to us and we know as well as anyone, that loudness,
except when morally deaf people drive us to it is in bad taste.
We are looking forward, every one of us, to being as elegant as
anyone is, and the very first minute we get the morally deaf
people out of office where we will not have to go about shouting
out at them—we will tone down in our goodness. We will [534]
modulate beautifully!
IV
There are three other bug-a-boos, besides the Modesty
Bug-a-boo that America will have to face and drive out of the
way before it can be truly said to have a national character or to
have grown up and found itself. There is the Goody-good
Bug-a-boo, the Consistency Bug-a-boo, and the Bug-a-boo that
Thomas Jefferson if he were living now, would never never ride
in a carriage.
Each of these bug-a-boos in the general mistiness and muddle-
headiness of the time can be seen going about, saying, "Boo!
Boo!" to this democracy from day to day and year to year,
keeping it scared into not getting what it wants.
There is not one of them that will not evaporate in ten min-
utes the first morning we get some real news through in this
country about ourselves and about what we are like.
What is the real news about us, for instance, as regards being
goody-good?
I can only begin with the news for one.
For years, I have held myself back from taking a plain or
possibly loud stand for goodness as a shrewd, worldly-wise
program for American business and public life, because I was
afraid of people, and afraid people would think I was trying to
improve them.
What was worse, I was afraid of myself too. I was afraid I
really would.
I am afraid now, or rather I would be, if I had not drilled
through to the news about myself and about other people and
about human nature that I am putting into this chapter.
. . . . . . .
I have written five hundred pages in this book on an
awkward and dangerous subject like the Golden Rule, and
I appeal to the reader—I ask him humbly, hopefully, grate- [535]
fully if he can honestly say (except for a minute here and
there when I have been tired and slipped up), if he has really
felt improved or felt that I was trying to improve him in
this book.
On your honour, Gentle Reader—you who have been with
me five hundred pages!
You say "Yes"?
Then I appeal to your sense of fairness. If you truly feel I
have been trying to improve you in this book, turn this leaf
down here and stop. It is only fair to me. Close the book with
your improved and being improved feeling and never open it
again until it passes over. You have no right to go on page
after page calling me names, as it were, right in the middle of
my own book in this way behind my back, you!—hundreds and
thousands of miles away from me, by your own lamp, by your
own window—you come to me here between these two helpless
pasteboard covers where I cannot get out at you, where
I cannot answer back, and you say that I am trying to im-
prove you!
Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me! God forgive me! Believe
me, I never meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve
you! If you insist on it and keep saying that I have been
improving you, all I can say is that I was merely looking as if I
were improving you. You did it. I did not. God help me if
I am trying to improve you! I am trying to find out in this
book who I am. If, incidentally, while I am quietly working
away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are
yourself, and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling
all by yourself, do not mix me up in it. I deny that I have tried
to improve you or anybody. I have written this book to get
my own way, to express my America. I have written it to say
"i," to say "I," to say (the first minute you let me), "you and
I," to say we, WE about America—to drive the news through
to a President of what America is like.
I am not improving you. I am telling you what mayor may [536]
not be news about you,
Take it or leave it.
V
I want to be good.
I do not feel superior to other men.
And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it,
to be compelled to feel superior.
I believe we all want to be good.
The one thing I want in this world is to prove it. I want my
own way.
I am not going to slump into being a beautiful character. I
have written this book to get my own way.
I have said I will not be mixed up in the fate of people who
do not know where they are going, who have not decided what
they are like, who do not know who they are. What do the
people want? Some people tell me they want nothing. They
tell me it would only make things worse and stir things up for
me to want to be good.
Or perhaps they think it is beautiful to lower the price of oil.
They want oil at seven cents a gallon.
Do they? Do you? Do I?
I say no. Let oil wait. I want to raise the price of men and
to put a market value on human life.
I find as I look about me that there are two classes of states-
men offering to be helpful in making life worth living in America.
There are the statesmen who think we are going to be good
and who believe in a program which trusts and exalts the people
and the leaders of the people.
There are the statesmen who seem to believe that American
human nature does not amount to enough to be good. They
are planning a program on the principle that the best that can
be done with human nature in America in business and public
life is to have it expurgated.
Which class of statesmen do we want? [537]
In some of our state prisons men who are not considered fit
to reproduce themselves are sterilized. The question that is
now up before this country is, Do we or do we not want Ameri-
can business sterilized? Are we or are we not going to put a
national penalty on all initiative in all business men because
some men abuse it?
There is but one thing that can save us, namely, proving to
one another and to our public men, that we are good, that we
are going to be good and that we know how. We face the issue
to-day. Two definite programs are before the country.
Those who have put their faith in being afraid of one another
as a national policy have devised several By-laws for an Expur-
gated America.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to do wrong. Deny
him the right of moral experiment because some of his experi-
ments do not work. We say let him try. We can look out for
ourselves or we will have bigger men than he is, to look out for us.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to be an owner, be-
cause nobody has the courage to believe that a man can express
I his best self in property. We say that property may express a
man's religion, and that the way a man has of being rich or of
being poor may be an art-form.
Most men can express themselves better in property than in
anything else.
They say, eliminate all monopoly indiscriminately and the
occasional logical efficiency of monopoly because it has not
worked well for the people the first few times and because we
have not learned how to handle it. We say learn how to
handle it.
They say eliminate the middleman. They say that the one
strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody
if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a
great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because no-
body believes America can produce a middleman. We say
instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual [538]
and morally-engineering institution like the middleman because
the average middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt
the middleman raise him to the nth power, make him—well—
do you remember, Gentle Reader, the walking beams on the old
sidewheel steamers? We say do not eliminate him—lift him
up—make him what he naturally is and is in position to be—
the walking beam of Business!
If the average middleman does not know how to be a real
middleman we will make one who does.
And all the other eliminations that we have watched people
being scared into, one by one, we will turn into exaltations—
each in its own kind and place. There is not one of our fears
that is not the suggestion, the mighty outline, the inspiration
for the world's next new size and new kind of American man.
We say place the position before the man—with its fears, with
its songs, with its challenge. We say, tell him what we expect
of him and demand of him. Put him in a high place on a plat-
form before the world! There with the truth about him written
on his forehead in the sight of all the people, call him by name,
glorify him or behead him! We are men and we are Americans.
We will stand up to each of our dangers one by one. Each and
every danger of them is a romance, a sublime adventure, a
nation-maker. Our threats, our very by-words and despairs,
we will take up, and, in the sight of the world, forge them into
shrewd faiths and into mighty men!
This is my news or vision. I say that this is where we are
going in America. I compel no man to follow my news but I
will pursue him with my news until he gives me his!
. . . . . . .
This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about
you.
If it is not true news, say so. Say what is. We all have a
right to know. The one compulsion of modern life is our right
to know, our right to compel people who live on the same con- [539]
tinent or who live in the same country with us, to open up their
hearts, to furnish us with their share of the materials for a
mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual misunderstand-
ing, on which to live.
It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty. All
liberty is in it. These people who have to live with us and that
we have to live with, these people who breathe the same moral
air with us, drink the same water with us, these people who have
their moral dumps, who throwaway their moral garbage with
us—these people who will not help provide some daily, mutual
understanding for these common decencies for our souls to live
together—these people we defy and challenge! We will com-
pel them to reveal themselves. We will drive them away, or we
will drive them into driving us away, if they will not yield to
us what is in their hearts—Mars, hell, anywhere we go, it
matters not to us where we go, except that we cannot and we
will not live with men about us who thrust down their true feel-
ings and their real desires into a kind of manhole under them,
and sit on the lid and smile. Some seem to have manholes
and some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others
who have convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide
their feelings in. But whatever their real feelings are, and
wherever they keep them, they belong to us.
We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to
have, if we live in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit
system for getting our minds through to one another. We
demand a system for having the streets of our souls decently
lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air or atmosphere
—and all the common conveniences for having decent and
self-respecting souls in crowds—all the intelligence-machines,
the love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines
that the crowds must have for living decently, for living with
beauty, living with considerateness and respect in this awful
daily sublime presence of one another's lives!
We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need [540]
them, some of us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the
main common fund of motives for living together, for growing
up into a world together, the desires, motives, and intentions in
men's hearts, their desires toward us and ours toward them, we
are going to know and compel to be made known. We will
fight men to the death to know them.
Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each
man of us, all our years, all our days, to drive through to some
sort of mutual understanding with our own selves? Now we
will fight through to some mutual understanding with one
another and with the world.
We will knock on every door, make a house to house canvass
of the souls of the world, pursue every man, sing under his
windows. We will undergird his consciousness and his dreams.
We will make the birds sing to him in the morning, "Where are
you going?" We will put up a sign at the foot of his bed for
his eyes to fall on when he awakes, "Where are you going?"
Whatever it is that works best, if we blow it out of you with
dynamite or love or fear or draw it out of you with some mighty
singing going past—ah, brother, we will have it out of you!
You shall be our brother! We will be your brother though we
die!
We will live together or we will die together.
What do you really want? What do you really like? Who
are you?
We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dread-
noughts, our stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what
are they? And what do they amount to and what can they do,
as compared with truth, the real news about what people want
in this world, and about where we are going?
I say—they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory
to tear down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth,
with the news about us, that shall come out at last (God hasten
the day!) from the open—the pried-open hearts of men!
And I have seen that men shall go forth with shouts in that [541]
day and with glad and solemn silence, to build a world!
. . . . . . .
I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo.
I speak for five million men.
We have got this book written between us (under the name
of one of us), because we want our own way. We are not im-
proving people. We are not even trying to improve ourselves.
Many of us started in on it once and the first improvement we
thought of was not to try any more.
It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people want us
to—most people get in the way. And when people get in the
way we lay about us a little—We hit them. We have written
this book, because we want to hit a great many people at once.
We find them everywhere about us, in monster cities, huge
thoughtless anthills of them, and they will not let us live a larger
and a richer life. We say to them, We resent your houses your
shoes, your voices, your fears, your motives, your wills, the
diseases you make us walk past every day, the rows of things
you seem to think will do, and that you think we must get used
to, and we do not propose, if we can help it, to get used to what
you think will do for Churches; nor to what you think will do
for a government or to the little lonely, scattered, toy school-
houses, that when you come into the world, fresh and strange
and happy you all proceed solemnly to coop your souls in.
Nor do we want to get used to your hem-and-haw parliaments
and your funny little perfumed prophets—your prophets
lying down or propped up with pillows or your poets wringing
their hands. Nor will we be put off with all your gracefully
feeble, watery, lovely little pastel religions for this grim and
mighty modern world. We are American men. We do not pro-
pose to be driven out to sea, to stand face to face every day with
what is true and full of beauty and magic, or to have skies and
mountains and stars palmed off on us as companions instead of [542]
men!
This is what five million men are trying to express in writing
this book. If people deny that I have the right to give the
news about America for five million men; if they say that this
is not true about American human nature, that this is not the
news, then I will say, I am the news! I am this sort of an
American! God helping me, I say it! "Look at me!" I am
this sort of man of whom I am writing! If I am not this sort of
man this afternoon, I will be in the morning! Though I go
down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking
to the end of my days—I am this sort of man! I say, "Look
at me!"
If you will not believe me—that this is an American, if you
say that I cannot prove that there are five million of men like
this in America, then I will still say, "Here is one!" What will
you do with ME?" Though I die in laughter, all my desires
and all my professions in a tumult about my soul, I say it to
this nation, "Your laws, your programs, your philosophies,
your I wills, and I won'ts, I say, shall reckon with me! Your
presidents and your legislatures shall reckon with Me!"
Here I am. The man is here. He is in this book!
I will break through to the five million men. I will make the
five million men look at me until they recognize themselves.
If no one else will attend to it for me, and if there shall be no
other way, I will have a brass band go through the streets of
New York and of a thousand cities, with banners and floats and
great hymns to the people, and they shall go up and down the
streets of the people with signs saying, "Have you read Crowds?
I will have the Boston Symphony Orchestra tour the country
singing—singing from kettledrums to violins to a thousand
silent audiences, "Have you read 'CROWDS'?"
I live in a nation in which we are butting through into our
sense of our national character, working our way up into a
huge mutual working understanding. In our beautiful, vague,
patriotic, muddleheadedness about what we want and whether [543]
we really want to be good, and about what being good is like
and I say, for one, half-laughing, half-praying, God helping me
—Look at ME!
VI
I was much interested some time ago when I had not
been long landed in England, and was still trying in the hopeful
American way to understand it—to see the various attitudes
of Englishmen toward the discussions which were going on at
that time in the Spectator and elsewhere, of Mr. Cadbury's
inconsistency; and while I had no reason, as an American,
fresh-landed from New York, to be interested in Mr. Cadbury
himself, I found that his inconsistency interested me very
much. It insisted on coming back into my mind, in spite of
what I would have thought, as a strangely important subject
—not merely as regards Mr. Cadbury, which might or might
not be important, but as regards England and as regards
America, as regards the way a modern man struggling day by day
with a huge, heavy machine civilization like ours, can still man-
age to be a live, useful, and possibly even a human, being in it.
There are two astonishing facts that stand face to face with
all of us to-day, who are labouring with civilization.
The first fact is that almost without exception all the men in
it who mean the most in it to us and to other people for good or
for evil—who stir us deeply and do things—all fall into the
inconsistent class.
The second fact is that this is a very small, select distin-
guished, and astonishingly capable class.
A man who is in a grim, serious business like being good, must
expect to give up many of his little self-indulgences in the way
of looking good. Looking inconsistent, possibly even incon-
sistency itself, may be sometimes, temporarily, a man's most
important public service to his time.
One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's [544]
own personal history. It is by being inconsistent that people
grow, and without meaning to, give other people materials for
growing. For the particular purpose of making the best things
grow, of pointing up truths, of giving definite edges to right and
wrong, an inconsistent man—a man who is trying to pry him-
self out a little at a time from an impossible situation in an im-
possible world, is likely to do the world more good than a very
large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they
are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look
in this same world—whatever happens to it.
. . . . . . .
If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a
scale of 100 as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist
on 98. One does not always insist on 98 for one's self. And
when one does and does not get it, one feels forgiving sometimes.
In dealing with public men and with other people that we
know less than we know ourselves—if they really do things, it
is well to make allowances, and let them off at 65.
In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no
one else volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well
with letting them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I
have been in England, that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and
the Wise and the Good would consider letting George Cadbury
off at 51.
Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George
Cadbury in his journals than they might be by other people in
what seem to seem to many of us unfamiliar and dangerous
ideas.
Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of
revolution England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George
Cadbury 73—possibly 89.
If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can
crowd in and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen
and women from being educated by John Bottomley Bull or [545]
by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts of other would-be
friends of the people—by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and Vernon
Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave na-
tional importance that George Cadbury—a professional non-
better—in educating these people should allow them to keep
on in his paper, having a betting column?
So long as he really helps stave off John Bottomley Bull and
Mrs. John Bottomley Bull, let him slump into being a million-
aire, if he cannot very well help it! We say, some of us,
let him even make cocoa! or have family prayers! or be a
Liberal!
At least this is the way one American visiting England feels
about it, if he may be permitted.
Perhaps I would not, if I were an angel.
I do not want to be an angel.
I am more ambitious. I want my ideals to do things, and
I want to stand by people who are doing things with their ideals,
whether their ideals are my ideals or not.
. . . . . . .
Let us suppose. Suppose the reader were in Mr. Cadbury's
place. What would he do? Here are two things, let us
suppose, he wishes very much. He wishes a certain class of
people would not bet, and he also wishes to convince these same
people of certain important social and political ideas for which
he stands. If he told them that he would have nothing to
do with them unless they stopped betting, there would be no
object in his publishing their paper at all. There would be
nothing that they would let him tell them. If, on the other
hand, he begins merely as one more humble, fellow-human being,
and puts himself definitely on record as not betting himself,
and still more definitely as wishing other people would not bet,
and then admits honestly that these other people have as good a
right to decide to bet as he has to decide not to; and if he then
deliberately proceeds to do what every real gentleman who does [546]
not smoke and wishes other people did not, does without ques-
tion—namely, offers them the facilities for doing it why should
people call him inconsistent?
Perhaps a man's consistency consists in his relation to his own
smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over
into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being
consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or
using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with
them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in
another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr. Cadbury
would publish in a parallel column (if he could get a genius to
write it) an extremely tolerant, human, comrade-like series of
objections to betting, which people could read alongside, and
which would persuade people as much as possible not to read
the best betting tips in the world in the column next door, but
certainly the act of furnishing the tips in the meantime and of
being sure that they are the best tips in the world, is a very
real, human, courageous act. It even has a kind of rough and
ready religion in it. It may be too much to expect, but even in
our goodness perhaps we ought to do as we would be done by.
We must be righteous, but on the whole, must we not be righte-
ous toward others as we would have them righteous toward
us?
What many of us find ourselves wishing most of all, when we
come upon some specially attractive man is, that we could dis-
cover some way, or that he could discover some way, in which
the idealist in him, and the realist in him could be got to act
together.
There are some of us who have come to believe that in the
dead earnest, daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life,
the real solid idealist will have to care enough about his ideals
1to arrange to have two complete sets, one set which he calls
his personal ideals, which are of such a nature that he can carry
them out alone and rigidly and quite by himself, and another
which he calls his bending or cooperative ideals, geared a little [547]
lower and adjusted to more gradual usage, which he uses when
he asks other men to act with him.
It may take a very single-hearted and strong man to keep
before his own mind and before other people's his two sets of
ideals, his "I" faiths, and his you-and-I faiths, keeping each in
strict proportion, but it would certainly be a great human adven-
ture to do it. Saying "God and I," and saying "God and you
and I" are two different arts. And it is clear-headedness and
not inconsistency in a man that keeps him so.
This is not a mere defence of Mr. Cadbury; it is a defence of
a type of man, of a temperament in our modern life, of men
like Edward A. Filene, of Boston, of a man like Hugh Mac Rae,
one of the institutions of North Carolina, of Tom L. Johnson
of Cleveland, of nine men out of ten of the bigger and
more creative sort who are helping cities to get their way
and nations to express themselves. I have believed that the
principle at stake, the great principle for rea1 life in England and
in America, of letting a man be inconsistent if he knows how—
must have a stand made for it.
There is no one thing, whether in history, or literature, or
science, or politics that can be more crucial in the fate of a
nation to-day than the correct, just, and constructive judgment
of Contemporary Inconsistent People.
VII
If I could have managed it, I would have had this book
printed and written—every page of it—in three parallel
columns.
The first column would be for the reader who believes it,
who keeps writing a book more or less like it as he goes along.
I would put in one sentence at the top for him and then let
him have the rest of the space to write in himself. In other
words I would say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and drop it.
The second column would be for the reader who would like
to believe it if he could, and I would branch out a little more—[548]
about half a column.
2+2=4
20+20=40
The third column would be for the reader who is not going
to believe it if it can be helped. It would be in fine type,
bitterly detailed and statistical and take nothing for granted.
2+2=4
20+20=40
200+200=400
2,000+2,000=4,000
20,000+20,000=40,000
etc.
This arrangement would make the book what might be
called a Moving Sidewalk of Truth. First sidewalk rather
quick (six miles an hour). Second, four miles an hour. Third,
two miles an hour. People could move over from one sidewalk
to the other in the middle of an idea any time, and go faster or
slower as they liked to, needed to.
No one would accuse me—though I might like or need for
my own personal use at one time or another, a slower sidewalk
or a faster one than others—no one would accuse me of being
inconsistent if I supplied extra sidewalks for people of different
temperaments to move over to suddenly any time they wanted
to. I have come to some of my truth by a bitterly slow side-
walk—slower than other people need, and sometimes I have
come by a fast one (or what some would say was no sidewalk
at all!) but it cannot fairly be claimed that there is anything
inconsistent in my offering people every possible convenience
I can think of—for believing me.
Mr. Cadbury is not inconsistent if he tells truth at a different
rate to different people, or if he chooses to put truths before
people in Indian file.
A man is not inconsistent who does not tell all the news he
knows to all kinds of people, all at once, all the time.
There is nothing disingenuous about having an order for [549]
truth.
It is not considered compromising to have an order in moving
railway trains. Why not allow an order in moving trains of
thought? And why should a schedule for moving around
people's bodies be considered any more reasonable than a
schedule or timetable or order for moving around their souls?
Truth in action must always be in an order. Nine idealists
out of ten who fight against News-men, or men who are trying
to make the beautiful work, and who call them hypocrites,
would not do it if they were trying desperately to make the
beautiful work themselves. It is more comfortable and has
a fine free look, to be blunt with the beautiful—the way a
Poet is—to dump all one's ideals down before people and walk
off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental, lazy, and
ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them—to give
everybody all of them all the time without considering what
becomes of the ideals or what becomes of the people.
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