Crowds Part 35

I am not sure that Bishop Gore, on the merits of the case, was right. I wish this day I knew that he was wrong. I wish that I had spent the last six months in fighting him, in fighting against his vision, that I might be more free to-day to point to him with joy when I go up and down the streets with men and look at the churches with men--the rows of churches--and try to tell them what they are for. I have seen that the cathedrals scattered about under the sky in England are but G.o.d's little tools to make great cities on the earth, and to build softly out of the hearts of men and women men who shall be cathedrals too--men b.u.t.tressed against the world, men who can stand alone.

And it has seemed to me that Tom Mann and D.A. Thomas are incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this. I am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to a nation that is still the headquarters--the international citadel--of individualism upon the earth. The world knows if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought against that England has produced.

But England knows it too.

I have seen thousands of men in England in their dull brown clothes pa.s.s by me in the street who know and respond to the spirit that is in Bishop Gore, and who have the courage to show it themselves. And the vision is in them, but it is not waked. The moment it is waked we will have a new world. It is because Tom Mann and D.A. Thomas are not leaders of men who have this spirit that they are about to be dropped as typical leaders of Labour and Capital in modern times. No man will be accepted by the Crowd to-day as a competent leader of his cla.s.s who is afraid of the other cla.s.ses. No man will be said to be a true leader, to be competent to make things move in the world, who does not have three gears of courage: courage for himself, courage for his own people, courage for other people; and who does not dare to deal with other people as if they really might be dealt with, after all, as fellow human beings capable of acting like fellow human beings, capable of finer and of truer things, of more manly and patient, more shrewdly generous, more far-sighted things, than might appear at first.

Was Mr. Josiah Wedgewood right when he called Davy McEwen a traitor to his cla.s.s?

I do not want to judge Davy McEwen. Such things are matters of personal interpretation, and of standing with a man face to face for a moment and looking him in the eyes.

Of course, if I had done this, I might have been tempted and despised him.

And I might now. The thing that I would have tried to look down through to in him, if I had looked him in the eye, would have been something like this: "Are you or are you not, Davy McEwen, standing out day after day against your cla.s.s because you can see less than your cla.s.s sees, because you are a mere me-man? Do you go by here grimly day by day, past all these people lined up on the hills, sternly thinking of yourself?"

If I found that this was true, as it might well be, and often is, I would say that Davy McEwen was a traitor to his cla.s.s. But if I found Davy McEwen going past hills-ful of workmen because he had a larger, fairer vision of what his cla.s.s is than they had, if it proved to be true that the crowd-man in him was keeping the cla.s.s-man in place, and holding true his vision for his cla.s.s, I would say that it was his cla.s.s that was being a traitor to him; I would say that sooner or later his cla.s.s would see in some quiet day that it had been a traitor to him and to the world, and a traitor to itself.

If socialism and individualism cannot work together, and if (like the masculine and feminine in spirit) each cannot make itself the means and the method of fulfilling the other, there is no reason why either of them should be fulfilled.

In the meantime, there is a kind of self-will that seems to me, as its shadow comes across my path, like G.o.d himself walking on the earth. And I have seen it in the rich and I have seen it in the poor, and in people who were being wrong and in people who were being right.

It is like hearing great bells in the dark, singing in the solemn night to so much as hear of a man somewhere, I might go and see, who stands alone.

If we want to stand together, let us begin with these men who can stand alone.

There is a sense in which Christ died on the cross because He could find at the time no other way of saying this. There is a sense in which the decline of individualism is what he died for.

Or we might call it the beginning of individualism. He died for the principle of doing what he thought was right before anybody else did it, and whether anybody else did it or not. The self-will of Jesus was half the New Testament. He crucified himself, his mother, and a dozen disciples that His own vision for all might be fulfilled. Socialism itself, what is good in it, would not exist to-day if Jesus, the Christ, had not practised socialism, in the best sense, by being an individualist.

If we are going to get to socialism by giving up individualism, by abolishing heroes, why get to it?

This more glorious self-will is not, of course, of a kind that all men can expect to have. Most of us have not the vision that equips us, and that gives us the right, to have it. But we can exact of our leaders that they shall have it--that they shall see more for us than we can see for ourselves, that they shall hold their vision up before us and let us see it, and let us have the use of it, that they shall be true to us, that they shall be the big brothers of the people.

CHAPTER IX

RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE

I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who could protect the French Revolution. What we need most of all just now in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it.

As it is, hardly a day pa.s.ses but one sees new little n.o.bodies everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking to it--to the French Revolution--grabbing it calmly, and then using it deliberately before our eyes as a general free-for-all a.n.a.logy for anything that comes into their heads. The Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the World have had the use of it last. The fact that the French Revolution was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years ago and with a Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a kind of first rough sketch, or draft of just what a revolution might be for once, and what it would have to get over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to have occurred to many people. One sees them rushing about the world trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas of a revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world put quietly away in the attic seventy years ago. The real world, and all the men in it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution way. The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more effective and practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping their heads on than it is by taking their heads off--some of us seem to have pa.s.sed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with our new explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are--has gone by. We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution all together, suit us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of thought--by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see them as they are. The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded, implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.

There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded, romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with cooperation, with understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably, obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will, of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned. We had an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside first and then dealing with outside things together.

We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.

The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a kind of chemistry.

Hercules is a bust now.

We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph Lister, or like Wilbur Wright--the courage that faces material facts, that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.

When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are the most difficult facts to face in people?"

They are:

The facts about how they are different from us. The facts about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do about it.

So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can be made to go together.

A man's courage is his sense of ident.i.ty.

A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts, chemistry, geology, is his sense of ident.i.ty with G.o.d and of his right to share with G.o.d in the creating of His world.

His courage toward people is his sense of ident.i.ty with men who seem different from him, of all races, all cla.s.ses, and all nations. He sees the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.

There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works where thousands of workmen day and night pa.s.s in and pa.s.s out.

Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he was. He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and cooperating all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the business a success.

He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it, with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his partners, or who did not want to be.

He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of the works. Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow human beings, did not interest him.

He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent gorillas, any more than he did.

The Trades Unions pa.s.sed a resolution that it was safer for the men in dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being gorillas.

Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it worked.

The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try. Even if it worked very well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the Trades Unions thought. They took the ground that it was safer to have all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not.

They instructed the men to strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Company was almost closed up, but it did not yield.

Sir George Livesey took the ground that if the Trades Unions believed that his men were not good enough for him, and that he was not good enough for his men, he would wait until they did.

The bronze statue of Sir George Livesey that the men have raised, and that thousands of men go by every day, day after day, and look up to at their work, was raised to a man who had stood out against his workmen for weeks to prove that they were as good as he was, and could be trusted to be loyal to him, and that he was as good as they were, and that he could be trusted to be loyal to them.

He had the courage to insist on being, whether anybody wanted it for the moment or not, a new kind and new size of man. He preferred being allowed to be a new kind and new size himself, and he preferred allowing his men to be new kinds and new sizes of men, and he made a shrewd, dogged guess that when they tried it they would like it. They were merely afraid to be new sizes, as we all are at first.