Crowds Part 68

We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dreadnoughts, our stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what are they? And what do they amount to and what can they do, as compared with truth, the real news about what people want in this world, and about where we are going?

I say--they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory to tear down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth, with the news about us, that shall come out at last (G.o.d hasten the day!) from the open--the pried-open hearts of men! And I have seen that men shall go forth with shouts in that day and with glad and solemn silence, to build a world!

I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo.

I speak for five million men.

We have got this book written between us (under the name of one of us), because we want our own way. We are not improving people. We are not even trying to improve ourselves. Many of us started in on it once and the first improvement we thought of was not to try any more.

It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people want us to--most people get in the way. And when people get in the way we lay about us a little--We hit them. We have written this book, because we want to hit a great many people at once. We find them everywhere about us, in monster cities, huge thoughtless anthills of them, and they will not let us live a larger and a richer life. We say to them, We resent your houses your shoes, your voices, your fears, your motives, your wills, the diseases you make us walk past every day, the rows of things you seem to think will do, and that you think we must get used to, and we do not propose, if we can help it, to get used to what you think will do for Churches; nor to what you think will do for a government or to the little lonely, scattered, toyschool-houses, that when you come into the world, fresh and strange and happy you all proceed solemnly to coop your souls in.

Nor do we want to get used to your hem-and-haw parliaments and your funny little perfumed prophets--your prophets lying down or propped up with pillows or your poets wringing their hands. Nor will we be put off with all your gracefully feeble, watery, lovely little pastel religions for this grim and mighty modern world. We are American men. We do not propose to be driven out to sea, to stand face to face every day with what is true and full of beauty and magic, or to have skies and mountains and stars palmed off on us as companions instead of men!

This is what five million men are trying to express in writing this book. If people deny that I have the right to give the news about America for five million men; if they say that this is not true about American human nature, that this is not the news, then I will say, _I am the news_! I am this sort of an American! G.o.d helping me, I say it!

"Look at _me_!" I am this sort of man of whom I am writing! If I am not this sort of man this afternoon, I will be in the morning! Though I go down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking to the end of my days--_I_ am this sort of man! I say, "Look at _me_!"

If you will not believe me--that this is an American, if you say that I cannot prove that there are five million of men like this in America, then I will still say, "Here is _one_! What will you do with ME?" Though I die in laughter, all my desires and all my professions in a tumult about my soul, I say it to this nation, "Your laws, your programs, your philosophies, your I wills, and I won'ts, I say, shall reckon with _me_!

Your presidents and your legislatures shall reckon with Me!"

Here I am. The man is here. He is in this book!

I will break through to the five million men. I will make the five million men look at me until they recognize themselves. If no one else will attend to it for me, and if there shall be no other way, I will have a bra.s.s band go through the streets of New York and of a thousand cities, with banners and floats and great hymns to the people, and they shall go up and down the streets of the people with signs saying, "Have you read Crowds?" I will have the Boston Symphony Orchestra tour the country singing--singing from kettledrums to violins to a thousand silent audiences, "_Have yon read 'CROWDS'_?"

I live in a nation in which we are b.u.t.ting through into our sense of our national character, working our way up into a huge mutual working understanding. In our beautiful, vague, patriotic, muddleheadedness about what we want and whether we really want to be good, and about what being good is like and I say, for one, half-laughing, half-praying, G.o.d helping me--_Look at_ =ME=!

=VI=

I was much interested some time ago when I had not been long landed in England, and was still trying in the hopeful American way to understand it--to see the various att.i.tudes of Englishmen toward the discussions which were going on at that time in the _Spectator_ and elsewhere, of Mr. Cadbury's inconsistency; and while I had no reason, as an American, fresh-landed from New York, to be interested in Mr. Cadbury himself, I found that his inconsistency interested me very much. It insisted on coming back into my mind, in spite of what I would have thought, as a strangely important subject--not merely as regards Mr. Cadbury, which might or might not be important, but as regards England and as regards America, as regards the way a modern man struggling day by day with a huge, heavy machine civilization like ours, can still manage to be a live, useful, and possibly even a human, being in it.

There are two astonishing facts that stand face to face with all of us to-day, who are labouring with civilization.

The first fact is that almost without exception all the men in it who mean the most in it to us and to other people for good or for evil--who stir us deeply and do things--all fall into the inconsistent cla.s.s.

The second fact is that this is a very small, select distinguished, and astonishingly capable cla.s.s.

A man who is in a grim, serious business like being good, must expect to give up many of his little self-indulgences in the way of looking good.

Looking inconsistent, possibly even inconsistency itself, may be sometimes, temporarily, a man's most important public service to his time.

One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's own personal history. It is by being inconsistent that people grow, and without meaning to, give other people materials for growing. For the particular purpose of making the best things grow, of pointing up truths, of giving definite edges to right and wrong, an inconsistent man--a man who is trying to pry himself out a little at a time from an impossible situation in an impossible world, is likely to do the world more good than a very large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look in this same world--whatever happens to it.

If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a scale of 100 as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist on 98. One does not always insist on 98 for one's self. And when one does and does not get it, one feels forgiving sometimes.

In dealing with public men and with other people that we know less than we know ourselves--if they really do things, it is well to make allowances, and let them off at 65.

In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no one else volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well with letting them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I have been in England, that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and the Wise and the Good would consider letting George Cadbury off at 51.

Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George Cadbury in his journals than they might be by other people in what seem to seem to many of us unfamiliar and dangerous ideas.

Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of revolution England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George Cadbury 73--possibly 89.

If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can crowd in and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen and women from being educated by John Bottomley Bull or by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts of other would-be friends of the people--by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and Vernon Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave national importance that George Cadbury--a professional non-better--in educating these people should allow them to keep on in his paper, having a betting column?

So long as he really helps stave off John Bottomley Bull and Mrs. John Bottomley Bull, let him slump into being a millionaire, if he cannot very well help it! We say, some of us, let him even make cocoa! or have family prayers! or be a Liberal!

At least this is the way one American visiting England feels about it, if he may be permitted.

Perhaps I would not, if I were an angel.

I do not want to be an angel.

I am more ambitious. I want my ideals to do things, and I want to stand by people who are doing things with their ideals, whether their ideals are my ideals or not.

Let us suppose. Suppose the reader were in Mr. Cadbury's place. What would he do? Here are two things, let us suppose, he wishes very much.

He wishes a certain cla.s.s of people would not bet, and he also wishes to convince these same people of certain important social and political ideas for which he stands. If he told them that he would have nothing to do with them unless they stopped betting, there would be no object in his publishing their paper at all. There would be nothing that they would let him tell them. If, on the other hand, he begins merely as one more humble, fellow-human being, and puts himself definitely on record as not betting himself, and still more definitely as wishing other people would not bet, and then admits honestly that these other people have as good a right to decide to bet as he has to decide not to; and if he then deliberately proceeds to do what every real gentleman who does not smoke and wishes other people did not, does without question--namely, offers them the facilities for doing it why should people call him inconsistent?

Perhaps a man's consistency consists in his relation to his own smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr.

Cadbury would publish in a parallel column (if he could get a genius to write it) an extremely tolerant, human, comrade-like series of objections to betting, which people could read alongside, and which would persuade people as much as possible not to read the best betting tips in the world in the column next door, but certainly the act of furnishing the tips in the meantime and of being sure that they are the best tips in the world, is a very real, human, courageous act. It even has a kind of rough and ready religion in it. It may be too much to expect, but even in our goodness perhaps we ought to do as we would be done by. We must be righteous, but on the whole, must we not be righteous toward others as we would have them righteous toward us?

What many of us find ourselves wishing most of all, when we come upon some specially attractive man is, that we could discover some way, or that he could discover some way, in which the idealist in him, and the realist in him could be got to act together.

There are some of us who have come to believe that in the dead earnest, daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life, the real solid idealist will have to care enough about his ideals to arrange to have two complete sets, one set which he calls his personal ideals, which are of such a nature that he can carry them out alone and rigidly and quite by himself, and another which he calls his bending or cooperative ideals, geared a little lower and adjusted to more gradual usage, which he uses when he asks other men to act with him.

It may take a very single-hearted and strong man to keep before his own mind and before other people's his two sets of ideals, his "I" faiths, and his you-and-I faiths, keeping each in strict proportion, but it would certainly be a great human adventure to do it. Saying "G.o.d and I,"

and saying "G.o.d and you and I" are two different arts. And it is clear-headedness and not inconsistency in a man that keeps him so.

This is not a mere defence of Mr. Cadbury; it is a defence of a type of man, of a temperament in our modern life, of men like Edward A. Filene, of Boston, of a man like Hugh Mac Rae, one of the inst.i.tutions of North Carolina, of Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, of nine men out of ten of the bigger and more creative sort who are helping cities to get their way and nations to express themselves. I have believed that the principle at stake, the great principle for real life in England and in America, of letting a man be inconsistent if he knows how--must have a stand made for it.

There is no one thing, whether in history, or literature, or science, or politics that can be more crucial in the fate of a nation to-day than the correct, just, and constructive judgment of Contemporary Inconsistent People.

=VII=

If I could have managed it, I would have had this book printed and written--every page of it--in three parallel columns.

The first column would be for the reader who believes it, who keeps writing a book more or less like it as he goes along. I would put in one sentence at the top for him and then let him have the rest of the s.p.a.ce to write in himself. In other words I would say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and drop it.

The second column would be for the reader who would like to believe it if he could, and I would branch out a little more--about half a column.

2 + 2 = 4

20 + 20 = 40

The third column would be for the reader who is not going to believe it if it can be helped. It would be in fine type, bitterly detailed and statistical and take nothing for granted.