Crowds Part 13

When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most self-revealing experience that people can have together. Every bargain is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A bargain tells everything about people--who they are, and what they are like. It also tells what they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they are not going to be like too sometimes, and why.

The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who determines in what spirit and by what method the people under him shall conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ----, at the head of his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five hundred men and women. He is in the business of determining their religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six days a week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world. He is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of goodness. If he does not work his way through to a man's imagination one minute or one day, he does the next. If he cannot open up a man's imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another. If he cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another, and another--the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed nearly every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep from doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not surround, besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff, every customer who slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way--confronts him with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer.

In ----'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of the two thousand five hundred clerks are men. If I were a minister wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I imagine, to the head of ----'s department store, sitting at that quiet, calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his big building in ---- Street, with nothing but those little six or seven b.u.t.tons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand men.

And he does not even need the b.u.t.tons. Every man knows and feels, personally and intimately, what the man at the desk is asking him to do with a particular customer who stands before him at the moment. As soon as the customer is there, the man at the desk practically is there too.

His religion works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a huge stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He makes regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty to sixty pastoral calls (with every sale they make) on a thousand men a day. He is not dependent, as the ordinary minister often is, on their dying, or on their babies, or on their wives, for a chance to get at men with his religion.

If I wanted to take a spiritual census of modern civilization and get at the actual scientific facts, what we would have to call, probably the foot-tons of religion in the world to-day, I would not look for them in the year-books of the churches, I would get them by going about in the great department stores, by moving among the men and women in them day after day, and standing by and looking on invisibly. Like a shadow or a light I would watch them registering their goodness daily, hourly, on their counters, over their counters, measuring out their souls before G.o.d in dress goods, shoes, boas, hats, silk, and bread and b.u.t.ter!

This may not be true of the Orient, but it is true, and getting to be more true every day, of Europe and America.

It is especially true of America. In the things which we borrow in America, we are far behind the rest of the world. It is to the things that we create, that we must look alone, for our larger destiny, and our world-service.

Naturally, in so far as civilization is a race of borrowing, nations like England and France and Germany a few hundred miles apart from one another, set the pace for a nation that is three thousand miles away from where it can borrow, like the United States. It is a far cry from the land of the Greeks with their still sunny temples and dreams, and from England with its quiet-singing churches, to New York with its practical sky-sc.r.a.ping hewing prayer!

New York--scooping its will out of the very heavens!

New York--the World's last, most stern, perhaps most manful prayer of all--half-asking and half-grasping out of the hand of G.o.d!

Here is America's religion! Half afraid at first, half glad, slowly, solemnly triumphant, as on the edge of an abyss, I have seen America's religion! I have seen my brother Americans hewing it out--day by day, night by night, have I seen them--in these huge steel sub-cellars of the sky!

I have accepted the challenge.

If it is not a religion, then it shall be to us a religion to make it a religion.

The Metropolitan Tower with its big clock dial, with its three stories of telling what time it is, and its great bell singing hymns above the dizzy flocks of the skysc.r.a.pers, is the soul of New York, to me.

If one could see a soul--if one could see the soul of New York, it would look more like the Metropolitan Tower than anything else.

It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the whiteness and the light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-hearted city.

I write as an American. To me there is something about it as I come up the harbour that fills my heart with a big ringing, as if all the world were ringing, ringing once more--ringing all over again--up in this white tower of ours in its new bit of blue sky! I glory in England with it, in Greece, in Bethlehem. It is as an outpost on s.p.a.ce and Time, for all of us gathering up all history in it softly--once more and pointing it to G.o.d!

It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower--the mighty Child among the steeples of the world. The lonely towers of Cologne stretching with that grave and empty nave against the sky, out of that old and faded region of religion, far away, tremulously send greetings to it--to this white tower in the west--to where it goes up with its crowds of people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping and dying in it, and strikes heaven!

It may be perhaps only the American blood in me. Perhaps it is raw and new to be so happy. I do not know. I only know that to me the Metropolitan Tower is saying something that has been never quite said before--something that has been given in some special sense to us as a trust from the world. It is to me the steeple of democracy--of our democracy, England's democracy--the world's democracy. The hollow domes of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world--are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower--as the souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to heaven!

I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the big bell in it and when I look up to where the tower is in that still place like a sea--look up to where that little white country belfry sits in the light, in the dark above the vast and roaring city!

To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe, tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our time. Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of business and singing great hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in it--prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below.

I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it--one more look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyielding, alive, sinewy, imperturbable, lifting up within itself the steel and soul of the world.

I am content to go to sleep.

It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world. I would rather have said that business needed a steeple before until I saw the Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the streets. But I had always wanted (without knowing it), in a modern office building, a great solemn bell to remind us what the common day was. I like to hear it striking a common hour and what can be done in it. I stop in the street to listen--to listen while that great hive of people tolls--tolls not the reveries of monks above the roofs of the skysc.r.a.pers, but the religion of business--of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the women.

CHAPTER X

THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL

The imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most successfully when it is appealed to in one of four ways:

THE STUPENDOUS. THE UNUSUAL. THE MONOTONOUS. THE SUCCESSFUL.

Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or the successful are the most in evidence, and have something showy about them, so that we can look at them afterward, and point out at a glance what they have done. But probably the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its imagination, the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a crowd's ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds are like inside--is the Monotonous.

The man who tells the most people what they shall be like in this world is not the great man or the unusual man. He is the monotonous man.

He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious beat and rhythm with which we live our daily lives.

If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines the crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives--the man, if we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat.

It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has the most dominion over the imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is the man to whom we look for our daily bread.

It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no--the feeling that they come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and h.e.l.ls are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight and the manhole of life.

The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk, one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window, the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand--it is these, G.o.dlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think and let us know enough to think shall be a part of the inner substance of our being. It shall be a part of growing of the gra.s.s to us, and shall be as water and food and sleep. It shall be to us as the shouts of boys at play in the field and as the crying of our children in the night. To most men Employers are the great doors that creak at the end of the world.

It is not the houses that people live in, or the theatres that they go to, or the churches to which they belong, or the street and number--the East End look or the West End look the great city carves on the faces of these men I see in the street--that determines what the men are like.

Their daily work lies deeper in them than their faces. One finds one's self as one flashes by being told things in their walk, in the way they hold their hands and swing their feet.

And what is it their hands and feet, umbrellas, bundles, and the wrinkles in their clothes tell us about them?

They tell us how they earn their money. Their hopes, their sorrow, their fears and curses, their convictions, their very religions are the silent, irrevocable, heavenly minded, diabolical by-products of what their Employers think they can afford to let them know enough to think.

"Fight for yourselves. Your masters hate you. They would shoot you down like rabbits, but they need your labour for their huge profits. Don't go in till you get your minimum. No Royal Commission, no promise in the future. Leaders only want your votes; they will sell you. They lie. Parliament lies, and will not help you, but is trying to sell you. Don't touch a tool till you get your minimum. Win, win, win! It is up to all workers to support the miners."

If a man happens to be an employer, and happens to know that he is not this sort of man, and finds that he cannot successfully carry on his business unless he can make five hundred men in his factory believe it, what can he do? How can he touch their imaginations? What language is there, either of words or of action, that will lead them to see that he is a really a fair-minded, competent employer, a representative of the interests of all, a fellow-citizen, a Crowdman, and that his men can afford to believe in him and cooperate with them?

If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it is because they have not the remotest idea what he is really like. They have not noticed him. They have no imagination about him, have not put themselves in his place. How can he get their attention?

CHAPTER XI

THE SUCCESSFUL

A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not interest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could. Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see--it was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it there--on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo--until....

I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it inside.