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BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors,
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip—drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
CHAPTER I
SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD
IT IS a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.
Probably It will be still more awkward afterward.
But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the
faces of the crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell
it as it is.
I want to be good.
And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink
off and live all alone on an island in the sea.
I go a step further.
I believe that the crowds want to be good.
But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds,
and so for the sake of the argument, and to make the case as
simple as possible, I am going to give up speaking for crowds,
and speak for myself as one member of the crowd and for Lim.
Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a mere author)
have had long talks in which we have confided to each other
what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like,
and we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a
definite agreement on our two main points.
1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of
convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and
partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is
good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an
awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general,
but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth. [94]
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing
in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is
this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present
hopeful, squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some
brand new, clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of per-
fect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it
down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this
one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, cumbersome,
real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and
by the people on it, what can be done by these same people,
whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith,
Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W. H. Riley & Co.,
Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are
really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks
of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers,
Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles.
Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to
me (as anyone might guess, in a little quiet job like mak-
ing over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with
ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began,
owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the
idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide
into talking to people about goodness.
We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show
them some.
Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But
the trouble always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know
it, or at least one does not know which it is. The best we can
do with goodness, some of us, if we want it to show more quickly
or to hurry people along in goodness more, is to show them other [95]
people's.
I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know
my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin
slowly but surely to be a very different place.
My plumber is a genius.
CHAPTER II
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE
EFFICIENT?
PERHAPS it will seem a pity to spoil a book—one that
might have been really rather interesting—by putting the
word "goodness" down flatly in this way in the middle of it.
And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with
business.
I would not yield first place to anyone in being tired of the
word. I think, for one, that unless there is something we can
do to it, and something we can do to it now, it had better be
dropped.
But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was
tired of a word, that what I was really tired of was somebody
who was using it.
I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard
him use it (and swearing softly, I regret to say) when it affected
me like a Hymn Tune.
And there is Non, too.
I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of
New York, and we found ourselves going down together on
Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M ____ in North Caro-
lina. The first thing he said was, when we were seated
in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world
under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement
with his wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that after-
noon, and he had faithfully promised to be there. But a week-
end in North Carolina appealed to him, and afternoon tea
—well, he explained to me, crossing his legs and beaming at me
all over as if he were a whole genial, successful afternoon tea all [97]
by himself—afternoon tea did not appeal to him.
He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person.
As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with
sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every
minute all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we
heard from him), we called him the Non-Gregarious Person, and
every time he piled on one more story, we reminded him how
non-gregarious he was. We called him Non-Gregarious all the
way after that—Non for short.
This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has been
Non ever since.
. . . . . . .
I found in the course of the next three days that when Non
was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any
more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he be-
came, like most people who let themselves go, a very serious
person. When he talked about his business, he was even relig-
ious. Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being
religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of
business—his own business—that almost startled me at first.
He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke
of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion
by itself.
Now Non is a builder or contractor.
. . . . . . .
For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a
confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a
house. No better arrangement for not believing in more
people, and for not believing in more kinds of people at once and
for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house.
No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this
world, until he has built a house. I submit this proposition to
anybody who has tried it, or to anyone who is going to try it. [98]
There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later
will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter
with him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of minia-
ture model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the
matter with people. You enter the door, you walk inside and
brood over them. Everything you Come upon, from the white
cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof,
reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is
the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted
now. Any man who is sensitive to houses and to people and
who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look
about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been
built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and
steal out of it, out of the front door of it, and never enter that
house again.
This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their
houses, and how they lived in them helplessly and angrily year
after year, and felt hateful about the world.
I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found
he was not as good as some people are at talking about himself,
but the subject was interesting. He began his career building
houses for people, as nearly every one does. The general idea
is that everybody is expected to exact commissions from every-
body else, and the owner is expected to pay each man his own
commission and then pay all the commissions that each man has
charged the other man. Every house that got built in this way
seemed to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you
would be done by. Non did not see any way out at first, just
for one man. He merely noticed how things were going, and
he noticed that nearly every person that he had dealings with,
from the bottom to the top of the house, seemed to make him
feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be, a grafter.
He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through
the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a
better man, and studying on how it could be managed. His [99]
own first houses made him see things. They proved to be the
making of him, and if similar houses have not made similar
men, it is their fault. It might not be reassuring to the men
who are now living in these first houses to dwell too much on
this (and I might say he did not build them alone), but it seems
to be necessary to bring out the most striking thing about Non
in his first stage as a business man, viz. : He hated his business.
He made up his mind he either would make the business the
kind of business he liked or get out of it. I did not gather from
the way he talked about it that he had any idea of being an up-
lifter. He merely had, apparently, an obstinate, doggedly
comfortable idea about himself, and about what a thing would
have to be, in this world, if he was connected with it. He pro-
posed to enjoy his business. He was spending most of his
time at it.
Other people have had this same happy thought, but they
seem to manage to keep on being patient. Non could not fall
back on being patient, and it made him think harder.
The first thing he thought of was that doing his business as
he thought he ought to, if he once worked his idea out, and
worked it down through and organized it, might pay. He
almost had the belief that people might pay a man a little extra,
perhaps, for enjoying his business. It cannot be said that he
believed this immediately. He merely wanted to, and worked
toward it, and merely contrived new shrewd ways at first of
being able to afford it. Gradually he began to notice that the
more he enjoyed his business, the more he enjoyed it with his
whole soul and body, enjoyed it down to the very toes of his
conscience, the more people there were who stepped into his
office and wanted him to enjoy his business on their houses.
It was what they had been looking for for years—for some
builder who was really enjoying his business. And the more he
enjoyed his business in his own particular way—that of build-
ing a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and
for less money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end [100]
of it—the more his business grew.
I do not know that there would be any special harm in speak-
ing of Non's idea—of just doing as you would be done by—
in more moral or religious language, but it is not necessary.
And I find I take an almost religious joy in looking at the Golden
Rule at last as a plain business proposition. All that happened
was that Non was original, saw something that everybody
thought they knew, and acted as if it were so. Theoretically
one would not have said that it would be original to take an old
platitudinous law like the law of supply and demand, and act
as if it were so; but it was. At the time Non was beginning his
career there was nothing in the building-market people found
harder to hire than honesty. Here was something, he saw at
last, that thousands of busy and important men who did not
have time to be detectives, wanted. There did not seem to be
anyone very actively supplying the demand. A big market,
a small supply, and almost no competition. Non stepped in
and proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a
house as literally as the man would represent his interests him-
self, if he knew all about houses. Everything has followed from
this. What Non's business is now, when a man is building a
house, is to step quietly into the man's shoes, let him put on an-
other pair, and go about his business. It is not necessary to go
into the details. Any reader who has ever built a house knows
the details. Just take them and turn them around.
What those of us who know Non best like about him is that
he is a plain business man, and that he has acted in this par-
ticular matter without any fine moral frills or remarks. He has
done the thing because he liked it and believed in it.
But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way
he is making money out of saving money for other people, but
the way the fact that he can do it makes people feel about the
world. Whenever I have a little space of discouragement or of
impatience about the world because it does not hurry more, I
fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"—I say to my- [101]
self cheerfully—"I can go down to New York and slip into
Non's office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting
on. Or he will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop
scolding or idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I
will take a good long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental
face of his while he tells me across the little corner table at Del-
monico's for three hours how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how
it works. Sometimes when I have just been in New York, and
have come home and am sitting in my still study, with the big
idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and all the
world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself, lying
out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he
is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and in-
side of their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people
at a thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights
and shadows and little visions of words fall together just so,
seems, suddenly a very trivial occupation—like amusing one's
self with a pretty little safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it
and shaking softly one's coloured bits of phrases at a world!
Of course, it need not be so. But there are moments when I
think of Non when it seems so.
In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at
our best just now.
At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not.
Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest,
informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more
hopeful about religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit,
and who are being good all the week, can even be good on
Sunday.
There are many ways of resting on leaning back upon one's
instincts and getting over to one's religion or perspective about
the world. Mount Tom (which is in my front yard, in Massa-
chusetts) helps sometimes—with a single look.
When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan
Tower, the Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and [102]
at Non.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get
him to work in Non's office, or work with anybody who ever
worked with him, or who ever saw him; or I would have him
live in a house built by him, or pay a bill made out by him.
It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making him-
self succeed in this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure
religion, a difficult, fresh, and stupendous religion.
Now these many days have I watched him going up and down
through all the empty reputations, the unmeaning noises of the
world, living his life like some low, old-fashioned, modest
Hymn Tune he keeps whistling—and I have seen him in fear,
and in danger, and in gladness being shrewder and shrewder
for God, now grimly, now radiantly, hour by hour, day by
day getting rich with the Holy Ghost!
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