Crowds Part 39

There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an uprising of the labour cla.s.ses as long as the labour cla.s.ses are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of things--things like worlds into their hands. The me-man and the cla.s.s-man, under our modern conditions, are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places, the me-places and cla.s.s-places, by the men who want more things than they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others.

The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he wants.

But he does not get it. It is the cla.s.s-man who gets it for him.

The cla.s.s-man may see what he wants for his cla.s.s clearly and may say what he wants.

But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him.

It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that G.o.d has worked it out!

It is one of His usual paradoxes.

The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.

He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he can--in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.

The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get outside of himself into his cla.s.s, who, in being a good cla.s.s-man, can overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he wants.

I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial world, as at present const.i.tuted in our cooperative age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other people.

If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.

Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and desperate cla.s.s of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day after.

And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause--a prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of Labour--that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to represent Labour.

In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No G.o.d and no Master"--it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In G.o.d we trust" and "One is our Master, even Christ"--thousands of men who had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, s.n.a.t.c.hing up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea that the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed to represent for one moment the manhood and the courage, the faithfulness and (even in the hour of their extremity) the quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty and self-forgetfulness, the moral dignity of the American workingman.

It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring man, whether in America or England, is a coward; that he has no desire, no courage, for any one except for himself and for his own cla.s.s. Mr. O'Connor of the Dockers' Organization in the East of Scotland, said at the time of the strike of the dockers in London: "This kind of business of the bureaucratic labour men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work all over the country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of England. It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it."

It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the World when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and that Labour alone can save the world. He knows that any scheme of social and industrial reform which leaves any cla.s.s out, rich or poor, which does not see that everybody is to blame, which does not see that everybody is responsible, which does not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and expectation for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial.

If we are going to have a society that is for all of us, it will take all of us, and all of us together, to make it. Mutual expectation alone can make a great society. Mutual expectation, or courage for others, persistently and patiently and flexibly applied--applied to details by small men, applied to wholes by bigger ones--is going to be the next big serious, unsentimental, practical industrial achievement. And I do not believe that for sheer sentiment's sake we are going to begin by rooting up millionaires and, with one glorious thoughtless sweep, saying, "We will have a new world," without asking at least some of the owners of it to help, or at least letting them in on good behaviour. Nor are we going to begin by rooting up trade unions and labour leaders.

The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are daily engaged, through compet.i.tion and experiment and observation, in educating one another and finding out what they really want and what they can really do; and it is equally true that the great organizations of labour, in the same way, are educating one another.

The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational fight. And the fight is being conducted, not between Labour and Capital, but between the labouring men who have courage for Capital and labouring men who have not, and between capitalists who have courage for Labour and those who have not. To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day is between those who have courage and those who have not.

It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage and men who have not, which will win.

Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world will be the most safe in the hands of the men who have the most courage.

There are four items of courage I would like to see duly discussed in the meetings of the trades unions in America and England.

First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when the leaders of trades unions come to know employers better than the other men do and begin to see the other side and to have some courage about employers and to become practicable and reasonable, the unions drop them?

Second, Why is it that, in a large degree, the big employers, when they succeed in getting skilled representatives or managers who come to know and to understand their labouring men better than they do, do _not_ drop them? Why is it that, day by day, on all sides in America and England, one sees the employing cla.s.s advancing men who have a genius for being believed in, to at first questioned, and then to almost unquestioned, control of their business? If this is true, does it not seem on the whole that industry is safer in the hands of employers who have courage for both sides and who see both sides than of employees who do not? Does not the remedy for trades unions and employees, if they want to get control, seem to be, instead of fighting, to see if they cannot see both sides quicker, and see them better, than their employers do?

Third, A discussion of efficiency in a National Labour Party from the point of view of the trend of national efficiency in business.

Apparently the most efficient and shrewd business men in England and America are the men who are running what might be called lubricated industries--who are making their industries succeed on the principle of sympathetic, smooth-running, mutual interests. If the successful modern business man who owns factories is not running each factory as a small civil war, is it not true that the only practical and successful Labour Party in England, the only party that can get things done for labour and that can hold power, is bound to be the party that succeeds in having the most courage for both sides, in seeing the most mutual interests, and in seeing how these interests can be put together, and in seeing it first and acting on it before any other merely one-sided party would be able to think it out?

Fourth, A discussion of the selection of the best labour leaders to place at the head of the unions.

Nearly every man who succeeds in business notably, succeeds in believing something about the people with whom he deals that the men around him have not believed before, or in believing something which, if they did believe it, they had not applied or acted as if they had believed before. If, in order to succeed, a business man does not believe something that needs to be believed before other people believe it, he hires somebody who does believe it to believe it for him.

Perhaps Labour would find it profitable to act on this principle too, and to see to it that the leaders chosen to act for them are not the noisiest minded, but the most creative men, the men who can express original, shrewd faiths in the men with whom they have to deal--faiths that the men around them will be grateful (after a second thought) to have expressed next.

In the meantime, whether among the labourers or the capitalists, however long it may take, it is not hard to see, on every hand to-day, the world about us slowly, implacably getting into the hands of the men, poor or rich, who have the most keen, patient courage about other people, the men who are "good" (G.o.d save the word!), the men who have practical, working human sympathies and a sense of possibilities in those above them and beneath them with whom they work--the men who most clearly, eagerly, and doggedly want things for others, who have the most courage for others.

I have thought that if we could find out what this courage is, how it works, how it can be had, and where it comes from, it might be more worth our while to know than any other one thing in the world.

I would like to try to consider a few of the sources of this courage for others.

CHAPTER XIV

SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION

After making an address on inspired millionaires one night before the Sociological Society in their quarters in John Street, I found myself the next day--a six-penny day--standing thoughtfully in the quarters of the Zoological Society in Regent's Park.

The Zoological Society makes one feel more humble, I think, than the Sociological Society does.

All sociologists, members of Parliament, eugenists, professors, and others, ought to be compelled by law to spend one day every two weeks with the Zoological Society in Regent's Park.

All reformers who essay to make over human nature, all idealists, should be required by law to visit menageries--to go to see them faithfully or to be put in them a while until they have observed life and thought things out.

A GREEN BENCH, THE ZOO, REGENT'S PARK, 1911.

For orienting a man and making him reasonable, there is nothing, I find, like coming out and putting in a day here, making one's self gaze firmly and doggedly at the other animals.

We have every reason to believe that Noah was a good psychologist, or judge of human nature, before he went into the ark, but if he was not, he certainly would have come out one.

There is nothing like a menagerie to limber one up.

Especially an idealist.

Take a pelican, for instance. What possible personal ideal was it that could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that could ever have made a pelican take being a pelican seriously for one minute?

And the camel with his lopsided hump. "Why, oh, why," cries the idealist, wringing his hands. "Oh, why----?"

I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me, after spending half a day looking calmly at peac.o.c.ks, at giraffes, at hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this stretch or bird's eye view--this vast landscape of G.o.d's toleration--to criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like inside.