Crowds Part 53

I have about so much money I spend every year in buying things. I have proposed to study with my money every firm on which I spend it. I propose to take away my trade from the firm that does the least as it should and give it to the firm that does the most as it should. I will vote with my entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of employers who can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep the kind of salesmen and saleswomen I choose to do business with.

All the year round, every firm with which I deal, I am going to study not only with my mind but with my money. I will proceed to take my trade away from the big employers who think that I want shoddy goods or who think that I want or am willing to trade with saleswomen who would let an employer impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford to impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with every penny I have in the world, and I will earn more that I may vote more, for the kind of employer with whom I like to trade. And there shall not be a man, woman, or child of my acquaintance, if I can help it, or of my family's acquaintance who shall not know who these employers are by name and by address, the employers that I will trade with and the employers that I will not.

This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public, of the way for a people to express itself and to get what it wants.

What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about me so far as I go, as one member of the public. As I am only one person every item of the news about me must be put where it works. I will deal directly with the news of what I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can give it to me when they know it.

News is the real government now and always of this world.

When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, obviously the best art-form for telling news to employers and business men--the news of what we want and what we do not want and of what we want in them as well as in the things they sell, is to tell them the news in the language they have studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars, and cents, and by trading somewhere else.

The gospel-bearing value, the news that one can get into a man's mind with one dollar, the news that he can be made to see and act on for one dollar--well, thinking of this some days, makes for me, at least, going up and down the Main Street of the World feeling my purse snuggling in my pocket, and all the people I can step up to with my purse and tell so many dollars' worth of news to, tell that dollar's worth of gospel to about the world--makes going up and down with a dollar on a big business street, and spending it or not spending it, feel like a kind of chronic, easy, happy, going to Church. One always has a little money in one's pocket that one spends or that one won't spend, and sometimes even not spending a dollar, practised by some people, at just the right moment and in just the right way, can be made to mean as much and do as much with a world as spending a thousand dollars would without any meaning put into it.

Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind of store I know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them look a minute at the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk out with it quietly.

I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall circulate in my money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion, my gospel or news for this world, news about what I want and about what I will have in a world, if I cannot make every dollar, every shilling I earn, go through the world and sing my own little world-song in it, may I never have another shilling or earn another dollar as long as I live!

The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once more, fills me with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what a bargain it is and how I can use it twice over, thinking of the dollar's worth of news, to say nothing of the dollar's worth of things that belong with a dollar!

For some generations, now, we have tried to make people good in a vague, general way, by using priests, sacraments and confessional boxes. For some centuries we have been trying to make people good with lawyers and juries and ballot boxes. We are now to try, at last, religion or gospel or news or ideals--practical, shrewd aimed ideals, that is, news to a man about himself or news about the man from the man himself to us. In everything a man does he is expressing to us this news about himself, and about his world, and about his G.o.d. We are all telling news about the world and about ourselves all the time and we are all in a position for news all the time.

What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do and we will not do?

This news about us is the religion in us.

The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of late as to just where his religion is located. He has come to see that real religion in a man, very conveniently located (immediately at hand in him and personally directed), is his own action, his own divine "I will" or "I won't."

He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured, G.o.dlike "I will" and "I won't "--or News about himself.

CHAPTER III

PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES

We are deeply interested in the United States just now, in seeing what will be the fate of President Wilson's government in getting men to be good. The fate of a government in 1913 may be said to stand on the government's psychology or knowledge of human nature or of what might be called human engineering, its mastery of the principles of lifting over in great ma.s.ses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great ma.s.ses of people's minds over as on some huge national derrick up on The White House, from one lookout on life to another.

There are certain aspects of human nature when power is being applied to it in this way, and when it is being got to be good, that may not be beside the point.

If one could drop in on a government and have a little neighbourly chat with it, as one was going by, I think I would rather talk with it (especially our government, just now), about Human Nature than about anything.

I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a government to be a plain and homely way.

I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people are getting it to be good. What a government thinks about them might possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It.

The first observation is this:

The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not marry.

Possibly it is because many people are following the same principle in trying to be good and in getting other people to be good that they make such poor work of it.

Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of one that they must.

Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to what one really wants to do.

Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not conducive to goodness. The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a contradiction in terms. It is a principle that would make wicked people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never worked with people since.

It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.

All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups or cla.s.ses of people who are especially not what they should be. The people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in common. There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once more to get them to be good.

They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good and cannot do it.

And this is not true.

When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he sits down and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying to be good at all. He is trying to be not bad.

A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process, by being not bad, and it is still harder for him and for everybody, when other people try to do it--those who are near him, and it is still, still harder for a President down in Washington to do it.

An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be got to keep up an interest very long in being not bad. Being not bad is a glittering generality. It is like being not extravagant or economical.

Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable degree to a pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have reflected upon their experiences, have come to conclusions that may not be very far from the point in a fine art like getting one's self to be good or getting other people to be good.

To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the street, looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of things one will not buy, cannot be said to be a practicable method of attaining economy.

The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to upon the opposite principle. Even if the good thing he tries for is merely a negative good thing like economy, he instinctively seeks out some positive way of getting it.

A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be economical, or of getting his wife to be economical, does not make a start by sitting down with a pencil and making out a list, by concentrating his mind on rows of things that he and his family must get along without. He knows a better way. He goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a big shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand he cannot get. As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he will get it.

Then a subtle, spiritual change pa.s.ses over him and over his family while they listen. He would not have said before he started that sitting down and thinking of things he could get along without--making lists in his mind of things that he must not have--could ever be in this world a happy, even an almost thrilling experience. But as a matter of fact, as he sits by the piano and listens, he finds himself counting off economies like strings of pearls, and he greets each new self-sacrifice he can think of with a cheer. While the Steinway Grand fills the room with melody all around him, there he actually is sitting, and having the time of his life dreaming of the things he can get along without!

When he goes home, he goes home thinking. And the family all go home thinking.

Then economy sets in. The reason most people make a failure of their economy is that they are not artistic with it, they do not enjoy it.

They do not pick out anything to enjoy their economy with.

With some people an automobile would work better than a Steinway Grand and there are as many ways, of course, of practising the Steinway Grand principle in not being bad as there are people, but they all consist apparently in selecting some big, positive thing that one wants to do, which logically includes and bundles all together where they are attended to in a lump, all the things that one ought not to do.

Most sins (every one who has ever tried them knows this) most sins are not really worth bothering with, each in detail, even the not-doing them and the most practical, firm method of getting them out of the way (thousands of them at once, sometimes, with one hand) is to have something so big to live for that all the things that would like to get in the way, and would like to look important, look, when one thinks of it, suddenly small.

The distinctive, preeminent, official business for the next four years, of making small things in this country look small and of gently, quietly making small men feel small, has been a.s.signed by our people recently, to Mr. Woodrow Wilson.

Now it naturally seems to some of us, the best way for Mr. Wilson's government to do in getting the Trusts to give up lying and stealing, is going to be to place before them quietly a few really big, interesting, equally exciting things that Trusts can do, and then dare them, as in some great game or tournament of skill--all the people looking on--dare them, challenge them like great men, to do them.

There are three ideas President Wilson may have of the government's getting people to be good.