Crowds Part 21

We will b.u.t.t our way through to the man who sees where to b.u.t.t and how to b.u.t.t. Then all together!

Very few of the wrongs that are done to society by individuals would be done if civilization were supplied with the slightest adequate machinery or conveniences for bringing home to people vividly who the people are they are wronging, how they are wronging them, and how the people feel about it. This machinery for moral and social insight, this intelligence-engine or apparatus of sympathy for a planet to-day, before our eyes is being invented and set up.

Sometimes I almost think that history as a study or particularly as a habit of mind ought to be part.i.tioned off and not allowed to people in general to-day. Only men of genius have imagination enough for handling history so that it is not a nuisance, a provincialism and an impertinence in the serene presence to-day of what is happening before our eyes. History makes common people stop thinking or makes them think wrong, about nine tenths of the area of human nature, particularly about the next important things that are going to happen to it.

Our modern life is not an historian's problem. It is an inventor's problem. The historian can stand by and can be consulted. But things that seem to an historian quite reasonably impossible in human nature are true and we must all of us act every day as if they were true. We but change the temperature of human nature and in one moment new levels and possibilities open up on every side.

Things that are true about water stop being true the moment it is heated 212 degrees Fahrenheit. It begins suddenly to act like a cloud and when it is cooled off enough a cloud acts like a stone. Railroad trains are run for hundreds of miles every year in Siberia across clouds that are cold enough. We raise the temperature of human nature and the motives with which men cannot act to-day suddenly around a world are the motives with which they cannot help acting to-morrow.

The theory of raised temperatures alone, in human nature, will make possible to us ranges of goodness, of social pa.s.sion and vision, that only a few men have been capable of before.

All the new inventions have new sins, even new manners that go with them, new virtues and new faculties. The telephone, the motor-car, the wireless telegraph, the airship and the motor-boat all make men act with different insights, longer distances, and higher speeds.

Men who, like our modern men, have a going consciousness, see things deeper by going faster.

They see how more clearly by going faster.

They see farther by going faster.

If a man is driving a motor-car three miles an hour all he needs to attend to with his imagination is a few feet of the road ahead.

If he is driving his car thirty miles an hour and trying to get on by antic.i.p.ating his road a few feet ahead, he dies.

The faster a man goes--if he has the brains for it--the more people and the more things in the way, his mind covers in a minute--the more magnificently he sees how.

On a railway train any ordinary man any day in the year (if he goes fast enough) can see through a board fence. It may be made of vertical slats five inches across and half an inch apart. He sees through the slits between the slats the whole country for miles. If he goes fast enough a man can see through a solid freight train.

All our modern industrial social problems are problems of gearing people up. Ordinary men are living on trains now--on moral trains.

Their social consciousness is being geared up. They are seeing more other people and more other things and more things beyond the Fence.

The increased vibration in human nature and in the human brain and heart that go with the motor-car habit, the increased speed of the human motor, the gearing up of the central power house in society everywhere is going to make men capable of unheard-of social technique. The social consciousness is becoming the common man's daily habit. Laws of social technique and laws of human nature which were theories once are habits now.

There is a certain sense in which it may be said that the modern man enjoys daily his moral imagination. He is angered and delighted with his social consciousness. He boils with rage or sings when he hears of all the new machines of good and machines of evil that people are setting up in our modern world.

There is a sense in which he glories in the Golden Rule. The moral-machinist's joy is in him. He is not content to watch it go round and round like some smooth-running Corliss engine which is not connected up yet--that n.o.body really uses except as a kind of model under gla.s.s or a miniature for theological schools. He cannot bear the Golden Rule under gla.s.s. He wants to see it going round and round, look up at it, immense, silent, masterful, running a world. He delights in the Golden Rule as a part of his love of nature. It is as the falling of apples to him. He delights in it as he delights in frost and fire and in the glorious, modest, implacable, hushed way they work!

We are in an age in which a Golden Rule can sing. The men around us are in a new temper. They have the pa.s.sion, almost, the religion of precision that goes with machines.

While I have been sitting at my desk and writing these last words, the two half-past-eight trains, at full speed, have met in the meadow.

There is something a little impersonal, almost abstracted, about the way the trains meet out here on their lonely sidewalk through the meadow, twenty inches apart--morning after morning. It always seems as if this time--this one next time--they would not do it right. One argues it all out unconsciously that of course there is a kind of understanding between them as they come bearing down on each other and it's all been arranged beforehand when they left their stations; and yet somehow as I watch them flying up out of the distance, those two still, swift thoughts, or shots of cities--dark, monstrous (it's as if Springfield and Northampton had caught some people up and were firing them at each other)--I am always wondering if this particular time there will not be a report, after all, a clang on the landscape, on all the hills, and a long story in the _Republican_ the next morning.

Then they softly crash together and pa.s.s on--two or three quiet whiffs at each other--as if nothing had happened.

I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of stern singing.

I know well enough, of course, that it is a plat.i.tude, this meeting of two trains in a meadow, but it never acts like one. I sometimes stand and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it.

Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and in G.o.d.

I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him and death but a few telegraph ticks--the f.l.a.n.g.e of a wheel.... Suddenly the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a whistle, the way Calvin believed in G.o.d.

BOOK THREE

LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL

TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI

_"Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh, Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust Hast thrust Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, Where are the deeds that needs must be, The dreams, the high delights, That I once more may hear my voice From cloudy door to door rejoice-- May stretch the boundaries of love Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears To the faint-remembered glory of those years-- May lift my soul And reach this Heaven of thine With mine?"

"Come up here, dear little Child To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light!"_

PART ONE

WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES

CHAPTER I

MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP

As I was wandering through s.p.a.ce the other day--just aeroplaning past on my way over from Mars--I came suddenly upon a neat, snug little property, with a huge sign stuck in the middle of it:

THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan & Co.

I was just about to pa.s.s it by, inferring naturally that it must be a mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it occurred to me it might do no harm to stop over on it, and see. I thought I might at least drop in and inquire what kind of a firm it was that was handling it, and what was their idea, and what, if anything, they thought their little planet was for, and what they proposed to do with it.

I found, on meeting Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan, to my astonishment, that they did not propose to do anything with it at all. They had merely got it; that was as far as they had thought the thing out apparently--to get it. They seemed to be depending, so far as I could judge, in a vague, pained way, on somebody's happening along who would think perhaps of something that could be done with it.

Of course, as Mr. Carnegie (who was the talking member of the firm) pointed out, if they only owned a part of it, and could sell one part of it to the other part there would still be something left that they could do, at least it would be their line; but merely owning all of it, so, as they did, was embarra.s.sing. He had tried, Mr. Carnegie told me, to think of a few things himself, but was discouraged; and he intimated he was devoting his life just now to pulling himself together at the end, and dying a poor man. But that was not much, he admitted, and it was really not a very great service on his part to a world, he thought--his merely dying poor in it.

When I asked him if there was anything else he had been able to think of to do for the world--

"No," he said, "nothing really; nothing except chucking down libraries on it--safes for old books."