Crowds Part 33

Now when the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their hats in a hundred nations, with one big hoa.r.s.e hurrah around a world, with five minutes' experience, come rushing in, and propose to take up the world--the whole world in two minutes more and run it in the same old bygone way--the way that the capitalists are just giving up--by force--it knows what it thinks.

It thinks it will fight Cla.s.s Syndicalism. It makes up its mind it will fight Cla.s.s Syndicalism with Crowd Syndicalism. It has decided that, in the interests of all of us, of a crowd civilization, of what we call the world or Crowd Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by the owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever they are, who can control them with the most skill and efficiency.

The Crowd has come to see that the present owners--judging from current events, and taking them as a whole, and speaking impersonally and historically--have proved themselves, on the whole, incompetent to control industries with skill and efficiency, because they have treated labour as the natural enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it. It sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or otherwise, are incompetent to own and control and manage industry because they propose to treat capital as the natural enemy of the workers. There has been but one conclusion possible. If Civilization or the Crowd Syndicate has a right to have its industries managed in the interests of all, and if the present owners have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent to control industry because they fight labour, and if the present labourers as a cla.s.s have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent because they propose to fight capital, there is naturally but one question the crowd syndicate is asking to-day, namely, _"Are there any mentally competent business firms at all in the world, any firms whose owners and labourers have thought out a way of not fighting?"_ From the point of view of the Crowd, the men who are competent, who know how to do their work, do not have to lay down their tools and find out all over again how to do their work. They know it and keep doing it.

So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, "Are there or are there not any competent business establishments in our modern life?

Which are they, and where are they?" We want to know about them. We want to study them. We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see how they do it.

The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont Morgan and the next Tom Mann are for.

What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for us who the competent employers are--the employers who can get twice as much work out of their labour as other employers do--recognize them, stand by them and put up money on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also who the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out against them, and unless they have brains enough or can get brains enough to cooperate with their own workmen, refuse to lend money to them.

This would make a banker a statesman, would make banking a great and creative profession, shaping the destinies of civilizations, determining with coins back and forth over a counter the prayers and the songs, the very religions of nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the world.

The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary transitional movement, a hero in the business world because of a certain moral energy there is in him. He has insisted in expressing his own character in business. He would not send money to capitalists fighting capitalists, and in a general way he has compelled capitalists to cooperate. The new hero of the business world is going to compel capital not merely to cooperate with capital, but to cooperate with labour and with the public. And as Morgan compelled the railroads of the United States to cooperate with one another by getting money for those that showed the most genius for cooperation, and by not getting money for railroads that showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont Morgan will throw the weight of his capital at critical times in favour of companies that show the largest genius for building the mutual interests of capitalists, employees, and the public inextricably into one body. He is going to recognize as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical, and competent employers are those whose business genius is essentially social genius, the genius for being human, for discovering the mutual interests of men, and for making human machinery work.

There is a great position ahead for this hero when he comes. And I have seen in my mind to-day thousands of men, young and old in every business, in every country of the world, pressing forward to get the place.

It is what the next Tom Mann is for--to find out for the Trades Unions and for the public who the most competent workmen are in every line of business, the workmen who are the least mechanical-minded, who have shown the most brains in educating and being educated by their employers, the most power in touching the imaginations of their employers with their lives and with their work, and in cooperating with them.

When the next Tom Mann has searched out and found the workmen in every line of business who are capable of working with their superiors, and of becoming more and more like them, he will make known to all other workmen and to all other Trades Unions who these workmen are, and how they have managed to do it. He will see that all Trades Unions are informed, in night-schools and otherwise, how they have done it. He will see that the principles, motives, and conditions that these men have employed in making themselves more like their superiors, in making themselves more and more fit to take the place of their superiors, in making their work a daily, creative, spirited part of a great business, are made so familiar to all Trades Unions that the policies of all our labour organizations everywhere shall change and shall be infected with a new spirit; and labouring men, instead of going to their shops the world over, to spend nine hours a day in fighting the business in which they are engaged, to spend nine hours a day in trying to get themselves nothing to do, nine hours a day in getting n.o.body to want to employ them, will work the way they would like to work, and the way they would all work to-morrow morning if they knew the things about capital and about labour that they have a right to know, and that only incompetent employers and incompetent labor leaders year by year have kept them from knowing.

CHAPTER VI

AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN

Christ said once, "He that is greatest among you let him be your servant."

Most people have taken it as if He had said:

"He that is greatest among you let him be your valet.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your butler.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your hostler, porter, footman."

They cling to a mediaeval Morality-Play, Servant-in-the-House idea, a kind of head-waiter idea of what Christ meant.

This seems to some of us a literal-minded, Western way of interpreting an Oriental metaphor. We do not believe that Christ meant servanthood.

It seems to us that He meant something deeper, that He meant service; that He might have said as well:

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Duke of Wellington.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Lincoln.

"He that is greatest among you let him be your Edison, your Marconi."

At all events, it is extremely unlikely that He meant looking and acting like a servant.

He meant really being one, whether one looked like a servant or not. If looking independent and being independent makes the service better, if defying the appearance of a servant makes the service more efficient, we believe the appearance should be defied.

It troubles us when we see the Czar of Russia in the presence of the civilized world, once a year taking such great pains to look like a servant and to wash his peasants' feet.

We are not willing, if we ever have any relations with the public, to be Czars and look like servants.

We would prefer to look like czars and be servants.

We are inclined to believe that no man who is rendering his utmost service to the crowd ever thinks in the ordinary servant sense of being obedient to it. He is thinking of his service, and of its being the most high and perfect and most complete thing that he can render--the thing that he, out of all men, could think of and do, and that the crowd would want him to do. He is busy in being obedient to the crowd, in fulfilling daily its spirit, and not in taking orders from it.

The reason that the larger number of men who go into politics to-day are inefficient and do not get the things done that crowds want, is that they are the kind of men who feel that they must talk and act like servants. Even the most independent-looking and efficient men, who look as if they really saw something and had something to give, often prove disappointing. When one comes to know a man of this type more intimately, one is apt to find that he is really a flunkey in his thoughts; that he feels hired in his mind; that he is the valet of a crowd, and often, too, the valet of some particular crowd--some little, safe, shut-in crowd, party, or special interest that wants to own, or to keep, or to take away a world.

Whichever way to-day one looks, one finds this illusion as to what a public servant really is, for the moment, corrupting our public life.

But Christ did not say, "He that is greatest among you, let him be your valet."

The man who is greatest among us, neither in this age nor in any other, ever will or ever can be a valet. He faces the crowd the way Christ did--with his life, with his soul, with his G.o.d.

He will not be afraid of the Crowd....

He will be the Greatest, he will be a Servant.

In the meantime--in the hour of the valets, only the little crowds, speak. The People wait.

The Crowd is dumb, ma.s.sive, and silent. There seems to be no one in the world to express it, to express its indomitable desire, its prayer, to lay at last its huge, terrible, beautiful will upon the earth.

It is the cla.s.ses or little crowds--the little pulling and pushing, helpless, lonely, mean, separated crowds--blind, hateful, and afraid, who are running about trying to lay their little wills upon the earth.

The Crowd waits and is not afraid.

The little, separated crowds are afraid.

The world, for the moment, is being interpreted, expressed, and managed by People Who Are Afraid.

It is the same in all the nations. In the coal strike in England one finds the miners in the trades unions afraid to vote except in secret because they are afraid of one another. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the men under them and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the mine-managers and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the mine-managers afraid of one another, afraid of their stockholders, afraid of the miners' leaders, and afraid of the newspapers and afraid of the Government.

One finds the Government afraid of everybody.

Everybody is afraid of the Government.

Everybody fights because everybody is afraid.

And everybody is afraid because everybody sees that it is mere crowds that are running the world.

There is another reason why everybody is afraid. Everybody is afraid because everybody is shut in with some little separated crowd.