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CROWDS
A MOVING-PICTURE
OF DEMOCRACY
BY
GERALD STANLEY LEE
_Editor of "Mount Tom"_
IN FIVE BOOKS
CROWDS AND MACHINES
LETTING THE CROWD BE GOOD
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
CROWDS AND HEROES
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_Copyright, 1913, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, INCORPORATED
BOOKS
By GERALD STANLEY LEE
THE LOST ART OF READING
_A Sketch of Civilization_
THE CHILD AND THE BOOK
_A Constructive Criticism of Education_
THE SHADOW CHRIST
_A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius_
THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES
_An Introduction to the Twentieth Century_
INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES
_A Study of the Man of Genius in Business_
CROWDS
_A Moving Picture of Democracy_
_Gratefully inscribed to a little Mountain,
a great Meadow, and a Woman.
To the Mountain for the sense of time, to
the Meadow for the sense of space, and
to the Woman for the sense of everything._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
CROWDS AND MACHINES
I. WHERE ARE WE GOING? 3
II. THE CROWD SCARE 19
III. THE MACHINE SCARE 34
IV. THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK 49
V. THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE 58
VI. THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 65
VII. IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN 66
VIII. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE 69
IX. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE 74
X. A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE 76
XI. DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS 80
XII. NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN 86
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
I. SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD 93
II. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT? 96
III. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING? 103
IV. PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR 107
V. PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY 111
VI. GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS 114
VII. THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE 116
VIII. MAKING GOODNESS HURRY 125
IX. TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 128
X. THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS AND THE SUCCESSFUL 142
XI. THE SUCCESSFUL 146
XII. THE NECKS OF THE WICKED 154
XIII. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 163
XIV. IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 167
XV. THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT 173
XVI. THE MEN AHEAD PULL 178
XVII. THE CROWDS PUSH 184
XVIII. THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW 186
XIX. AND THE MACHINE STARTS! 194
BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
PART I. WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES
I. MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP 205
II. MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ 208
III. MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE 211
IV. PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS 221
V. THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE 227
PART II. IRON MACHINES
I. STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS 236
II. BELLS AND WHEELS 240
III. DEW AND ENGINES 243
IV. DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL! 245
V. AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON 248
VI. THE MACHINES' MACHINES 250
VII. THE MEN'S MACHINES 252
VIII. THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD 256
IX. THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS 262
X. THE MACHINE-TRAINERS 266
XI. MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS 269
PART III. PEOPLE-MACHINES
I. NOW! 280
II. COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES 288
III. THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN 286
IV. LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT 290
BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
I. THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO 297
II. THE CROWD AND THE HERO 301
III. THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON 303
IV. THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN 307
V. THE CROWD AND TOM MANN 313
VI. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN 323
VII. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN 327
VIII. THE MEN WHO LOOK 331
IX. WHO IS AFRAID? 337
X. RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE 343
XI. THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE 346
XII. THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS 349
XIII. MEN WHO GET THINGS 356
XIV. SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION 364
XV. CONVERSION 371
XVI. EXCEPTION 380
XVII. INVENTION 383
XVIII. THE MAN WHO PULLS THE WORLD TOGETHER 397
XIX. THE MAN WHO STANDS BY 400
XX. THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS 402
XXI. THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID 404
BOOK FIVE
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
PART I. NEWS AND LABOUR 413
PART II. NEWS AND MONEY 422
PART III. NEWS AND GOVERNMENT
I. OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 431
II. OXFORD STREET HUMS, THE HOUSE HEMS 440
III. PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES 449
IV. THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO 455
V. THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!" 463
VI. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?" 469
VII. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?" 472
VIII. NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT 474
IX. NEWS-MEN 476
X. AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT 483
XI-XII. NEWS-BOOKS 505-513
XIII. NEWS-PAPERS 517
XIV. NEWS-MACHINES 524
XV. NEWS-CROWDS 527
XVI. CROWD-MEN 550
EPILOGUE 539
BOOK ONE
CROWDS AND MACHINES
TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
_"A battered, wrecked old man
Thrown on this savage shore far, far from home,
Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows twelve dreary months
... The end I know not, it is all in Thee,
Or small or great I know not--haply what broad fields, what
lands!...
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they
As if some miracle, some hand divine unsealed my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me."_
CHAPTER I
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
The best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one sees it
going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to many perhaps like
a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it has in it the three things
with which I worship most my Maker in this present world--the three
things which it would be the breath of religion to me to offer to a God
together--Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines.
With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives
in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd
streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly
church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's
whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one
against the sky--the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the
vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven
day and night for us all....
I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and
stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment
before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar
outside the Court gathers it all up--that huge, boundless, tiny,
summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows
while I sit and think.
And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully,
half-triumphantly back to one's work--the very thought of it. The Crowd
hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's God, send one
back to one's work!
In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along
the Strand, toward Charing Cross.
I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all
these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little
space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like
mercury, between the cabs.
But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the
street, coming in over one like waves, like seas--all these happy,
curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches;
these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans--all these
little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past.
I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver,
staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks--that low,
distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so
gone-by below.
The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll
or swing on top of a 'bus through it--the miles of faces, all these
tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all
sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they
wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their
little throats, and the things they pray to and curse and worship and
swindle in! It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of
living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their
abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and
heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off.... I can
never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of
splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging
along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about
me, within me ... it is as if on top of my 'bus I had been far away in
some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and Hell sweep past.
One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from
New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it--walking
down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way
things--thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.
Of course, with all the things that are happening to him--the 'buses,
the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the
streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet
and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming
up in space on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of
people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his
mind.
In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of
tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his
point, and New York does not--at least it does not very often--make
things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he
begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of
the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles
of expecting.
And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds
in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the
greater, silenter streets of England--the streets of people's thoughts.
And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the
English people are really going somewhere.... "_Where are they going?_"
He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "_Where
are the English people going?_"
* * * * *
An American thinks of the English people in the third person--at first,
of course.
After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over
every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person
plural.
Then the first person plural grows.
He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of
happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We." New York and London,
Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and
even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he
asks, as the people of a world stream by, "_Where are WE going?_"
Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its
grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him
before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him.
* * * * *
There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his spirit
that big, quiet roundness of the earth.
Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea--sleeping out
there alone night by night--the gentle round earth sloping away down
from under one on both sides, in the midst of space.... Then, suddenly,
almost before one knows, that quiet Space still lingering round one,
perhaps one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into
that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square.
And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one's own fellow-men
hurrying past. One looks into the faces of the people hurrying past:
"_Where are we going?_" One looks at the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
* * * * *
That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in
the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a
besieged and conquered city. Some men had risen up in a day and said to
London: "No one shall go in. No one shall go out."
I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her
big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around her, and
soldiers camping out with her locomotives!
With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming
out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial
mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her great stations were
all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of
machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers!
And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as
all England was asking that night: "Where are we going?"
And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.
And nobody knew.
And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the
great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the
more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private
parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little
absent, now and then a footfall passing through.
And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we
going?"
And nobody knew.
It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all
about me, out of the skyscrapers.
New York did not know.
Now London did not know.
* * * * *
And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of
books.
I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a
lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways
and windows--for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in
the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who
still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint
and tiny roar of London.
I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the
men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they
mould their thoughts.
I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his
long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?... Here, where Shakespeare
played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton,
Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives
and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets,
going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb
walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made
one--lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men....
I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy
out with his camera--his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett
stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day--big, curious
tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his
experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew
of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer
messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K.
Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting,
rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and
Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the
eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of
Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon....
* * * * *
When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried, formless,
speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be
this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up
out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that
vast yellow mist of people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the
poor, of the rich, coming and going they cannot say where--he naturally
thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when he looks
to those who speak for them, to their writers or interpreters, and when
he finds that they are bewildered, that they are asking the same
question over and over that we in America are asking too, "Where are we
going?" he is brought abruptly up, front to front with the great
broadside of modern life. London, his last resort, is as bewildered as
New York; and so, at last, here it is. It has to be faced now and here,
as if it were some great scare-head or billboard on the world, "WHERE
ARE WE GOING?"
* * * * *
The most stupendous feat for the artist or man of imagination in modern
times is to conceive a picture or vision for our Society--our present
machine-civilization--a common expectation for people which will make
them want to live.
If Leonardo were living now, he would probably slight for the time being
his building bridges, and skimp his work on Mona Lisa, and write a
book--an exultant book about common people. He would focus and express
democracy as only the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will
ever do it. A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation
before men can see it together, and go to work on it together, and make
it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is full of people who
have something to live for and who know what it is. It is because nobody
knows, now, that our present society is not great. The different kinds
of people in it have not made up their minds what they are for, and some
kinds have particularly failed to make up their minds what the other
kinds are for.
We are all making our particular contribution to the common vision, and
some of us are able to say in one way and some in another what this
vision is; but it is going to take a supreme catholic, summing-up
individualist, a great man or artist--a man who is all of us in one--to
express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go,
what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want.
This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world is
collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible.
The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the rest of the
world if they were to have one) is the one great outstanding fact and
result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but
they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out
of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the
Hebrews for two thousand years.
And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made
it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal,
masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see
all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the
question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and
outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and
say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and
where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what
might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very
small and unimportant question--"Where is it that I really want to go
myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly
considered, I really want to be in?"
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he
can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been
so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to
my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me
what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never
have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange
a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as
an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book
is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one
man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds'
machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world,
until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a
breath of air and looked at the light. The book is merely a
life-preserver--that is all; and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the
man is representative, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is.
Anybody else who can use it is welcome to it.
* * * * *
The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this
world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be
expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists
in wanting it still harder and still harder until one can express it.
This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new world. Here
are all these other people who have to be asked. And until one wants it
hard enough to say it, to get it outside one's self, possibly make it
catching, nothing happens.
If one were to point out one trait rather than another that makes
Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or
literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has
never wanted anything.
If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which Mr. Shaw had
merely said what he wanted himself, it is quite possible this book would
not have been written. Even if Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted,
had ever shown in any corner of any book that one man's wanting
something in this world amounted to anything, or could make any one else
want it, or could make any difference in him, or in the world around
him, perhaps I would not have written this book.
Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen in America, in
England, I have found, not the things that they wanted in their books,
but always these same deadly lists or bleak inventories--these prairies
of things that they did not want.
Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing
distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not
helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy
out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them
harder. And Mr. Wells's measles and children's diseases, too. I knew
already that I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost
noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me--nor
could it supply any other man with furniture to make a world with--even
if it were not this real, big world, with rain and sunshine and wind and
people in it, and were only that little, wonderful world a man lives
within his own heart. There have been times, and there will be more of
them, when I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard
Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that
George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things all
around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little, warm,
lighted room to keep my thoughts in? Nor has he furnished me with one
thing with which I would care to sit down in my little room and
think--looking into the cold, perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my
hearth. Even if I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human
being, loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound to
say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy's photographs, or in
Mr. Wells's rich, bottomless murk of humanity to make a revolution for.
And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his bottles of disinfectants and shelves
of sterilized truths, his hard well-being and his glittering comforts,
has presented the vision of a world in which at the very best--even if
it all comes out as he says it will--a man would merely have things
without wanting them, and without wanting anything.
* * * * *
And so it has seemed to me that even if he is quite unimportant, any man
to-day who, in some public place, like a book, shall paint the picture
of his heart's desire, who shall throw up, as upon a screen, where all
men may see them, his most immediate and most pressing ideals, would
perform an important service. If a man's sole interest were to find out
what all men in the world want, the best way to do it would be for him
to say quite definitely, so that we could all compare notes, what he
wanted himself. Speaking for a planet has gone by, but possibly, if a
few of us but speak for ourselves, the planet will talk back, and we
shall find out at last what it really is that it wants.
The thing that many of us want most in the present grayness and din of
the world is some one to play with, or if the word "play" is not quite
the right word, some one with whom we can work with freedom and
self-expressiveness and joy. Nine men out of ten one meets to-day talk
with one as it were with their watches in their hands. The people who
are rich one sees everywhere, being run away with by their motor-cars;
and the people who are poor one sees struggling pitifully and for their
very souls, under great wheels and beneath machines.
Of course, I can only speak for myself. I do not deny that a little
while at a time I can sit by a brook in the woods and be happy; but if,
as it happens, I would rather have other people about me--people who do
not spoil things, I find that the machines about me everywhere have made
most people very strange and pathetic in the woods. They cannot sit by
brooks, many of them; and when they come out to the sky, it looks to
them like some mere, big, blue lead roof up over their lives. Perhaps I
am selfish about it, but I cannot bear to see people looking at the sky
in this way....
* * * * *
So, as I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want
most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or what I have
called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the
machines off the backs of the people and take the machines out of their
wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls.
If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the
social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation
and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people.
I believe that the time has come when the world is to make its last
stand for idealism, great men, and crowds.
I believe that great men can be really great, that they can represent
crowds. I believe that crowds can be really great, that they can know
great men.
The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first will
probably be a kind of everyday great man or business statesman, the man
who represents all classes, and who proves it in the way he conducts his
business.
I have called this man the Crowdman.
I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired millionaire
I have in mind, but I have known scores of men who have reminded me of
him and of what he is going to be, and I am prepared to say that in
spirit, or latent at least, he is all about me in the world to-day. If
it is proved to me that no such man exists, I am here to say there will
be one. If it is proved to me that there cannot be one, _I will make
one_. If it is proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of
young men and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young
mothers, and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the
schools, I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write
the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one! I say this
with all reverence for other men's desires and with all respect for
natural prejudgments. As I have conceived it, the one business of the
world to-day is to find out what we are for and to find out what men in
the world--on the whole--really want. When men know what they want they
get it. Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life is
due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get it, due to the
passions and the dreams of men; and the one single way in which these
wrong things will ever be overcome is with more passions and with more
and mightier dreams of men.
Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams,
especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better
in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are
so largely allowed to run it.
In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be
reckoned with is Desire.
The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd,
dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong
passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones.
It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of
principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a
portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself.
What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of
the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the
nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful
place--all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the
vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires,
flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim,
silent wills of men. _"What do we want?" "Where are we going?"_
In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the
literature of Desire.
This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe
that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not
prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the
story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the
faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over
him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have.
There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by. In
the present desperate crisis of a world plunging on in the dark to a
catastrophe or a glory that we cannot guess, it is a time for men to
pray a prayer, a standing-up prayer, to one another.
I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of public
desire, this imperious challenge of what men want, this standing-up
prayer of men to one another, which alone shall make men go forth with
faith and singing once more into the battle of life. Sometimes it has
seemed to me I have already heard it--this song of men's desires about
me--faintly. But I have seen that the time is at hand when it shall come
as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men's voices, filling the dome
of the world--a chorus in the glory and the shame of which no
millionaire who merely wants to make money, no artist who is not
expressing the souls and freeing the bodies of men, no statesman who is
not gathering up the desires of crowds, and going daily through the
world hewing out the will of the people, shall dare to live.
* * * * *
But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any one
suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings.
It is rather of a great daily adventure one has with the world.
There have been times when it seemed as if it had to begin all over
again every morning.
Day by day I walk down Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill.
I look once more every morning at that great picture of any religion; I
look at the quiet, soaring, hopeful dome--that little touch of singing
or praying that men have lifted up against heaven. "Will the Dome bring
the Man to me?"
I look up at the machines, strange and eager, hurrying across the
bridge. "Will the Machines bring the Man to me?"
I look in the faces of the crowd hurrying past. "Will the Crowd bring
the Man to me?"
With the picture of my religion--or perhaps three religions or three
stories of religion--I walk on and on through the crowd, past the
railway, past the Cathedral, past the Mansion House, and over the Tower
Bridge. I walk fast and eagerly and blindly, as though a man would walk
away from the world.
Suddenly I find myself, throngs of voices all about me, standing
half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey watching that
smooth asphalt playground where one sees the very dead (for once)
crowded by the living--pushed over to the edges--their gravestones
tilted calmly up against the walls. I stand and look through the pickets
and watch the children run and shout--the little funny, mockingly
dressed, frowzily frumpily happy children, the stored-up sunshine of a
thousand years all shining faintly out through the dirt, out through the
generations in their little faces--"Will the Man come to me out of
these?"
The tombstones lean against the wall and the children run and shout. As
I watch them with my hopes and fears and the tombstones tilted against
the walls--as I peer through the railings at the children, I face my
three religions. What will the three religions do with the children?
What will the children do with the three religions?
And now I will tell the truth. I will not cheat nor run away as
sometimes I seem to have tried to do for years. I will no longer let
myself be tricked by the mere glamour and bigness of our modern life
nor swooned into good-will by the roll and liturgy of revolution, "of
the people," "for the people," "by the people," nor will I be longer
awed by those huge phrase-idols, constitutions, routines, that have
roared around me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"--those imperious,
thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. Do the People see truth?
Can the People see truth? Can all the crowd, and can all the machines,
and all the cathedrals piled up together produce the Man, the Crowd-man
or great man who sees truth?
And so with my three religions, I have three fears, one for each of
them. There is the Machine fear, lest the crowd should be overswept by
its machines and become like them; and the Crowd fear, lest the crowd
should overlook its mighty innumerable and personal need of great men;
and there is also the daily fear for the Church, lest the Church should
not understand crowds and machines and grapple with crowds and machines,
interpret them and glory in them and appropriate them for her own use
and for God's--lest the Church should turn away from the crowds and the
machines and graciously and idly bow down to Herself.
And now I am going to try to express these three fears that go with the
three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn on them and face
them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance.
CHAPTER II
THE CROWD SCARE
Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely
fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for
him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until
he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and
there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and
earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked
forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, "What shall I
be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?" And the sky and
the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days
beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all
said, "Come!"
On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very
long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a
shovel--a tool for living a little longer.
The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding
room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern
life that the geography of the world has been changed to conform to it.
We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.
Civilization is a list of cities. Cities are the huge central dynamos of
all being. The power of a man can be measured to-day by the mile, the
number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what
the city stands for--the centre of mass.
The crowd principle is the first principle of production. The producer
who can get the most men together and the most dollars together controls
the market; and when he once controls the market, instead of merely
getting the most men and the most dollars, he can get all the men and
all the dollars. Hence the corporation in production.
The crowd principle is the first principle of distribution. The man who
can get the most men to buy a particular thing from him can buy the most
of it, and therefore buy it the cheapest, and therefore get more men to
buy from him; and having bought this particular thing cheaper than all
men could buy it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then,
having all the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is
able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell them for a
little more than nothing to everybody. Hence the department store--the
syndicate of department stores--the crowd principle in commerce.
The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps passing by it in
twenty-four hours. The value of a railroad is the number of people near
it who cannot keep still. If there are a great many of these people, the
railroad runs its trains for them. If there are only a few, though they
be heroes and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons,
trains shall not be run for them. The railroad is the characteristic
property and symbol of property in this modern age, and the entire value
of a railroad depends upon its getting control of a crowd--either a
crowd that wants to be where some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants
a great many tons of something that some other crowd has.
When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the same principle
running through them both. The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is
the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity. A man's destiny
is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul--if
he has a soul--is an atom acted upon by a majority of other atoms.
When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find the same
emphasis upon them all--the emphasis of mass, of majority. Not that the
church exists for the masses--no one claims this--but that, such as it
is, it is a mass church. While the promise of Scripture, as a last
resort, is often heard in the church about two or three gathered
together in God's name, the Church is run on the working conviction that
unless the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred in
God's name, He will not pay any particular attention to them, or, if He
does, He will not pay the bills. The church of our forefathers, founded
on personality, is exchanged for the church of democracy, founded on
crowds; and the church of the moment is the institutional church, in
which the standing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the
congregation. The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman, is seen on
every hand amongst us--the agent of an audience, who, instead of telling
an audience what they ought to do, runs errands for them morning and
noon and night. With coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he
carefully picks his way. He does his people as much good as they will
let him, tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at
last, and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered
majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered by
majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a new world without
the help of majorities at all.
Theology reveals the same tendency. The measuring by numbers is found in
all belief, the same cringing before masses of little facts instead of
conceiving the few immeasurable ones. Helpless individuals mastered by
crowds are bound to believe in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He
stands in the midst of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His
worlds: to those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those
who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens, who, in a kind
of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would say), seems to want everybody
to be good and hopes they will, but does not quite know what to do
about it if they are not.
Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea of hell
(in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which), and every
civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civilization with sovereign
men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd civilization, reflecting its
mood on the heavens, is inclined to a pleasant, large-minded God,
eternally considering everybody and considering everything, but
inefficient withal, a kind of legislature of Deity, typical of
representative institutions at their best and at their worst.
If we pass from our theology to our social science we come to the most
characteristic result of the crowd principle that the times afford. We
are brought face to face with Socialism, the millennium machine, the
Corliss engine of progress. It were idle to deny to the Socialist that
he is right--and more right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that
there is a great wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this
point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly trying to
create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet, that shall be large
enough to swallow the wrong we have. The term "Socialism" stands for
many things, in its present state; but so far as the average Socialist
is concerned, he may be defined as an idealist who turns to materialism,
that is, to mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered
two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men by all
other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the Socialist
expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying the other.
The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be produced by
setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals is Socialism, as the
average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the
eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by
machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining
them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences
for heroes, to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do
away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless to do
right because it would be impossible to do wrong. It is a philosophy of
helplessness, which, even if it succeeds in helplessly carrying its
helplessness out--in doing away with suffering, for instance--can only
do it by bringing to pass a man not alive enough to be capable of
suffering, and putting him in a world where suffering and joy alike
would be a bore to him.
But the main importance of Socialism in this connection lies in the fact
that it does not confine itself to sociology. It has become a complete
philosophy of life, and can be seen penetrating with its subtle satire
on human nature almost everything about us. We have the cash register to
educate our clerks into pure and honest character, and the souls of
conductors can be seen being nurtured, mile after mile, by
fare-recorders. Corporations buy consciences by the gross. They are hung
over the door of every street car. Consciences are worked by pulling a
strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth,
and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to
vote the way they think. And when, in the course of human events, we
came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman's right to
dress in good taste--that is, appropriately for what she is doing, what
did we proceed to do to bring it about? Conventions were held year after
year, and over and over, to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress
reform associations were founded, syndicates of courage were established
all over the land--all in vain; and finally,--Heaven help us!--how was
this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished? By an invention of
two wheels, one in front of the other. It was brought about by the Pope
Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut in two short years.
Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies. It is the
socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, there is some
machine that can surely be invented that will take the place of men: not
only of hands and feet, but of all the old-fashioned and lumbering
virtues, courage, patience, vision, common sense, and religion itself,
out of which they are made.
But we depend upon machinery not only for the things that we want, but
for the brains with which we decide what we want. If a man wants to know
what he thinks, he starts a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he
calls a convention. From the National Undertakers' Association and the
Launderers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World's
Congress--the Midway Pleasance of Piety--the Convention strides the
world with vociferousness. The silence that descends from the hills is
filled with its ceaseless din. The smallest hamlet in the land has
learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It,
as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times.
Every idea we have is run into a constitution. We cannot think without a
chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws. Literature
is a club. Philosophy is a society. Our reforms are mass meetings. Our
culture is a summer school. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without
Carnegie hall and forty vice-presidents. We remember our poets with
trustees, and the immortality of a genius is watched by a standing
committee. Charity is an Association. Theology is a set of resolutions.
Religion is an endeavour to be numerous and communicative. We awe the
impenitent with crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost
with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so great a
work without being on a committee is beyond our ken. What Socrates and
Solomon would have come to if they had only had the advantage of
conventions it would be hard to say; but in these days, when the
excursion train is applied to wisdom; when, having little enough, we try
to make it more by pulling it about; when secretaries urge us,
treasurers dun us, programs unfold out of every mail--where is the man
who, guileless-eyed, can look in his brother's face; can declare upon
his honour that he has never been a delegate, never belonged to
anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed on, in his life?
Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns. Nothing stays
adjourned. We have reports that think for us, committees that do right
for us, and platforms that spread their wooden lengths over all the
things we love, until there is hardly an inch of the dear old earth to
stand on, where, fresh and sweet and from day to day, we can live our
lives ourselves, pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God,
garner our grain, and die. Every new and fresh human being that comes
upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into a machine
as soon as we get at him. We have already come to the point where we do
not expect to interest anybody in anything without a constitution. And
the Eugenic Society is busy now on by-laws for falling in love.
What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he
does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think. He
has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized
from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense
of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have
been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the
crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on
it, if perchance it may be stirred to something. To the bigotry of the
man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry
on the earth--the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who,
with a more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a mass
meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd can give,
backs his opinions with forty states, and walks the streets of his
native town in the uniform of all humanity. This is a kind of fool that
has never been possible until these latter days. Only a very great many
people, all of them working on him at once, and all of them watching
every one else working at once, can produce this kind.
Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has so mastered
the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle reader, have found
ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps, in a certain sheepish feeling
at being caught in a small audience. Being caught in a small audience at
a lecture is no insignificant experience. You will see people looking
furtively about, counting one another. You will make comparisons. You
will recall the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you
had the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing
confidently to itself before the lecture began. The hush of
disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual
shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room,
every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm
through--all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty
chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great
personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not
make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to--to--as small a
crowd as this?" Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty
Chairs--we who are to be lectured to--until the poor lecturer who is to
lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs begins.
When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied,
inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We see little but the
massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and
numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total
submergence of personality, except by accident, in all educated life.
The infinite value of the individual, the innumerable consequences of
one single great teaching man, penetrating every pupil who knows him,
becoming a part of the universe, a part of the fibre of thought and
existence to every pupil who knows him--this is a thing that belongs to
the past and to the inevitable future. With all our great institutions,
the crowds of men who teach in them, the crowds of men who learn in
them, we are still unable to produce out of all the men they graduate
enough college presidents to go around. The fact that at almost any
given time there may be seen, in this American land of ours, half a
score of colleges standing and waiting, wondering if they will ever find
a president again, is the climax of what the universities have failed to
do. The university will be justified only when a man with a university
in him, a whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it,
and the soul that has room for more than one chair in it comes out of it
to teach in it.
When we turn from education to journalism, the pressure of the crowd is
still more in evidence. To have the largest circulation is to have the
most advertising, and to have the most advertising means to have the
most money, and to have the most money means to be able to buy the most
ability, and to have the most ability means to keep all that one gains
and get more. The degradation of many of our great journals in the last
twenty years is but the inevitable carrying out of the syndicate method
in letters--a mass of contributors, a mass of subscribers, and a mass of
advertisers. So long as it gives itself over to the circulation idea,
the worse a newspaper is, the more logical it is. There may be a certain
point where it is bound to stop some time, because there will not be
enough bad people who are bad enough to go around; but we have not come
to it yet, and in the meantime about everything that can be thought of
is being printed to make bad people. If it be asserted that there are
not enough bad people to go around even now, it may be added that there
are plenty of good people to take their places as fast as they fail to
be bad enough, and that the good people who take the bad papers to find
fault with them are the ones who make such papers possible.
The result of the crowd principle is the inevitable result. Our journals
have fallen off as a matter of course, not only in moral ideals (which
everybody realizes), but in brain force, power of expression,
imagination, and foresight--the things that give distinction and results
to utterance and that make a journal worth while. The editorial page has
been practically abandoned by most journals, because most journals have
been abandoned by their editors: they have become printed
counting-rooms. With all their greatness, their crowds of writers, and
masses of readers, and piles of cablegrams, they are not able to produce
the kind of man who is able to say a thing the kind of way that will
make everybody stop and listen to him, cablegrams and all. Horace
Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the
press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns
every day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass
machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week and from year
to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where
the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to
go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, imperious
Personality--is it not at an end? It were a dazzling sight, perhaps, to
gaze at night upon a huge building, thinking with telegraph under the
wide sky around the world, the hurrying of its hundred pens upon the
desks, and the trembling of its floors with the mighty coming of a Day
out of the grip of the press; but even this huge bewildering pile of
power, this aggregation, this corporation of forces, machines of souls,
glittering down the Night--does any one suppose It stands by Itself,
that It is its own master, that It can do its own will in the world? In
all its splendour It stands, weaving the thoughts of the world in the
dark; but that very night, that very moment, It lies in the power of a
little ticking-thing behind its doors. It belongs to that legislature of
information and telegraph, that owner of what happens in a day, called
the Associated Press.
If the One who called Himself a man and a God had not been born in a
crowd, if he had not loved and grappled with it, and been crucified and
worshipped by it, He might have been a Redeemer for the silent, stately,
ancient world that was before He came, but He would have failed to be a
Redeemer for this modern world--a world where the main inspiration and
the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great problem and
every great hope is one that deals with crowds. It is a world where,
from the first day a man looks forth to move, he finds his feet and
hands held by crowds. The sun rises over crowds for him, and sets over
crowds; and having presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last,
in a crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God. Ten human lives
deep they have them--the graves in Paris; and whether men live their
lives piled upon other men's lives, in blocks in cities or in the
apparent loneliness of town or country what they shall do or shall not
do, or shall have or shall not have--is it not determined by crowds, by
the movement of crowds? The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as
he rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat; but
the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the voice of the crowd
to him, thousands of miles away, shouting in the Stock Exchange: "You
shall not sell your wheat! Let it lie! Let it rot in your barns!"
And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a surveyor's chain,
there would seem to be plenty of room for all who are born upon it. The
fact that there are enough square miles of the planet for every human
being on it to have several square miles to himself does not prove that
a man can avoid the crowd--that it is not a crowded world. If what a man
could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed be a gentle
and graceful earth to live on. But an acre of Nowhere satisfies no one;
and how many square miles does a man want to be a nobody in? He can do
it better in a crowd, where every one else is doing it.
In the ancient world, when a human being found something in the wrong
place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he found himself face to
face with a few men. He found he had to deal with these few men. To-day,
if he wants anything put where it belongs, he finds himself face to face
with a crowd. He finds that he has to deal with a crowd. The world has
telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a man
proposes to do a certain thing in it, the telephones tell the few, and
the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd gets on to the railroad;
and before he rises from his sleep, behold the crowd in his front yard;
and if he can get as far as his own front gate in the thing he is going
for, he must be--either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius? None of
these. Let him be a corporation--of ideas or of dollars; let him be some
complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do anything for himself, or for
anybody else, or for everybody else, in a world too crowded to tell the
truth without breaking something, or to find room for it, when it is
told, without breaking something.
This is the Crowd's World.
* * * * *
What I have written I have written.
I have been sitting and reading it. It is a mood. But there is an
implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be gotten out and used.
As I have been reading I have looked up. I see the quiet little mountain
through my window standing out there in the sun. It looks around the
world as if nothing had happened; and the bobolinks out in the great
meadow are all flying and singing in the same breath and rowing through
the air, thousands of them, miles of them. They do not stop a minute.
A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside on the
piazza, four years old, going by my window back and forth, listening to
the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the music of the spheres. Why
should not I do as well? I thought. The Child is merely seeing her shoes
as they are with as many senses and as many thoughts and desires at once
as she can muster, and with all her might.
What if I were to see the world like the Child?
Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with
their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles.
They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them,
and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about
until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys--looked as if it had
been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back,
when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on
and thought how they felt about it.
Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and
looked back; saw those three boys--a little retinue to that solitary
fish--trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and
wanted to be in it! Then I saw them going round the bend in the road
thirty years away.
I still want to be one of those boys.
And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I will yet grow up to
them!
I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish--the way they
folded it around with something, the way they made the most of it, is
the way to feel about the world.
I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as regards
technical and comparatively unimportant details or as regards
perspective on the fish the boys may not have been right. It is possible
that they had not taken a point of view, measured in inches or volts or
foot-pounds, that was right and could last forever; but I know that the
spirit of their point of view was right--the spirit that hovered around
the three boys and around the fish that day was right and could last
forever.
It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit in which
new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by Boys and Girls
and--God, are being made.
It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about worlds. And
it is only boys and girls who are right.
I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the rain singing,
_"I believe! I believe!"_
* * * * *
At the same time, I am glad that I have known and faced, and that I
shall have to know and face, the Crowd Fear.
I know in some dogged, submerged, and speechless way that it is not a
true fear. And yet I want to move along the sheer edge of it all my
life. I want it. I want all men to have it, and to keep having it, and
to keep conquering it. I have seen that no man who has not felt it, who
does not know this huge numbing, numberless fear before the crowd, and
who may not know it again almost any moment, will ever be able to lead
the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any man who has
not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and alone before it and
cried to God, ever interpret the crowd or express the will of the crowd,
or hew out of earth and heaven what the crowd wants.
We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to
share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel--the great
crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those
who live and struggle with crowds.
We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main
emotions men are having to-day. And the main emotion men are having
to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the
nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other
important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from
this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the
thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged
to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret
anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd
principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central
place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and
bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish
and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of
his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.
* * * * *
After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear.
Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow
the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the
little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and
beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes.
CHAPTER III
THE MACHINE SCARE
I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by
an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of
the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and
reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by
long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and
cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had
been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and
of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who
loved them.
When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to
the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly
in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the
gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather
thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of
course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be
true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim,
capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness
and reverence before their dead as the others were--but the lines on the
stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them;
one knows it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the
strange, happy, human things of another world--even of this world, that
make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us. One
gives a glance at the stone and passes on. It was made by machinery,
apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died
and been buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like
it--all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced
people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern
like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing
here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly,
heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside?
I wondered.
I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be
breathing things, and looked once more at the new.
And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds--one the
world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and
the other--well, the one we will have to have.
* * * * *
As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about
me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy
treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its
huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two
worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard,
except that they are all jumbled together--the complacent, capable,
cut-out, homeless-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with
their happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke. I see the same
two worlds standing and facing each other before me whichever way I
turn.
And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little separate
worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long bustling village
street, and look into the faces of the living, the same two worlds that
were in the churchyard and on the hills seem to look at me out of the
faces of the living too.
The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart. Most people, I imagine, who
read these pages must have noticed the people's faces in the streets
nowadays--how they seem to have come out of separate worlds into the
street a moment, and hurry past, and seem to be going back in a moment
more to separate worlds.
There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one
cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting
past one through the streets in people's faces, and nightly before our
eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself
human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth.
One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the
Machine-made World.
* * * * *
As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them
flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent
resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I
try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an
account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age
with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself
with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one cannot live in
an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other
age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up
one's mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live
in it. Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I
begin to try to decide which of the two--the Hand-made World or the
Machine-made World--I will choose. I find that in an odd, confused,
groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both. In spite of all
its ugly ways--a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody,
its magnificent heartlessness--I find I have come to take in the
Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a
terrible and strange beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I
wanted to give it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the
world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred
thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a
little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World. There must be some way
out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We
have merely lost it for a moment.
Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing through
which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways
that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to
the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to
the Machines Themselves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced
them. There is some way in which they can answer and can be made to
answer--can be made to give me and the men about me the kind of world we
want. I try to analyze it and think it out. What is the thing, the real
thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that
I cannot and will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it
something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it,
something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a
spirit and passed on? And what is it in the new Machine-made World
which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is
in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this
contradictory obstinate dread of them? After a time I have made a little
cleared space in my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me
from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is
not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight,
but the Hand-made spirit of the men who made them which the men put into
the things. And perhaps what is full of death and fear in the
Machine-made World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made
spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the machines
work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive, eternal. Perhaps it can
escape like a spirit, and can live where it will live, and do what it
will do, like a spirit, and possess the body that it wills to possess.
Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is still living around me to-day, and is
not only living, but is living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body
than any spirit has ever lived in before, and is to-day before our eyes,
laying its huge iron fingers around our little earth, and holding the
oceans in its hand, and brushing away mountains with a breath, until we
have Man at last playing all night through the sky, with visions and
airships and telescopes. His very words walk on the air with soft and
unseen feet.
It is the Hand-made spirit that creates machines. The machines
themselves are still the mighty children of the men who move and work in
the Hand-made spirit; and the men who glory in them, the men who bring
them forth, who think them out, and who create them, and who do the
great and mighty things with them, are still the Hand-made men.
* * * * *
This leads us up to the question we are all asking ourselves every day.
"How can a machine-made world be run in the spirit of a hand-made
world?" The particular form in which the question has been put, which is
taken from "Inspired Millionaires" is as follows:
"The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a machine which
makes it inherently unspiritual is based upon the experience of the
world; but it is, after all, a rather amateur and juvenile world with
machines as yet. Its ideas are in their first stages, and are based for
the most part upon the world's experience with second-rate men, working
in second-rate factories--men who have been bullied, and could be
bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines
themselves. No one would think of denying that men who let machines get
the better of them, either in their minds or their bodies, in any walk
of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. But it does not take a machine
to make a machine out of a man. Anything will do it if the man will let
it. Even the farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and
working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he buries
his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of
years, and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody--the farmer
who is master over the soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of
the soil himself, makes the soil express him. The next thing that is
going to happen is that every one is going to know the other kind of
mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic we largely
have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a
turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be classed as vegetable
life. He is not even organic matter except in a very small part of
himself.
"But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual.
It is the mechanical man beside the machine. A master at a piano (which
is a machine) makes it a spiritual thing; and a master at a
printing-press, like William Morris, makes it a free and artistic and
self-expressive thing."
I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory. I went
past miles of machines--great glass roofs of sunshine over them--and
looked in the faces of thousands of men. As I went through the machines
I kept looking to and fro between the machines and the men who stood
beside them, and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines
and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every machine, I
saw (any one could see it in that factory) was making a man of somebody.
One could see the spirit of the man who invented the machine, and the
spirit of the man who worked with it, and the spirit of the man who
owned it and who placed it there with the man, all softly, powerfully
running together. There were exceptions, and every now and then one
came, of course, upon the man who seemed to be simply another and
somewhat different contrivance or attachment to his machine--some part
that had been left over and thought of last, and had not been done as
well as the others; but the factory, taken as a whole, from the
manager's offices and the great counting-room, and from the tall
chimneys to the dump, seemed to me to have something fresh and human and
unwonted about it. It seemed to be a factory that had a look, a look of
its own. It was like a vast countenance. It had features, an expression.
It had an air--well, one must say it, of course, if one is driven to it:
the factory had a soul, and was humming it. Any one could have seen why
by going into his office and talking a little while with the owner, or
by even not talking to him--by seeing him look up from his desk. After
walking through several miles of his personality, and up and down and
down and up the corridors of his mind, one did not really need to meet
him except as a matter of form and as a finishing touch. One had been
visiting with him all along: to look in his face was merely to sum it
up, to see it all, the whole place, over again in one look. One did not
need to be surprised; one might have known what such a man would be
like--that such a factory could only be conceived and wrought by a man
of genius, a kind of lighted-up man. A man who had put not only
skylights in his buildings, but skylights in his men, would have to have
a skylight in himself (a skylight with a motor attachment, of course).
If one were to try to think in nature or in art of something that would
be like him--well, some kind of transcendental engine, I should say,
running softly, smoothly outdoors in a great sunshine, would have given
one a good idea of him. But, however this may be, it certainly would
have been quite impossible to go through his factory and ever say again
that machines do not and could not have souls, or at least over-souls,
and that men who worked with machines did not and could not have souls
as fast as they were allowed to.
A few days later I went through another factory, and I came out weary
and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about
machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them
as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney
first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great
cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted
nations, and began making for us--all around us, before our eyes, as
though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty, helpless
little religions--the hell we had ceased to believe in.
The hell is here, and is going to be here apparently as long as may be
necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more. If a hell on our
own premises, shut down hard over our lives here and now, is what is
necessary to make us religious and human once more, if we are reduced to
it, and if having a hard, literal hell--one of our own--is our only way
of seeing things, of fighting our way through to the truth, and of
getting once more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I
for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to hurry us
along and soon have it over with.
But while, like Ruskin, any one can look about the machines and see
hell, he can see hell to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven lined up close
beside it. The machines have come to have souls. The machines we can see
all about us have taken sides. We can all of us see the machines about
us to-day like vast looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the
world, the fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little
children, and the very fate of God; and everything about us we can see
turning at last on what we are doing with the machines that are about
us, and what we are letting our machines do with us.
* * * * *
It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side by side with
machines better from day to day, to consider what these two souls or
spirits in the machines are, and what they are doing and likely to do.
If one knows them and one sees them, and sees how they are working, it
is easier to take sides and join in and help.
It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery--the spirit
of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and
there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains,
conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one's work
over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost
impossible things. It is these two spirits that are fighting for the
possession and control of our machine civilization. I watch the machines
and the men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer who
is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who
is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one
side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and
there may be seen standing on the other side against them, battling for
our world, another small but mighty group made up of the labourer who
loves his work more than his wages, and the capitalist who loves the
thing he makes more than the profit. In other words, the fate of our
modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art
galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between
the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit
of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things.
It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers
the problem of living in one world or the other. If we are to take our
choice between living in a world run by tired men and a world run by
inspired ones, most of us will have little difficulty in deciding which
we would prefer, and which one we are bound to have. I have been moved
to come forward with the idea of inspired employers--or, as I have
called it, "Inspired Millionaires"--because it would seem to me inspired
employers are the very least we can ask for; for certainly if even our
employers cannot be inspired or rested and strong, we cannot expect
their overworked workmen to be. There is no hope for us but to write
our books and to live our lives in such a way as to help put the world
in the hands of the Strong, and to help keep its institutions and
customs out of the hands of the overworked. Overworked mechanical
employers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the problem
of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean, resentful, temporary
way.
And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are
working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that
I find myself taking sides. I will not live, if I can help it, in a
world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked
and mechanical men. Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole
generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the
machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come to ask of a
man, if he is to be at the head of a machine--whether it is a machine
called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a
machine called a nation--is, _Is he tired?_ I have cast my lot once for
all--and as it seems to me, too, the lot of the world--with those men
who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not
less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in
their imaginations, great men--men who are not driven to being
self-centred or driven to being class-centred, who can be world-centred
and inspired.
* * * * *
When one has made this decision, that one will work for a world in
control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought face to face with
a fact in our machine civilization which probably is quite new, and
which the spirit of man has never had to face in any age before.
For the first time in the history of the world, machinery has made it
possible for the world to get into the hands of the weak.
The Gun began it--the gun in a coward's hands may side with the weak,
and the machine in the hands of the weak may temporarily give the world
a list or a trend, and leave it leaning on the wrong side.
The Trust, for instance, which is really an extremely valuable
invention, and perhaps, on the whole, the most important machine of
modern times when it is used to defend the rights of the people, is a
very different thing when it is pointed at them. We have to-day, not
unnaturally, the spectacle of perhaps nine people out of ten getting up
and saying in chorus all through the world that Trusts ought to be
abolished; and yet it cannot honestly be said that there is really
anything about the trust-machine--any more than any other machine--that
is inherently wicked, or mechanical and heartless. Our real objection to
the trust-machines is not to the machines themselves, but to the fact
that they are, or happen to be (judging each Trust by itself), in the
hands of the weak and of the tired--of men, that is, who have no spirit,
no imagination about people; mechanical-minded men, who, at least in the
past, have taken the easiest and laziest course in business--that of
making all the money they can.
The moment we see the Trusts in the hands of the strong men, the men who
are unwilling to slump back into mere money-making, and who face daily
with hardihood and with joy the feat of weaving into business several
strands of value at once, making things and making money and making men
together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human happiness,
lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day and night.
If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under the machines,
we can only bring it to pass by doing everything we can in directors'
meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or as journalists--whatever we
may be--to keep the trust-machines in this world out of the hands of the
tired, weak, and mechanical-minded men.
And the things that have been happening to the trust-machines, or are
about to happen to them, have happened and are beginning to happen
before our eyes to the machines themselves. The machines of flame and
iron wheels and men in monstrous factories which the philosophers and
the poets and the very preachers have doomed our world with are passing
through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall be seen at
last through the dim struggle yielding themselves, bending their iron
wills to the same indomitable human spirit, the same slow, stern,
implacable will of the soul of man. They shall be inspired machines.
Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and
mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least
resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees
mechanical-minded. The men have not been able to work without machines
to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the
machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the
weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He
takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back
against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them,
their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which
they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them
long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into
machines themselves--as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization
out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers
as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood.
In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing--partly by
competition and partly by combination and by experience--employers who
are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe
in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours,
the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most
valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly
good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as
the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. These
employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live
men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones. If the great
slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not
mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them
categorically the little platitude (which even people who have observed
cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead,
and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead
ones.
But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments
or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business;
for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and
creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the
employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to
crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only
get and keep mechanical-minded ones.
* * * * *
It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on
among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired
ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the
mechanical-minded ones.
For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most
power to change the conditions of labour and to free the
mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are standing to-day on the
great strategical ground of our time. They hold the pass of human life.
People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy
and too inconvenient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate
their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on
insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in
with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with
which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people,
shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for
themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have
for themselves. If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle out
from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all that they can
in labour unions and in the press and at the polls to keep the machines
in this world out of the hands of tired and mechanical-minded owners.
But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or mechanicalness
in machines is not going to come from the employers on the one hand or
the employees on the other, but from having the employees in the Trades
Unions and the employers in the directors' meetings combining together
to keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all men,
whether directors or employees, who do not work harder than they have
to, and who have not the brains to do their work for something besides
money. The men who are like this will of course be pitied and duly
considered, but they will be kept where they will not have power to
control other men, or where by force of position or by mere majority
they will be able to bully other men to work as mechanically as they do.
Workmen who do not want to become machines can only better conditions by
combination with so-called inspired employers--employers who work harder
than they have to, who dote on the great human difficulties of work, who
choose not the easiest but the most perfect way of doing things, who are
never mechanical themselves, and will not let their men be if they can
help it. I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires. I
would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because
the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and
get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour
and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines are in
the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men--men of real
competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every
hand around us as the engines of war against evil, against slavery, the
whirling weapons of the Spirit.
Even now, in dreams have I stood and watched them--the will of the
people like a flail in their mighty hands--this vast army of
machines--go thundering past, driving the uninspired and mechanical off
the face of the earth.
CHAPTER IV
THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK
When I was arranging to slip over from New York and get something I very
much wanted in England last spring, I found myself held up suddenly in
all my plans because some men on the docks had decided that there was
something that they wanted too. They decided that I and thousands of
other people in New York would have to wait over on the shores of
America until they got it.
After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I took passage,
and in due time found myself standing on English soil, only to be
informed that, while I might be allowed perhaps at least to stand on
English soil, that was really as much as I could expect. I could not go
anywhere because a number of men on the railways had decided that there
was something they wanted and that I would have to wait till they got
it.
I could go down and look at the silent, cold locomotives on the rails,
and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked about getting up to
London, but these men had decided that there was something that they
wanted and I must wait.
I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men, and what had
Liverpool and London done to them?
After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into its little
ways, and was busily driving about and attending to my business as I had
planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted something, brought me up to a
full stop one rainy day, and said that they had decided that if I wanted
to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally
about in a 'bus, or worm my way through under the ground. As I
understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that
they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized
that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait
till they got theirs.
I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see
what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and
puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long,
hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them.
A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men
who wanted something--this time up in Lancashire. They had decided that
they wouldn't let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to
their work until they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way.
Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their
employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world
it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because--a certain
Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did
not think that they liked, the North Lancashire Trades Union. (The
general idea seemed to be to have all the others join in,
everywhere--fifty-four million spindles, and four hundred and forty
thousand looms--and wait and keep perfectly still until Mr. and Mrs.
Riley could make up their minds.)
And now this present week, morning after morning I take up my paper and
read that 500,000 miners want something. I look in my fire dubiously day
by day. I may have to go home to America in a few weeks to get warm.
Of course it is only fair to say at the outset that this little series
of impressions, or sketches, as one may say, of Civilization as I have
seen it since arriving in England are of such a nature that I need not
have come over to England to observe them. I would be the last to deny
that the same conveniences for being disagreeable and for getting in the
way and for making a general muss of Life can be offered almost any
time in my own hopeful and blundering country.
What more immediately concerns me in these things is that, having
happened, there can be no doubt that they have some valuable and worthy
meaning for me and for other people that I ought to get out of them.
One cannot stand by and see a great civilization like our
English-speaking civilization, with its ocean liners, cathedrals, and
aeroplanes, being undignified and inefficient before one's eyes and even
a little ridiculous, without trying to see if it does not serve some
purpose. There must be something beyond, something further and deeper,
something newborn about it, which shall be worth our while. Strikes seem
to be common people's way of thinking things out. If they had more
imagination, they would know what they were going to think beforehand,
without so much trouble perhaps; but so long as they have not, and so
long as it is really true perhaps that all these millions of levers and
wheels and engines will have to be stopped, so that the rich
mechanical-minded people who own them and the poor mechanical-minded
people who work with them can think better, we will have to be glad at
least that they are thinking, and we will have to hope that they are
thinking fast, and will soon have it over with. In the meantime, while
they are thinking, we can think too.
It is never fair to lump people together, and there are always
exceptions and special reasons to consider; but, speaking roughly, it is
fair to lay it down as a general principle that it is apt to be the more
common kind of employers and employees who find it difficult to think,
and who need strikes to think with. When we see 175,000 weavers striking
in Lancashire, and the Trades Unions insisting on the discharge of
Non-Union men, and employers being willing to recognize the Unions but
being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves
taking sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly we
take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent
inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the
employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour. We never know
when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our
next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly
about a new dispute in the morning paper, we had taken promptly one side
rather than the other, almost unconsciously, before we knew it we would
not perhaps be able to say at once. The other day I became a little
alarmed at myself at what looked at first like a kind of moral weakness,
and inability to stand still on one side or the other in the contest
between Labour and Capital; and I tried to think my way sternly through,
and decide why it was my mind seemed to waver from one side to the
other, and seemed so inconsistent and inefficient.
It seems to me I have just discovered a certain thread of consistency,
as I look back over many disputes.
As near as I can remember, I find the side that uses force, or that uses
the most force, invariably turns me against it. If, as I read, I find
that both sides are using force, I find myself against both sides. I
find myself wishing, in spite of my dislike of Socialism, that the
nation had the power, when a quarrelsome industry turns to the people in
the street and stops them in what they are doing, and tells the people
in the street that they cannot ride, or that they shall not sleep, or
that they cannot eat--when a quarrelsome industry insists on keeping the
whole world up all night because it has a Stomach Ache, I feel suddenly
that the people ought to be able to take the industry away and put it
into such hands that the people in the streets will be protected; into
hands that will make the industry behave so that it won't have a stomach
ache. An industry with a stomach ache always has it because somebody in
it has been over-eating and getting more than their share, and is
incompetent and unfit; and obviously it should have its freedom, its
privilege of selecting its food, taken away from it until it behaves.
Always allowing for exceptions, we may put it down as a general truth
that, when we find a cause using force or mere advantage of position, it
is because there is incompetence or lack of brains in those who conduct
it, and the cure lies, not in more force, but in more brains. One cannot
help being angered by force, because one knows that it is not only not a
remedy, but is itself the cause of all incompetence and blindness in
business. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up,
postpones coöperation, defeats the mutual interest which is the very
substance of business efficiency in a nation. Force is itself the injury
mounting up more and more, which it seeks to cure.
The most likely way to prevent industrial trouble would seem to be to
have employers and managers and foremen who have a genius for getting
men to trust and believe in them. We are getting smoke-consumers,
computing machines, and the next contrivance is going to be the employer
who has the understanding spirit, and who sees the cash value of human
genius, the value in the market of genius for being fair and getting on
with people. Arbitration boards are at best (as they themselves would
say) stupid and negative things, and though better than nothing, as a
rule merely postpone evil or change symptoms. No one can ever really
arbitrate for any one else either in industry or marriage except for a
moment. The trouble lies deep down inside the people who keep needing
arbitration. As long as these people are still there, and as long as
incompetent employers or employees are there, there is bound to be
trouble.
Turning out incompetent employers and incompetent labourers is the only
way. We are getting rid of them as rapidly as possible. All business in
the last resort turns on brains for being human and understanding
people. Business, as people say, is partly business and business is
partly economics, but more than anything else, in modern times, business
is psychology.
Success is the science of being believed in. Incompetent employers and
incompetent labourers are already being turned out, and are bound to be
turned out implacably more and more, by the competitive nature of modern
business. Under present conditions, if we have in each industry one
single competent employing firm, with brains for being fair and brains
for being far-sighted, and for being thoughtful of others--in short,
with brains for being believed in--the control of that industry soon
falls into their hands. People who use force instead of brains are
second-rate, are out of the spirit of the times, and are going by. And
this seems to be the spirit, too, which is to govern the more efficient
Labour Unions as well as the more efficient Trusts.
If it were possible to collect the names in England and America of the
men in each industry where brains were being personally believed in, we
would have a list of the leaders of England and America for the next
fifty years. Having a soul in business pays, not because it affords a
fine motive power, but because it affords a practical and conclusive
method of driving the devil out of business. He is being driven out of
industry, one industry at a time, by men who get on better without him;
and this is going to go on until the ability to do this--to crowd out
the devil, to get the devil out of machines and factories, out of the
machinery of organization--the power to keep the devil out of things and
out of people, is recognized by everybody as the greatest, most subtle,
most victorious and universal market-value in the world. The men who can
be believed in most will get the most business, and, what is still more
important, the men who can make men believe in them most will be able to
hire the employees who can be believed in most, and will get a monopoly
of the efficiency of the world; and though the men who can be believed
in less may be able to continue for a time to do their work and go
through all their old motions as well as they can, with all their old
lumbering, pathetic machinery of watching each other and suspecting each
other and fighting each other humped up on their backs, they can never
hope to compete with free-moving, honest men, who deal directly and
openly and in a few words for their employees, jobbers, consumers, and
the public, without any vast machinery of suspicion to bother with. It
is a most curious, local, temporary, back-county idea, the idea that,
for sheer industrial economy, for simple cheap conclusive finance, there
is anything on earth in business that will take the place of
old-fashioned human personal prestige--the prestige of the man who has a
genius for being believed in.
In a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen is an
instance of what is really the essential issue in every strike. The
bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated simply, was that they did
not believe in their employers. They believed that, if the precise
figures were known, their employers were getting more than their share.
On the other hand, the bottom fact about the employers was that they did
not and could not believe that, if the precise figures were known, the
cabmen were not getting more than their share. They insisted that the
cabmen should publish, or make known, the precise figures of their
extras. The cabmen declined to do it, and it made them look for the
moment perhaps as if they were wrong. But were they necessarily wrong?
Was it really true that they had any more reason to trust their
employers than their employers had to trust them? The cabmen might quite
honestly and justly have said to the owners: "What we want is an honest,
impeccable little dividend-recorder fastened on the back of every owner,
as well as on our machines and on us. Then we will publish our extras."
The determining and important fact of economics in the last analysis
always turns out to be some human fact, some fact about people. It is
really true that just now, in the present half-stage of
machine-industry, employers should nearly all be compelled to go about
in this world with fare-recorders on their backs. Employees too. This
would be the logical thing to do; and as it is impracticable, and as
every business must have certain elements of secrecy in it in order to
be competent, the only alternative is to have in charge men with enough
genius for being believed in and for taking measures to be believed
in--to keep employees believing in them, in spite of secrecy. Under
these conditions, it cannot be long before we will see in every business
the men being put forward on both sides who have a genius for being
believed in. Managers and superintendents will be put in office
everywhere who see the cash value, the economy, of the simple,
old-fashioned power in a man of a genius for being believed in;
employers with the power of inspiring more and better work from their
workmen; Labour men with the power of inspiring employers to believe in
them, of inspiring their employers to put up money, stock, or profits on
their belief--on the belief that workmen are capable of the highest
qualities of manhood: hard work, loyalty, persistence, and faith toward
a common end. I have preferred to have this inspired employer a
millionaire, because the more capital he has the more men he can employ,
and the more rapidly the other kind of millionaire, the blind,
old-fashioned butter of Labour, will be driven out of business.
Little can be done with one book, but at this special juncture, this
psychological moment for copartnership and the spirit of copartnership,
when all the world is touched to the quick by great strikes--at a time
when one can sit still and almost hear the nations think--there are some
of us who hope that the case we are trying to make out for copartnership
between Capital and Labour will be of use to those who are trying to do
things, and who for the moment find themselves foiled at every point by
men who have given up believing in human nature. We wish to put
ourselves on record, and to say that we do believe in human nature, and
that we believe not only that the inspired employer is going to be
evolved by the Crowd, but that the Crowd is going to recognize him and
is going to take sides with him, and that the Crowd is going to justify
him, make him succeed, is going to make his success its own success. In
other words, we believe in heroes, crowds, and goodness; in men of
heroic gifts--who are fit and meet to interpret the wills and desires
of crowds--who are great men or Crowd-Men, crowds in spirit themselves.
I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as it seems
to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our modern world, the
silent master of what the crowds shall think. It has seemed to me that
it is going to be a man of a marked type, and of a particular
temperament, to whom we will have to look in our new and crowded world
for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds.
As our whole labour problem to-day turns on our being able to touch the
imagination of Crowds, it may not be uninteresting in the next chapter
to consider what a man who can do this will probably be like and the
spirit in which he will do it.
CHAPTER V
THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE
When Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in New York the
other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still bigger event, as it
seems to some of us, was the way he felt about New York when he did it.
All New York could not make him show off. Hundreds of thousands of
people on roofs could look up at the sky over New York, for him to go
by, all that they liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying
anything, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious
business of the world.
Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in
the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are
reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and
wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads
everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and
funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap
its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to
him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his
little turn for it.
But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two million people
an encore, or even come back to bow. As one looked over from Mount Tom
one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and
houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright
slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole
great city under the sky, with its heads up!
A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a
long time. It takes a scientist to do these things. I wish there were
some poet who would do as well. Even a prophet up above New York--or
seer of men and of years--glinting his wings in the light, the New York
_Sun_ and the _World_ and the _Times_ down below, all their opera-glasses
trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly
about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst's church to
look up.... It would be something.
Probably there are very few capitals in the world--Paris, Berlin, or
London--that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved
by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so
interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether
anybody was looking--who would be capable of slipping off quietly and
leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to
business.
There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if
the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large
audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret
as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little.
We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how
he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it
some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on his soft
wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It is this Wilbur
Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these pages. It seems to
me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit which alone could make our
civilization great, and the spirit which alone could make crowds great.
It was the crowd that spoiled the way the Pole was discovered--all the
millions of people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a
show of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading about
it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the Pole; and when
Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these same people paid as much
as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with
him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his
attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and
there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole
was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and
the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur
Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he
went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the
planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience,
that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his
hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub
us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of
people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and
collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who understand
just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New
York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every
reason to expect that the crowd is to produce great leaders, and is to
become a great crowd, great and humble in spirit before God, before the
stars, and the atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the
meantime, however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be
leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand the way
Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from New York and left
the entire city with its heads up. Most newspaper men--men who are in
the habit of writing for a crowd and regarding a crowd quite
respectfully--will have wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have
let such a crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have
stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all
those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few
clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like
that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on
the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the
politicians of all countries are still wondering a little--if they ever
thought of it--how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world
wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the
world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true
scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood
just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The
great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and
architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation
builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists,
understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood.
Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and
thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi,
making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting
a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the
Hudson--understood.
And God, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered
America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over
His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a
very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross--He understood.
Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a
human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever
believed before.
Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those
admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still
alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright
made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly
who he was--and the people all about him--who were they? and what would
they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the
wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at
last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it,
slipping out of its cocoon at last--its little, old, faded, tied-down
cocoon, and sailing upon the air--sailing with him, sailing with the
churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History,
through the Invisible, through the Intangible--out to the Sun....
* * * * *
Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the
other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new
vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do.
He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly
moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and
new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and
built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip
off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all
the way round before their eyes. For three miles more--three miles
farther up above the ground--there was a space where human beings would
have to stop saying, "I can't," and "You can't," and "We can't." If
people want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say it
farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The
modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright
against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing
to expect.
Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be
invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty
thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he
had finished it. But the man had been invented--he invented himself.
He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he
did it himself--if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it.
Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president,
when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees
10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and
the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per
cent.
Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor
would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if
they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead
of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the
Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions. But
such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.
Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months old bear
chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-five years to make
a tree furnish its first chestnut before. About the same time that
Luther Burbank had succeeded in doing this with chestnuts a similar type
of man, who was not particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to
do something with human nature, who believed that human nature could
really be made to work, found a certain staple article that everybody
needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market. The producers were
not making anything on it. The wholesalers dealt in it without a profit,
and the retailers sold it without a profit, and merely because the other
things they sold were worthless without it.
----, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best position to
act, pointed out that, if the business was organized and everybody in it
would combine with everybody else and make it a monopoly, the price
could be made lower, and everybody would make money.
Of course this was a platitude.
It was also a platitude that human nature was not good enough, and could
not be trusted to work properly in a monopoly.
---- then proceeded to invent a monopoly--a kind of monopoly in which
human nature could be trusted.
He used a very simple device.
He began by being trusted himself.
Having personally and directly proved that human nature in a monopoly
could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he had to do was to
capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use the enormous market value
of the trust people had in him to gather people about him in the
business who had a good practical business genius for being trusted too
and for keeping trusted: everybody else was shut out.
The letter with which the monopoly was started (after dealing duly with
the technical details of the business) ended like this:
"... the soundest lines of business--_viz._, fair prices, fair profits,
fair division of profits, fair recognition of service, do as you would be
done by, money back where it is practicable, one's profit so small as to
make competition not worth while, open dealing, and open books."
He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and
which the people trusted. He was a Luther Burbank in money and people
instead of chestnuts. He raised the standard of impossibility in people,
and invented a new way for human nature to work.
CHAPTER VI
THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic
forms:
1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible--the spiritual--as
especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the
aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the
unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.
2. Imagination about the future--a new and extraordinary sense of what
is going to happen next in the world.
3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but
our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The
telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider
distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler
and wider motives.
Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree
the mastery of the spirit over matter.
Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years
an organic part of every man's life to-day.
The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to
give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is
going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are
going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in
human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.
CHAPTER VII
IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN
The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin
Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before
that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. The more
power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for
it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could
get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world
where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on
from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial
in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.
Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space,
and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved
people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they
were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea
that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of
little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing--the big, final,
and important thing--and that they and their churches and popes and
pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years
like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them
good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power.
Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the
world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the
skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea.
Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the
intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New
York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense,
the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers
in, out of space, out of hope, out of faith, the lives of men. The mere
fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the
world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and
to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women.... Then
miners, mariners, explorers, inventors--the impossible steamship, the
railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac
tunnels and Atlantic cables. The impossible became one of the habits of
modern life.
Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been
recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way.
But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a
horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously. And
so our Time has been fulfilled. We have had the stone age; we have had
the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and
sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's
visions, towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out
of their hearts.
* * * * *
Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield
Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly
some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging
to the man in the chair in front of me. I moved the satchel away, and
the smoke came up through the carpet. I spoke to the Pullman conductor
who was passing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the
great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white
silence in the fields. We got off the car--some of us--to see what had
happened, and to see if there was a hot box on the wheels. We found
that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what
had happened? Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a
human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it
was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the
car were set--twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve
wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that
heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way
from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind. As I came in I looked
again at the train--the long dull train that had been pulled along by
the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky--the long, dull,
heavy Train! And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it!
In Count Zeppelin's new airship the new social spirit has a symbol, and
in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm
foundation. The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his
power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real
genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius
over other men's wills. They are allied to the X-ray and the airship,
and gain their pre-eminence by their power of forecast and
invention--their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of
men and the spirit of the time. Even the painters have caught this
spirit. The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors
are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does
not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and
theosophy and Christian Science. The playwrights are touched by it; and
the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the
spirit of the audience. The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage
but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a
kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out
behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE
I remember looking over with H.G. Wells one night some time ago a set of
pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought
home with him. They were largely skyscrapers, big bridges, Niagaras, and
things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how
much more Mr. Wells had of the future of America in his own mind than he
could possibly buy in his photographs. What funny little films they were
after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those
pictures of the future of my country were! H.G. Wells himself, standing
in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of
America, than the pictures were.
The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen
is in people's faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago,
in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of
the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years--the next hundred
years--like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story
buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the
unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days,
flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the
vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn,
like sunshine around me.
This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America. The
solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily
sense in the streets of the future. And it has seemed to me that this
fact--whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in
England and in other nations--is what one might call, for lack of a
better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most
outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and
our philosophy about the world have now to reckon. Nothing can be seen
as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is
left out of it.
All power is rapidly coming to be based on news--news about human
nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels
by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and
by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless,
but it is in cipher--hence prophets, or men who have great
sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future,
platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are
world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to
the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years
hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be
true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older
days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the
man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet. But
to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on
to-morrow. The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed
farther along. A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary
now; he is a recognized force. Being a prophet is getting to be almost
smug and respectable.
We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so
great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a
ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is
put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made
President of a railroad. He swings the country as if it were his hat. We
see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the
skirts of Count Zeppelin. We only crucify a prophet now if he is a
hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead. Even then, we
would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except
the first twenty-five years of him.
The theory is no longer tenable that prophets must be necessarily
crucified. As a matter of history, most prophets have been crucified by
people; but it was not so much because of their prophecy as because
their prophecy did not have any first twenty-five years in it. They were
crucified because of a blank place or hiatus, not necessarily in their
own minds, but at least in other people's. People would have been very
glad to have their first twenty-five years' worth if they could have got
it. It is this first twenty-five years, or joining-on part, which is
most important in prophecy, and which has become our specialty in the
Western World. One might say, in a general way, that the idea of having
a first twenty-five years' section in truth for a prophet is a modern,
an almost American, invention. We are temperamentally a country of the
future, and think instinctively in futures; and perhaps it is not too
much to say (considering all the faults that go with it for which we are
criticized) that we have led the way in futures as a specialty, as a
national habit of mind; and though with terrific blunders perhaps have
been really the first people _en masse_ to put being a prophet on a
practical basis--that is, to supply the first twenty-five years'
section, or the next-thing-to-do section to Truth, to put in a kind of
coupling between this world and the next. This is what America is for,
perhaps--to put in the coupling between this world and the next.
In the former days, the strength of a man, or of an estate, or a
business, was its stability. In the new world, instead of stability, we
have the idea of persistence, and power lies not so much in solid
brittle foundation quality as in conductivity. Socially, men can be
divided into conductors--men who connect powers--and non-conductors--men
who do not; and power lies in persistence, in dogged flexibility,
adaptableness, and impressionableness. The set conservative class of
people, in three hundred years, are going to be the dreamers,
inventors--those who demonstrate their capacity to dream true, and who
hit shrewdly upon probabilities and trends and futures; and the power of
a man is coming to be the power of observing atmospheres, of being
sensitive to the intangible and the unknown. People are more likely to
be crucified two thousand years from now for wanting to stay as they
are. There used to be the inertia of rest; and now in its place, working
reciprocally in a new astonishing equilibrium, we step up calmly on our
vast moving sidewalk of civilization and swing into the inertia of
motion.
The inertia of men, instead of being that of foundations, conventions,
customs, facts, sogginess, and heaviness, is getting to be an inertia
now toward the future, or the next-thing-to-do. Most of us can prove
this by simply looking inward and taking a glimpse of our own
consciousness. Let a man draw up before his own mind the contents of his
own consciousness (if he has a motor consciousness), and we find that
the future in his life looms up, both in its motives and its character,
and takes about three quarters of the room of his consciousness; and
when it is not looming up, it is woven into everything he does. Even if
all the future were for was to help one understand the present and act
this immediate moment as one should, nine tenths of the power of seeing
a thing as it is, turns out to be one's power of seeing it as it is
going to be. In any normal man's life, it is really the future and his
sense of the future that make his present what it is.
History is losing its monopoly. It is only absorbed in men's minds--in
the minds of those who are making more of it--in parts or rather in
elements of all its parts.
The trouble with history seems to have been, thus far, that people have
been under the illusion that history should be taken as a solid. They
seem to think it should be taken in bulk. They take it, some of them, a
solid hundred years of it or so, and gulp it down. The advantage of
prophecy is that it cannot be taken as a solid by people who would take
everything so if they could. Prophecy is protected. People have to
breathe it, assimilate it, and get it into their circulation and make a
solid out of it personally, and do it all themselves. It is this process
which is making our modern men spiritual, interpretative, and powerful
toward the present and toward the past, and which is giving a body and
soul to knowledge, and is making knowledge lively and human, the kind of
knowledge (when men get it) that makes things happen.
CHAPTER IX
THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE
I would like to propose, as a basis for the judgment of men and events,
and as a basis for forecasting the next men and next events, and
arriving at a vision of action, a Theory of the World.
Every man has one.
Every man one knows can be seen doing his work in this world on a great
background, a kind of panorama or stage setting in his mind, made up of
history and books, newspapers, people, and experiences, which might be
called his Theory of the World.
It is his theory of the world which makes him what he is--his personal
judgment or personal interpretation of what the world is like, and what
works in it, and what does not work.
A man's theory as to why people do or do not do wrong is not a theory he
might in some brief disinterested moment, possibly at luncheon, take
time to discuss. His theory of what is wrong and of what is right, and
of how they work, touches the efficiency with which he works intimately
and permanently at every point every minute of his business day.
If he does not know, in the middle of his business day, what his theory
of the world--of human nature--is, let him stop and find out.
A man's theory of the world is the skylight or manhole over his work. It
becomes his hell or heaven--his day and night. He breathes his theory of
the world and breathes his idea of the people in it; and everything he
does may be made or may be marred by what, for instance, he thinks in
the long-run about what I am saying now on this next page. Whether he
is writing for people, or doing business with them over a counter, or
launching books at them, everything he does will be steeped in what he
believes about what I am saying now--it shall be the colour of the world
to him, the sound or timbre of his voice--what he thinks or can make up
his mind to think, of what I am saying--on this next page.
CHAPTER X
A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE
If the men who were crucifying Jesus could have been suddenly stopped at
the last moment, and if they could have been kept perfectly still for
ten minutes and could have thought about it, some of them would have
refused to go on with the crucifixion when the ten minutes were over. If
they could have been stopped for twenty minutes, there would have been
still more of them who would have refused to have gone on with it. They
would have stolen away and wondered about The Man in their hearts. There
were others who were there who would have needed twenty days of being
still and of thinking. There were some who would have had to have twenty
years to see what they really wanted, in all the circumstances, to do.
People crucified Christ because they were in a hurry.
They did what they wanted to do at the moment. So far as we know, there
were only two men who did what they would have wished they had done in
twenty years: there was the thief on the other cross, who showed The Man
he knew who He was; and there was the disciple John, who kept as close
as he could. John perhaps was thinking of the past--of all the things
that Christ had said to him; and the man on the other cross was thinking
what was going to happen next. The other people who had to do with the
crucifixion were all thinking about the thing they were doing at the
moment and the way they felt about it. But the Man was Thinking, not of
His suffering, but of the men in front of Him, and of what they could be
thinking about, and what they would be thinking about afterward--in ten
minutes, in twenty minutes, in twenty days, or in twenty years; and
suddenly His heart was flooded with pity at what they would be thinking
about afterward, and in the midst of the pain in His arms and the pain
in His feet He made that great cry to Heaven: "Father, forgive them;
they know not what they do!"
It is because Christians have never quite believed that The Man really
meant this when He said it that they have persecuted the Jews for two
thousand years. It is because they do not believe it now that they blame
Mr. Rockefeller for doing what most of them twenty years ago would have
done themselves. It was one of the hardest things to do and say that any
one ever said in the world, and it was said at the hardest possible time
to say it. It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have
said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has
ever been said since the world began. It has seemed to me the most
literal, and perhaps the most practical, truth that has been said since
the world began.
It goes straight to the point about people. It gives one one's
definition of goodness both for one's self and for others. It gives one
a program for action.
Except in our more joyous and free moments, we assume that when people
do us a wrong, they know what they are about. They look at the right
thing to do and they look at the wrong one, and they choose the wrong
one because they like it better. Nine people out of ten one meets in the
streets coming out of church on Sunday morning, if one asked them the
question plainly, "Do you ever do wrong when you know it is wrong?"
would say that they did. If you ask them what a sin is, they will tell
you that it is something you do when you know you ought not to do it.
But The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin that has ever
been committed, seemed to think that when men committed a sin, it was
because they did not really see what it was that they were doing. They
did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did not do what they
would have wished they had done in twenty years.
I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in
twenty years--twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, or twenty
seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe.
It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or
admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting too rich, to point
out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not
have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great
permanently successful business. His sin has consisted in his not taking
pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his
mind and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem to be
better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our
modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but
merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man. There are things that
he has not thought of that every one else has.
We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great
business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the most
colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced. To
point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would
seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has
not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly
two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow
for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one thing that the world could accept
gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a
great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in
time how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller leads in
this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly
being the world's most lonely man.
Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human
beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation--eighty million people; to
feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly
wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money,
peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral
curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the
most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he
really looked in all the world--this has been Mr. Rockefeller's
experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty
years.
Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as boning down
to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to
do. Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable
times for getting his own attention will be good. Any one else from
outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of
expression or--of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will
make him good.
CHAPTER XI
DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS
If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the
World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them
and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people
could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they
were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be
good in the morning.
It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked.
Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people,
when a vice tempted them would be to step out, look at it in its window
a minute--possibly take a look too at the other window--and they would
be good.
If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a
step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window--see
it lying there, its twenty years' evil, its twenty days', its twenty
minutes' evil, all branching up out of it--he would be good.
When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really
see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically.
Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the
right is.
A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had
just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge
yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a
prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of
the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small
sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A
letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do
it. He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself
into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been
the regular and conventional thing to do under the circumstances. But it
occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind,
that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad
presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant. He thought
he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself
more fully and adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven
feet long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a
landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with
trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph--a long panorama of
the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of
yellowness trailing through the city. The box containing the rolls was
sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the
bottom of the pictures.
A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his
suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at
once.
If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had
furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to
do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just the right
slide or possibly try three or four up there on his canvas a second, no
one would ever have any trouble in doing right.
* * * * *
It is not too much to say that this way of looking at evil and good--at
the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a man once believes
it, and if a man once practises it as a part of his daily practical
interpretation and mastery of men, will soon put a new face for him on
nearly every great human problem with which he finds his time
confronted. We shall watch the men in the world about us--each for their
little day--trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral
experiments, and we shall see the men--all of the men and all of the
good and the evil in the men this moment--daily before our eyes working
out with an implacable hopefulness the fate of the world. We know that,
in spite of self-deceived syndicalism and self-deceived trusts, in spite
of coal strikes and all the vain, comic little troops of warships around
the earth, peace and righteousness in a vast overtone are singing toward
us.
We are not only going to have new and better motives in our modern men,
but the new and better motives are going to be thrust upon us. Every man
who reads these pages is having, at the present moment, motives in his
life which he would not have been capable of at first. Why should not a
human race have motives which it was not capable of at first? If one
takes up two or three motives of one's own--the small motives and the
large ones--and holds them up in one's hand and looks at them quietly
from the point of view of what one would wish one had done in twenty
years, there is scarcely one of us who would choose the small ones.
People who are really modern, that is, who look beyond themselves in
what they do to others, who live their lives as one might say six people
away, or sixty people farther out from themselves, or sixty million
people farther, are becoming more common everywhere; and people who look
beyond the moment in what they do to another day, who are getting more
and more to live their lives twenty years ahead, and to have motives
that will last twenty years, are driven to better and more permanent
motives.
Thinking of more people when we act for ourselves means ethical
consciousness or goodness, and better and more permanent motives.
In the last analysis, the men who permanently succeed in business will
have to see farther than the other people do.
Men like John D. Rockefeller, who have made failures of their lives, and
have not been able to conduct a business so as to keep it out of the
courts, have failed because they have had imagination about Things but
not imagination about people.
The man who is just at hand will not do over again what Mr. Rockefeller
has done. He will at least have made some advance in imagination over
Rockefeller.
Mr. Rockefeller became rich by coöperating with other rich men to
exploit the public. The man of the immediate future is going to get
rich, as rich as he cares to be, by coöperating not merely with his
competitors--which is as far as Rockefeller got--but by coöperating with
the people.
It is a mere matter of social imagination, of seeing what succeeds most
permanently, and honourably, of putting what has been called "goodness"
and what is going to be called "Business" together. In other words,
social imagination is going to make a man gravitate toward mutual
interest or coöperation, which is the new and inevitable level of
efficiency and success in business. Success is being transferred from
men of millionaire genius to men of social and human genius. The men who
are going to compete most successfully in modern competitive business
are competing by knowing how to coöperate better than their competitors
do. Employers, employees, consumers, partners, become irresistible by
coöperation; only employers, employees, consumers, and partners who
coöperate better than they do can hope to compete with them. The Trusts
have already crowded out many small rivals because, while their
coöperation has been one-sided, they have coöperated with more people
than their rivals could; and the good Trusts, in the same way are going
to crowd out the bad Trusts, because the good ones will know how to
coöperate with more people than the bad ones do. They will have the
human genius to see how they can coöperate with the people instead of
against them.
They are going to invent ways of winning and keeping the confidence of
the people, of taking to this end a smaller and more just share of
profits. And they are going to gain their leadership through the wisdom
and power that goes with their money, and not through the money itself.
It is the spiritual power of their money that is going to count; and
wealth, instead of being a millionaire disease, is going to become a
great social energy in democracy. We are going to let men be rich
because they represent us, not because they hold us up, and because the
hold-up has gone by, that is: getting all one can, and service--getting
what we have earned--has come in.
The new kind and new size of politician will win his power by his faith,
like U. Ren of Oregon; the new kind and new size of editor is going to
hire with brains a millionaire to help him run his paper; and the new
kind and new size of author, instead of tagging a publisher, will be
paid royalties for supplying him with new ideas and creating for him new
publics. Power in modern life is to be light and heat and motion, and
not a gift of being heavy and solid. Even Money shall lose its inertia.
We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and new sizes of
men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some of them will be poor,
and no one will care. We will simply look at the man and at what size he
is.
If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will. Sometimes one
suspects that the reason goodness is not more popular in modern life is
that it has been taken hold of the wrong way. Perhaps when we stop
teasing people, and take goodness seriously and calmly, and see that
goodness is essentially imagination, that it is brains, that it is
thinking down through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to
be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or
imagination at all, it will be popular.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been
saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of
the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to
maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of
possibility, and the present strength of manhood. But I can only hope
that these objections that people make will turn out like mine. I have
been making objections all my life, as all idealists must--only to watch
with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of
going by.
People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they
were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto! The automobile becomes
silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty.
Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the balloon succeeds,"
we said, "there will be no way of going just where and when you want
to." And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the
balloon goes on.
"Aeroplanes," we said, "may be successful, but the more successful they
are, the more dangerous, and the more danger there will be of
collisions--collisions in the dark and up in the great sky at night." And,
presto! man invents the wireless telegraph, and the entire sky can be
full of whispers telling every airship where all the other airships are.
Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to do with
monopoly. Presto! there is suddenly evolved an entirely new type of
monopolist--the man who can be rich and good; the millionaire who has
invented a monopoly that serves the owners, the producers and employees,
the distributors and the consumers alike. An American railway President
has been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat in
2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. Some one,
almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as
dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York--who knows?--shall be
carried around in one railway President's vest pocket.
CHAPTER XII
NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN
It would be hard to overestimate the weariness and cynicism and despair
that have been caused in the world by its more recklessly hopeful
men--the men who plump down happily anywhere and hope, the optimists who
are merely slovenly in their minds about evil. But the optimism that
consists in putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds
and in giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the
optimism that consists in having one's brain move vigorously through
disagreeable facts--organize them into the other facts with which they
belong and with which they work--is worthy of consideration. Many of us,
who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things.
When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of
being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little, of course, having
all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not
really seeing through them!
So, though one ought not to, one does feel a little superior--even with
the best intentions--when one is being discouraged.
But the trouble with pessimism is that it is only at the moment when one
is having it that one really enjoys it, or feels in this way about it.
Perhaps I should not undertake to speak for others, and should only
speak for myself; but I can only bear witness, for one, that every time
in my life that I have broken through the surface a little, and seen
through to the evil, and found myself suddenly and astutely discouraged,
I have found afterward that all I had to do was to see the same thing a
little farther over, set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in
larger or more full relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged.
So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling discouraged
about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed it, too, in watching
other people--men I know. If I could take all the men I know who are
living and acting as if they believed big things about people to-day,
men who are daily taking for granted great things in human nature, and
put them in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then
take all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one
another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people would
find it hard to tell which group would be more clever. Possibly the
reason more of us do not spend more time in being hopeful about the
world is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the
moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees
facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in
which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to
turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down
where they belong in one's mind, the way they would in real time.
So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked
forward, I know the way I am going.
I am going to hope.
It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see
through ones' self; the only way to see through other people and to see
past them, and to see with them and for them--is to hope.
So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put
it to myself.
There are four questions with which day by day we stand face to face:
1. Does human nature change?
2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision?
3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and
new sizes of men?
4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical
and make a new world?
Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this moment, on
how he decides these questions. If he says Yes, he will live one kind of
life, he will live up to his world. If he says No, he will have a mean
world, smaller-minded than he is himself, and he will live down to it.
This is what the common run of men about us--the men of less creative
type in literature, in business, and in politics--are doing. They do not
believe human nature is changing. They are living down to a world that
is going by. They are living down to a world that is smaller than they
are themselves. They are trying to make others do it. They answer the
question "Does human nature change?" by "No!" Wilbur Wright, when he
flew around over the heads of the people in New York a few years ago, a
black speck above a whole city with its heads up, answered "Yes!"
But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped short with
a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air instead of the
ground.
The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright's flying was
that he changed the minds of the whole human race in a few minutes about
one thing. There was one particular thing that for forty thousand years
they knew they could not do. And now they knew they could.
It naturally follows--and it lies in the mind of every man who
lives--that there must be other particular things. And as nine men out
of ten are in business, most of these particular things are going to be
done in business.
The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching.
It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world.
One sees everywhere business men going about the street expecting new
things of themselves. They expect things of the very ground, and of the
air, and of one another they had not dared expect before.
The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had been the
president of an Electric Light Company for twenty years, who had
invented a public service corporation that worked. Since he took office
and dictated the policy of the Company, every single overture for more
expensive equipment in the electric lighting of the city has come from
the Company, and every single overture for reducing the rate to
consumers has come from the company.
The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest _per capita_
in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country; and,
incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let them have
electricity without metres, and the people so trust the Company that
they save its electricity as they would their own.
Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if he could, is
brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains from leaving his lights
burning all night when he goes to bed he is not merely saving the
Company's electricity but his own. He knows that he is reducing his own
and everybody's price for electricity, and not merely increasing the
profits of the Company.
It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day,
every night, turning on and turning off their lights.
The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly,
influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that
city--the motives and assumptions with which they bargain with one
another--that might be envied by twenty churches.
All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful
personality--the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other
ages--had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in
business. He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business
the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in
poetry or more easy and conventional ways.
If he could not have made the electric light business say the things
about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he
would have had to make some other business say them.
One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was
the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that
could be effected by being believed in.
He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other
people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being
believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in
people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.
He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at
a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he
took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he
should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his
own way for three years--in believing in people, and in inventing ways
of getting believed in as much as he liked.
The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as
he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in
his face.
He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a
hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.
By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing
that belief, he had invented a Corporation--a Public Service
Corporation--that had a soul, and consequently worked.
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip--drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
CHAPTER I
SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD
It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.
Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.
But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the
crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is.
_I want to be good._
And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and
live all alone on an island in the sea.
I go a step further.
I believe that the crowds want to be good.
But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the
sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am
going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member
of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a
mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other
what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and
we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite
agreement on our two main points.
1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience
for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want
to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and
exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world
hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular
planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful,
squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new,
clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient
people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great,
soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy,
inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be
done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same
people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith,
Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and
Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are
Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses,
Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing
that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a
little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had
to begin with ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to
circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting
people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to
people about goodness.
We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some.
Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But the trouble
always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know it, or at least
one does not know which it is. The best we can do with goodness, some of
us, if we want it to show more quickly or to hurry people along in
goodness more, is to show them other people's.
I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know my plumber
or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin slowly but surely to be
a very different place.
My plumber is a genius.
CHAPTER II
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT?
Perhaps it will seem a pity to spoil a book--one that might have been
really rather interesting--by putting the word "goodness" down flatly in
this way in the middle of it.
And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with business.
I would not yield first place to any one in being tired of the word. I
think, for one, that unless there is something we can do to it, and
something we can do to it now, it had better be dropped.
But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a
word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it.
I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and
swearing softly, I regret to say) when it affected me like a Hymn Tune.
And there is Non, too.
I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and
we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend
Sunday with M---- in North Carolina. The first thing he said was, when
we were seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world
under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his
wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that afternoon, and he had
faithfully promised to be there. But a weekend in North Carolina
appealed to him, and afternoon tea--well, he explained to me, crossing
his legs and beaming at me all over as if he were a whole genial,
successful afternoon tea all by himself--afternoon tea did not appeal to
him.
He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person.
As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with
sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every minute
all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we heard from him),
we called him the Non-Gregarious Person, and every time he piled on one
more story, we reminded him how non-gregarious he was. We called him
Non-Gregarious all the way after that--Non for short.
This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has been Non ever
since.
* * * * *
I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being
the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a
while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who
let themselves go, a very serious person. When he talked about his
business, he was even religious. Not that he had any particular
vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when
he spoke of business--his own business--that almost startled me at first.
He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as
being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself.
Now Non is a builder or contractor.
* * * * *
For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed
infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house. No better
arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in
more kinds of people at once and for life, has ever been invented
probably than building a house. No man has been educated, or has been
really tested in this world, until he has built a house. I submit this
proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to
try it. There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later
will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with
him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such
as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You
enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them. Everything you come
upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on
in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what
is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any
man who is sensitive to houses and to people and who would sit down in
his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think
of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into
it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of
it, and never enter that house again.
This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their houses, and how
they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt
hateful about the world.
I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found he was not
as good as some people are at talking about himself, but the subject was
interesting. He began his career building houses for people, as nearly
every one does. The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact
commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each
man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man
has charged the other man. Every house that got built in this way seemed
to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done
by. Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man. He merely
noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person
that he had dealings with, from the bottom to the top of the house,
seemed to make him feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be,
a grafter. He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through
the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a better
man, and studying on how it could be managed. His own first houses made
him see things. They proved to be the making of him, and if similar
houses have not made similar men, it is their fault. It might not be
reassuring to the men who are now living in these first houses to dwell
too much on this (and I might say he did not build them alone), but it
seems to be necessary to bring out the most striking thing about Non in
his first stage as a business man, _viz._: He hated his business. He
made up his mind he either would make the business the kind of business
he liked or get out of it. I did not gather from the way he talked about
it that he had any idea of being an uplifter. He merely had, apparently,
an obstinate, doggedly comfortable idea about himself, and about what a
thing would have to be, in this world, if he was connected with it. He
proposed to enjoy his business. He was spending most of his time at it.
Other people have had this same happy thought, but they seem to manage
to keep on being patient. Non could not fall back on being patient, and
it made him think harder.
The first thing he thought of was that doing his business as he thought
he ought to, if he once worked his idea out, and worked it down through
and organized it, might pay. He almost had the belief that people might
pay a man a little extra, perhaps, for enjoying his business. It cannot
be said that he believed this immediately. He merely wanted to, and
worked toward it, and merely contrived new shrewd ways at first of being
able to afford it. Gradually he began to notice that the more he enjoyed
his business, the more he enjoyed it with his whole soul and body,
enjoyed it down to the very toes of his conscience, the more people
there were who stepped into his office and wanted him to enjoy his
business on their houses. It was what they had been looking for for
years--for some builder who was really enjoying his business. And the
more he enjoyed his business in his own particular way--that of building
a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and for less
money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end of it--the more
his business grew.
I do not know that there would be any special harm in speaking of Non's
idea--of just doing as you would be done by--in more moral or religious
language, but it is not necessary. And I find I take an almost religious
joy in looking at the Golden Rule at last as a plain business
proposition. All that happened was that Non was original, saw something
that everybody thought they knew, and acted as if it were so.
Theoretically one would not have said that it would be original to take
an old platitudinous law like the law of supply and demand, and act as
if it were so; but it was. At the time Non was beginning his career
there was nothing in the building-market people found harder to hire
than honesty. Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy
and important men who did not have time to be detectives, wanted. There
did not seem to be any one very actively supplying the demand. A big
market, a small supply, and almost no competition. Non stepped in and
proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a house as
literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew
all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business
is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the
man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business. It
is not necessary to go into the details. Any reader who has ever built a
house knows the details. Just take them and turn them around.
What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain
business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without
any fine moral frills or remarks. He has done the thing because he liked
it and believed in it.
But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making
money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he
can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little
space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does
not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"--I say
to myself cheerfully--"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's
office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he
will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or
idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good
long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he
tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours
how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have
just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still
study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and
all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself,
lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he
is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of
their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a
thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows
and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a
very trivial occupation--like amusing one's self with a pretty little
safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one's
coloured bits of phrases at a world! Of course, it need not be so. But
there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so.
In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best
just now.
At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not.
Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest,
informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more hopeful about
religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit, and who are being good
all the week, can even be good on Sunday.
There are many ways of resting or leaning back upon one's instincts and
getting over to one's religion or perspective about the world. Mount Tom
(which is in my front yard, in Massachusetts) helps sometimes--with a
single look.
When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan Tower, the
Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and at Non.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in
Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever
saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill
made out by him.
It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making himself succeed in
this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure religion, a difficult,
fresh, and stupendous religion.
Now these many days have I watched him going up and down through all the
empty reputations, the unmeaning noises of the world, living his life
like some low, old-fashioned, modest Hymn Tune he keeps whistling--and I
have seen him in fear, and in danger, and in gladness being shrewder and
shrewder for God, now grimly, now radiantly, hour by hour, day by day
getting rich with the Holy Ghost!
CHAPTER III
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING?
People are acquiring automobiles, Oriental rugs, five-hundred-dollar
gowns, more rapidly just now than they are goodness, because
advertisements in this present generation are more readable than
sermons, and because the shop windows on Fifth Avenue can attract more
attention than the churches. The shop windows make people covetous.
If the goodness that one sees, hears about, or goes by does not make
other people covetous, does not make them wish they had it or some just
like it, it must be because there is something the matter with it, or
something the matter with the way it is displayed.
If the church shop windows, for instance, were to make displays of
goodness up and down the great Moral Fifth Avenue of the world--well,
one does not know; but there are some of us who would rather expect to
see the Goodness Display in the windows consisting largely of Things
People Ought Not to Want.
There would be rows and tiers of Not-Things piled up--Things for People
Not to Be, and Things for People Not to Do.
Goodness displayed in this way is not interesting. Perhaps this is one
of the reasons why the word Goodness spoils a thing for people--so many
people--when it is allowed in it.
Possibly it is because we are apt to think of the good people, and of
the people who are being good, as largely keeping from doing something,
or as keeping other people from doing something--as negative. Their
goodness seems to consist in being morally accurate, and in being very
particular just in time, and in a kind of general holding in.
We do not naturally or off-hand--any of us--think of goodness as having
much of a lunge to it. It is tired-looking and discouraged, and pulls
back kindly and gently. Or it teases and says, "Please"--God knows how
helpless it is, and I for one am frank to say that, as far as I have
observed, He has not been paying very much attention to good people of
late.
I do not believe I am alone in this. There must be thousands of others
who have this same half-guilty, half-defiant feeling of suspiciousness
toward what people seem to think should be called goodness. Not that we
say anything. We merely keep wondering--we cannot see what it is,
exactly, about goodness that should make it so depressing.
In the meantime we hold on. We do not propose to give up believing in
it. Perhaps, after all, all that is the matter with goodness in the
United States is the people who have taken hold of it.
They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting.
We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people
who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would
make it hum!
I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been
sitting (in some churches), or associating, owing to circumstances, with
very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the
street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk,
businesslike man I see going by, and saying, "My dear sir, I do wish
that _you_ would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all,
something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but
these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible
mess of it!"
And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day,
and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other
business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more
particular. I went straight to the point. "Here are at least sixteen
valuable efficient brands of goodness in America," I said, "all worth
their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really
using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I
believe with my whole soul in them all, and I believe thousands of other
men do, or are ready to, the moment some one makes a start."
I pulled out a little list of items which I had made out and put down on
a piece of paper, and handed them over to him, and said I wished he
would take a few of them--the first five or six or so--and make them
work.
He already had, I found, made two or three of the harder ones work.
I would not have any one suppose for a moment that I am presenting Lim
as a kind of business angel.
No one who knows Lim thinks of him, or would let anybody else think of
him, as being a Select Person, as being particularly or egregiously what
he ought to be. This is one reason I have picked him out. Being good in
a small private way, just as a small private end in itself, may be
practicable perhaps without dragging in people who are not quite what
they ought to be. But the moment one tries to make goodness work, one
comes to the fact that it must be made to work with what we have. We
have a great crowd of unselected people, people both good and bad, and
the first principle in making goodness work (instead of being merely
good) seems to be to believe that goodness is not too good for anybody.
Anybody who can make it work can have it, and what goodness seems to
need, especially in America and England just now, is people who do not
feel that they must at all hazards look good. Whatever happens, whatever
else we do in any general investment or movement we may be making with
goodness, we must let these people in. If there is one thing rather than
another that those of us who know Lim all rely on and like, it is that
nothing can ever make him slump down into looking good. We often find
him hard to make out--everything is left open and loose and unlabelled
in Lim's moral nature. The only really sure way any one can tell when
Lim is being good is, that whenever he is being good he becomes suddenly
and unexpectedly interesting. His goodness is daring, unexpected, and
original. One has the feeling that it may break out anywhere. It is
always doing things that everybody said could not be done before. It is
true that some people are dazed, and no one can ever seem to feel sure
he knows what it is that is going on in Lim when he is being good, or
that it is goodness. He merely keeps watching it. There is a certain
element of news, of freshness, of gentle sensation, in his goodness. It
leads to consequences. And there always seems to be something about
Lim's goodness which attracts the attention of people, and makes people
who see it want it. So when I speak of goodness in this book, and put it
down as the basis of the power of getting men to do as one likes, I do
not deny that I am taking the word away and moving it over from its
usual associations. I do not mean by a good act, a good-looking act, but
an act so constituted that it makes good. For the purpose of this book I
would define goodness as efficiency. Goodness is the quality in a thing
that makes the thing go, and that makes it go so that it will not run
down, and that nothing can stop it.
There is the inefficiency of lying, for instance, and the inefficiency
of force, or bullying.
CHAPTER IV
PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR
My theory about the Liar is that it is of no use to scold him or blame
him. It merely makes him feel superior. He should be looked upon quietly
and without saying anything as a case of arrested development. What has
happened to him is that he merely is not quite bright about himself, and
has failed to see how bright (in the long run) other people are.
When a man lies or does any other wrong thing, his real failure consists
not in the wrongdoing itself, but in his failure to take pains to focus
his mind on the facts in himself, and in the people about him, and see
what it really is that he would wish he had done, say in twenty years.
It seems to be possible, after a clumsy fashion, to find out by a study
of ourselves, and of our own lives and of other men's lives, what we
would wish we had done afterward. Everything we have learned so far we
have learned by guessing wrong on what we have thought we would want
afterward. We have gradually guessed what we wanted better. We began our
lives as children with all sorts of interesting sins or moral guesses
and experiments. We find there are certain sins or moral experiments we
almost never use any more because we found that they never worked. We
had been deceived about them. Most of us have tried lying. Since we were
very small we have tried in every possible fashion--now in one way, now
in another--to see if lying could not be made to work. By far the
majority of us, and all of us who are the most intelligent, are not
deceived now by our desire to tell lies. Perhaps we have not learned
that all lies do not pay. A child tells a lie at first as if a lie had
never been thought of before. It is as if lying had just been invented,
and he had just thought what a great convenience it was, and how many
things there were that he could do in that way. He discovers that the
particular thing he wants at the moment, he gets very often by lying.
But the next time he lies, he cannot get anything. If he keeps on lying
for a long time, he learns that while, after a fashion, he is getting
things, he is losing people. Finally, he finds he cannot even get
things. Nobody believes in him or trusts him. He cannot be efficient. He
then decides that being trusted, and having people who feel safe to
associate with him and to do business with him, is the thing he really
wants most; and that he must have first, even if it is only a way to get
the other things he wants. It need not be wondered that the Trusts,
those huge raw youngsters of the modern spirit, have had to go through
with most of the things other boys have. The Trusts have had to go
through, one after the other, all their children's diseases, and try
their funny little moral experiments on the world. They thought they
could lie at first. They thought it would be cunning, and that it would
work. They did not realize at once that the bigger a boy you were, even
if you were anonymous, the more your lie showed and the more people
there were who suffered from it who would be bound sooner or later to
call you to account for it.
The Trusts have been guessing wrong on what they would wish they had
done in twenty years, and the best of them now are trying to guess
better. They are trying to acquire prestige by being far-sighted for
themselves and far-sighted for the people who deal with them, and are
resting their policy on winning confidence and on keeping faith with the
people.
They not only tried lying, like all young children, but they tried
stealing. For years the big corporations could be seen going around from
one big innocent city in this country to another, and standing by
quietly and without saying a word, putting the streets in their pockets.
But no big corporation of the first class to-day would begin its
connection with a city in this fashion. Beginning a permanent business
relation with a customer by making him sorry afterward he has had any
dealings with you, has gone by as a method of getting business in
England and America.
One of our big American magazines not long ago, which had gained
especially high rates from its advertisers because they believed in it,
lied about its circulation. The man who was responsible was not
precisely sure, gave nominal figures in round numbers, and did what
magazines very commonly did under the circumstances; but when the
magazine owner looked up details afterward and learned precisely what
the circulation was for the particular issue concerned, he sent out
announcements to every firm in the country that had anything in the
columns of that issue, saying that the firm had lied, and enclosing a
check for the difference in value represented. Of course it was a good
stroke of business, eating national humble pie so, and it was a cheap
stroke of business too, doing some one, sudden, striking thing that no
one would forget. Not an advertisement could be inserted and paid for in
the magazine for years without having that action, and the prestige of
that action, back of it. Every shred of virtue there was in the action
could have been set one side, and was set one side by many people,
because it paid so well. Every one saw suddenly, and with a faint breath
of astonishment, how honesty worked. But the main point about the
magazine in distinction from its competitors seems to have been that it
not merely saw how honesty worked, but it saw it first and it had the
originality, the moral shrewdness and courage, to put up money on it. It
believed in honesty so hard that suddenly one morning, before all the
world, it risked its entire fortune on it. Now that it has been done
once, the new level or standard of candour may be said to have been
established which others will have to follow. But it does not seem to me
that the kind of man who has the moral originality to dare do a thing
like this first need ever have any serious trouble with competitors. In
the last analysis, in the competition of modern business to get the
crowd, the big success is bound to come to men in the one region of
competition where competition still has some give in it--the region of
moral originality. Other things in competition nowadays have all been
thought of except being good. Any man who can and will to-day think out
new and unlooked-for ways of being good can get ahead, in the United
States of practically everybody.
CHAPTER V
PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY
The stage properties that go with a bully change as we grow older. When
one thinks of a bully, one usually sees a picture at once in one's mind.
It is a big boy lording it over a little one, or getting him down and
sitting on him.
Everybody recognizes what is going on immediately, pitches in nobly and
beautifully, and licks the big boy.
The trouble with the bully in business has been that he is not so simple
and easy to recognize. He is apt to be more or less anonymous and
impersonal, and it is harder to hit him in the right place.
But when one thinks of it perhaps this pleasant and inspiring duty is
not so impracticable as it looks, and is presently to be attended to.
Any man who relies, in getting what he wants, on being big instead of
being right, is a bully.
Modern business is done over a wide area, with thousands of persons
looking on, and for a long time and with thousands of people coming
back. The man who relies on being big instead of being right, and who
takes advantage of his position instead of his inherent superiority, is
soon seen through. His customers go over to the enemy. A show of force
or a hold-up works very well at the moment. Being bigger may be more
showy than being right, and it may down the Little Boy, but the Little
Boy wins the crowd.
Business to-day consists in persuading crowds.
The Little Boy can prove he is right. All the bully can prove is that he
is bigger.
The Liar in Business is already going by.
Now it is the turn of the bully.
Not long ago a few advertisers in a big American city wanted unfairly
low rates for advertisements and tried to use force with the newspapers.
Three or four of the biggest shops combined and gave notice that they
would take their advertising away unless the rates came down. After a
little, they drew in a few other lines of business with them, and
suddenly one morning five or six full pages of advertisements were
withdrawn from every newspaper in the city. The newspapers went on
publishing all the news of the city except news as to what people could
buy in department stores, and waited. They made no counter-move of any
kind, and said nothing and seven days slipped past. They held to the
claim that the service they performed in connecting the great stores
with the people of the city was a real service, that it represented
market value which could be proved and paid for. They kept on for
another week publishing for the people all the news of the city except
the news as to how they could spend their money. They wondered how long
it would take the great shops with acres of things to sell to see how it
would work not to let anybody know what the things were.
The great shops tried other ways of letting people know. They tried
handbills, a huge helpless patter of them over all the city. They used
billboards, and posted huge lists of items for people to stop and read
in the streets, if they wanted to, while they rushed by. For three whole
weeks they held on tight to the idea that the newspapers were striking
employees of department stores. One would have thought that they would
have seen that the newspapers were the representatives of the
people--almost the homes of the people--and that it would pay to treat
them respectfully. One would have thought they would have seen that if
they wanted space in the homes of the people--places at their very
breakfast tables--space that the newspapers had earned and acquired
there, they would have to pay their share of what it had cost the
newspapers to get it.
One would have thought that the department shops would have seen that
the more they could make the newspapers prosper, the more influence the
newspapers would have in the homes of the people, and the more business
they could get through them. But it was not until the shopowners had
come down and gazed day after day on the big, white, lonely floors of
their shops that they saw the truth. Crowds stayed away, and proved it
to them. Namely: a store, if it uses a great newspaper, instead of
having a few feet of show windows on a street for people to walk by,
gets practically miles of show windows for people--in their own
houses--sells its goods almost any morning to the people--to a whole
city--before anybody gets up from breakfast--has its duties as well as
its rights.
Of course, when the shopkeepers really saw that this was what the
newspapers had been doing for them, they wanted to do what was right,
and wanted to pay for it. One would have thought, looking at it
theoretically, that the department stores in any city would have
imagination enough to see, without practically having to shut their
stores up for three weeks, what advertising was worth. But if great
department stores do not have imagination to see what they would wish
they had done in twenty years, in one year, or three weeks, and have to
spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by
word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying
does not. Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound
to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with
the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are
already taking it. Department stores that have the moral originality and
imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and
what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are going to win.
Department stores that deal with their customers three or four years
ahead are the ones that win first.
CHAPTER VI
GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS
The basis of successful business is imagination about other people. The
best way to train one's imagination about other people is to try
different ways of being of service to them. Trying different ways of
merely getting money out of them does not train the imagination. It is
too easy.
Business is going to be before long among the noblest of the
professions, because it takes the highest order of imagination to
succeed in it. Goodness is no longer a Sunday school. The whole world,
in a rough way, is its own Sunday school.
To have the most brains render the most service--render services people
had never dreamed of before.
Why bother to tell people to be good? It bores us. It bores them.
Presently we will tell them over our shoulders, as we go by, to use
their brains. Goodness is a by-product of efficiency.
Being good every day in business stands in no need of being stood up
for, or apologized for, or even helped. All of these things may be
expedient and human and natural, because one cannot help being
interested in particular people and in a particular generation; but they
are not really necessary to goodness. It is only when we are tired, or
when we only half believe in it, that we feel to-day that goodness needs
to be stood up for. In a day when men make vast crowds of things, so
that the things are seen everywhere, and when the things are made to
stand the test of crowds--crowds of days, or crowds of years--and when
they make them for crowds of people, goodness does not need scared and
helpful people defending it. I have seen that goodness is a thing to be
sung about like a sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and
grounded in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen
that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the huge daily
passionate moral experiment of the human heart--that all men are at work
on it, that goodness is an implacable crowd process, and that nothing
can stop it.
CHAPTER VII
THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE
But Fate has so arranged our lives that we all have to live cooped up in
one particular generation. Living in all of them, especially the ages
just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon them how goodness wins, may
be well enough when one is tired or discouraged and is driven to it, but
in the meantime all the while we are living in this one. The faces of
the people we know flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd
haunts us--the crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and
drop into the Darkness--a whole generation of it, without seeing how
things are coming out; and there is something about the streets, about
the look of women as they go by, something about the faces of the little
children, that makes one wish goodness would hurry. One cannot think
with any real pleasure of goodness as a huge, slow, implacable moral
glacier, a kind of human force of gravity, grinding out truths and
grinding under people, generation after generation, down toward some
vast, beautiful, happy valley with flowers and children in it and
majestic old men thousands of years away. One wishes goodness would
hurry. We are not content, some of us, with having the good people climb
over the so-called evil ones and gain the supremacy of the world, and
all because the evil people do not see what they really want to do or
would have wished they had done afterward. We want the evil ones, so
called, to see what they really want now. We cannot help believing that
there is some way of attracting their attention to what they really want
now.
I have seen, or seemed to see, in my time that there is almost no limit
to what people can do if they can get their own attention, or if some
person or some event will happen by that can get their attention for
them.
Paralytics jumped from their beds at the time of the San Francisco
earthquake and ran for blocks. The whole earth had to shake them in
order to get their attention; but it did it, and they saw what it was
they wanted, and they ran for it at once, whether they were paralytics
or not. In the fire that followed the earthquake, people that had been
sick in bed for weeks were seen, scores of them, dragging their trunks
through the streets.
I have seen, too, in my time scores of people doing great feats of
goodness in this way, things that they knew they could not do, dragging
huge moral trunks after them, or swinging them up on their shoulders. I
have seen men who thought they were old in their hearts, and who thought
they were wicked, running like boys, with shouts and cheers, to do
right. It was all a matter of attention. The question with most of us
would seem to be: How can one get one's attention to what one would wish
one had done in twenty years, and how can one get other people's--all
the people with whom we are living and working--to do with us what they
would wish they had done, in twenty minutes, twenty days, or twenty
years?
Letting the Crowd be Good, all turns in the long run upon touching the
imagination of Crowds.
In the last analysis, the coming of the kingdom of heaven, as it has
been called, is going to be the coming slowly, and from unsuspected
quarters, of a new piety and of new kinds of saints into the forefront
of modern life--saints who can attract attention, saints who can make
crowds think what they really want.
Using the word in its more special sense, the time has come when it is
being keenly realized that if goodness is to be properly appreciated by
crowds, it must be properly advertised.
How can goodness be advertised to Crowds?
Who are the people that can touch the imagination of Crowds?
The best and most suggestive truths that most of us could come to with
regard to doing right, would come from a study of the people who have
tried to make us do it. Most of us, if we were asked to name the people
most prominently connected with the virtues that we have studied and
wondered about most, would mention, probably, either our parents or our
preachers. Many of us feel quite expert about parents. We have studied
vividly, and sometimes with almost a breathless interest, all their
little ways of getting us to be good, and there is hardly any one who
has not come to quite definite conclusions of how he should be preached
to. I have thought it would be not unfruitful to consider in this
connection either our parents or our preachers. I have decided to
consider the preachers who try to make me good, because they are a
little less complicated than parents.
Preachers can only be put into classes in a general way. They often
overlap, and many of them change over from one class into another every
now and then on some special subject, or on some special line of
experience which they have had. But for the most part, at least as
regards emphasis, preachers may be said to divide off into three
classes:
Those who tease us to do right.
Those who make us see that doing right, if any one wants to do it, is
really an excellent thing.
Those who make us want to do it.
* * * * *
I never go to hear a second time, if I can help it, a preacher who has
teased me to do right. I used to hope at first that perhaps a clergyman
who was teasing people might incidentally slip off the track a minute,
and say something or see something interesting and alive. But,
apparently, preachers who do not see that people should not be teased to
do right, do not see other things, and I have gradually given up having
hopeful moments about them. Why, in a world like this, with the right
and the wrong in it all lying so eloquent and plain and beautiful in the
lives of the people about us, and just waiting to be uncovered a little,
waiting to be looked at hard a minute, should audiences be gathered
together and teased to do right?
If the right were merely to be had in sermons or on paper, it might be
different. My own experience with the right has been, if I may speak for
one, that when I get out of the way of the people who are doing it, and
let the right they are doing be seen by people, everybody wants it. When
people who are doing right are quietly revealed, uncovered a little
further by a preacher, everybody envies them, and teasing becomes
superfluous. People sit in their seats and think of them, and become
covetous to be like them. If, this very day, all the ministers of the
world were to agree that, on next Sunday morning at half-past ten
o'clock, they all with one accord would preach a sermon teasing people
to be rich, it would not be more absurd, or more pathetic, or more away
from the point, than it would be to preach a sermon teasing people to be
good. They want to be good now; they envy the people that they see going
about the world not leaning on others to be good--self-poised,
independent, free, rich, spiritually self-supporting persons.
The men and women that we know may be more or less muddled in their
minds with philosophy or with theology, or perhaps they are being
deceived by expediency or being bullied by their environment, but they
are not wicked; they are out of focus, and what they desire when they go
to church on Sunday morning is to get a good look at beautiful and
refreshing things that they want, and for an hour and a half, if
possible, with slow steadied thought see their own lives in perspective.
It is a criminal waste of time to get hundreds of people to come into
church on a Sunday morning and seat them all together in a great room
where they cannot get out, and then tease them and tell them they ought
to be good. They knew it before they came. They are already agreed, all
of them, that they want to be good. They even want to be good in
business--as good as they can afford to. The question is how to manage
to do it. The thing that is troubling them is the technique. How can
they be good in their business--more good than their employers want them
to be, for instance--and keep their positions? Doing as one would wish
one had done afterward, or knowing what one is about, or "being good" as
it is sometimes called, is a thing that all really clever people have
agreed upon. They simply cannot manage some of the details--details like
time and place, a detail like being good now, for instance, or like
being good here. It is the more practical things like these that trouble
people, or they grow mixed in their thoughts about the big goods and the
little ones--which shall be first in order of importance or which in the
order of time. And when one sees that people are really like this in
their hearts, and when one sees them, all these poor, helpless people,
sitting cooped up in a church for an hour and a half being teased to be
good, it is small wonder that it seems, or is coming to seem, to the
clean-cut morally businesslike men and women we have to-day, a pitiful
waste of time.
* * * * *
I come to the second class of preachers I had in mind with more
diffidence. My feelings about them are not so simple and rudimentary as
my feelings about those who have teased me to be good.
Any man who travels about, or who drops into churches wherever he
happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure to find in every
city of considerable size at least one imperious capable baffling
clergyman. If one is strictly honest and fair toward him, to say nothing
of being a well-meant and hopeful human being who is living in the same
world with him and who feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and
honest fault with the sermon, or at least laying one's finger upon what
the fault is, seems to be almost impossible. One simply comes out of
the church in a nice, neat little glow of good-will and admiration, and
with a strange, soothing, happy sense of new, fresh, convenient wisdom.
The only fair way to criticise the preacher who belongs in this class
seems to be to take ten years for it, go in regularly and get a little
practice every Sunday. There are preachers who preach so well that the
only way one can ever find what is the matter with their sermons is to
sit quietly while they are preaching them, and look around at the
people. One thinks as one looks around, "These people are what this man
has done."
They are the same people they were ten years ago.
I often hear other sermons that are far easier to criticise. They are
one-sided or narrow, but they make new people.
I might not always like to be in a congregation when a man is preaching
a sermon that makes new people, because he may be making people or kinds
of people that at the time at least I do not need to be. But I naturally
prefer, at least part of the time, a preacher who puts in, before he is
through, some good work on me. There is a preacher in B---- who always
arouses in me, whenever I am in the city, the same old, curious, hopeful
feeling about him that this next one more time he is going to get to me,
that I am going to be attended to. I cannot say how many times I have
dropped in upon him in his big plain church, seen him with his hushed
congregation all about him, all listening to him up to the last minute,
each of them sitting all alone with his own soul, and with him, and with
the ticking of the clock. And the sermon is always about the same. You
see him narrowing the truth down wonderfully, ruthlessly, to You. You
begin to see everything--to see all the arguments, all the
circumstances, all the principles. You see them narrowing you down
grimly, closing in upon you, converging you and all your little, mean
life, driving you apparently at last into one helpless beautiful corner
of doing right. You feel while you listen the old sermon-thrill you have
felt before, a kind of intellectual joy in God, in the very brains of
God; you think of how He has arranged right and wrong so cunningly, laid
them all out so plain and so close beside each other for you to choose
to be good. Then the benediction is pronounced over you, the sevenfold
amen dies away over you, and you go home and do as you like.
One sees the sermon for days afterward lying out there in calm and
orderly memory, all so complete and perfect by itself. There does not
really seem to be any need of doing anything more to it. It is what
people mean probably by a "finished sermon." It is as if goodness had
been put under a glass globe in a parlour. You go home proud to think of
it, and proud of course to have such a sermon by you. But you would
never think of touching such a complete and perfect thing during the
week the way you would a poorer sermon, disturbing it hopefully or
mussing it over, trying to work some of it into your own life.
* * * * *
So much for the first two types of preachers: the preachers who stand
before us Sunday morning with goodness placed beside them in a dense
darkness while they talk, and who tease us to look at it in the darkness
and to take some; and those who stand, a cold white light all about
them, and use pointers and blackboards and things--maps of goodness,
great charts of what people ought to be like--and who make one see each
virtue just where it belongs as a kind of dot, like cities in a
geography, and who leave us with the pleasant feeling of how sweet and
reasonable God is, or rather would be if anybody would pay any attention
to Him.
* * * * *
I have already hinted at the qualities of the third class of
preachers--those who make me want to be good. They seem to throw
goodness as upon a screen, some vast screen of the world, of this real
world about me. They turn their souls, like still stereopticons, upon
the faces of men--men who are like the men and women I know. I go about
afterward all the week seeing their sermons in the street. Everybody I
see, everything that comes up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the very
patterns of the days and nights, of my duties and failures, keep coming
up, reminding me to be good. I may start in--I often do--with such a
preacher, criticising him, but he soon gets me so occupied criticising
myself and so lost in wondering how this something that he has and sees
just beyond us, just beyond him, just beyond me, can be had for other
people, and how I can have some of it for myself, that I forget to
criticise. He searches my soul, makes me a new being in my presence
before my eyes--that is, a new being toward some one subject, or some
one possibility in the world. He helps me while in his presence to
accomplish the supreme thing that one man can ever do for another. He
helps me to get my own attention. He makes me see a set of particular
things that I immediately, before his next sentence, am trying to find
means to do. He does not attract my attention toward what he wants, like
a preacher who teases; nor does he attract my attention to what God
wants, like the preacher with the charts of goodness. He succeeds in
attracting and holding down my attention to what I really want for
myself or others, and to what I propose to get.
The imagination of crowds is convinced only by men who have real genius
for expression, for making word-pictures of real things, men who have
what might be called moving-picture minds, and who are so picturesque
and vivid that when they talk to people about goodness they have seen,
everybody feels as if they had been there. It has to be admitted that
this type of preacher, who has a kind of genius, and has developed an
art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional
man. And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to
get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely
with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present
goodness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a man who
finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother,
spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work
successfully has days of feeling that he has joined the ranks of The
Impossible Profession.
CHAPTER VIII
MAKING GOODNESS HURRY
Perhaps it has leaked out to those who have been following these pages
thus far, that I am merely at best, if the truth were known, a kind of
reformed preacher.
I admit it. Many other people are. We began, owing to circumstances,
with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we have grown discouraged in talking to people about goodness. More
and more, year by year, we have made up our minds, as I have hinted, to
lie low and to keep still and show them some.
And I can only say it again, as I have said it before, if everybody in
the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would
soon begin, slowly but surely, to be a very different place.
The first time I saw B---- I had asked him to come over to arrange with
regard to putting in new waterpipes from the street to my house. The old
ones had been put in no one could remember how many years before, and
the pressure of water in the house, apparently from rust in the pipes,
had become very weak. After a minute's conversation I at once engaged
B---- to put in the new and larger pipes, and he agreed to dig open the
trench (about two hundred feet long, and three feet deep) and put the
pipes in the next day for thirty-five dollars. The next morning he
appeared as promised, but, instead of going to work, he came into my
study, stood there a moment before my eyes, and quietly but firmly threw
himself out of his job!
There was no use in spending thirty-five dollars, he said. He had gone
to the City Water Works Office and told them to look into the matter and
see if the connection they had put in at the junction of my pipe with
the main in the street did not need attention. They had found that a new
connection was necessary. They would see that a new one was put in at
once. They were obliged to do it for nothing, he said; and then,
slipping (figuratively speaking) thirty-five dollars into my pocket, he
bowed gravely and was gone.
B---- knew absolutely and conclusively (as any one would with a look)
that I was not the sort of person who would ever have heard of that
blessed little joint out in the street, or who ever would hear of it or
who would know what to do with it if he did.
* * * * *
Sometimes I sit and think of B---- in church, or at least I used to,
especially when his bill had just come in. It was always a pleasure to
think of paying one of B----'s bills--even if it was sometimes a
postponed one. You always knew, with B----, that he had made that bill
out to you as if he had been making out a bill to himself.
Not such a bad thing to think about during a sermon.
I do not deny that I do lose a sentence now and then in sermons; and
while, as every one knows, the sermons I have been provided with in the
old stone church have been of a rare and high order, there have, I do
acknowledge, been bad moments--little sudden bare spots or streaks of
abstraction--and I do not deny that there have been times when I could
not help feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning
to the parsonage--my plumber. One could not help thinking what Dr. ----
if he once got started on a plumber like B---- (had had him around
working all the week during a sermon) could do with him.
I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers. I imagine he
would point up their sermons a good deal--if they had his shoes on.
Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon
to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual
forces of our time.
At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when
one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised.
CHAPTER IX
TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
A man's success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting
people to believe he has something that they want.
Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching the
imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this present
generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than
business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas,
is that business men as a class are more close and desperate students of
human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the
imaginations of crowds.
When one considers what it is that touches a crowd's imagination and how
it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a city anywhere
which has not hundreds of men in it who could do more to touch the
imagination of crowds with goodness than any clergyman could. A man of
very great gifts in the pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal
clergyman, could be outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of
crowds with goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in any one of
several hundred of our modern business occupations.
There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do not like
to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults as the rest of
us are with ours. But I do not think it would be too much to say that
this particular nation I have in mind--and I leave the reader to fill in
one for himself, has been determined in its national character for
hundreds of years, and is being determined to-day--every day, nearly
every minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep--by a
certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this
habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of
the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do
things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and
hand-to-mouth insights--a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little
jerk of materialism the next--a kind of national palavering, and
see-sawing and gesturing, and talking excitedly and with little
flourishes. It is a nation that is always shrugging its shoulders, that
almost never seems to be capable of doing a thing with fine directness,
with long rhythms of purpose or sustained feeling; and all because every
man, woman, and child in the country--scores of generations of them for
hundreds of years--has been taught that the great spiritual truth or
principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully buying a turnip is
to begin by saying that you do not want a turnip at all, that you never
eat turnips, and none of your family, and that they never would. The
other man begins by pointing out that he is never going to sell another
turnip as long as he lives, if he can help it. Gradually the facts are
allowed to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off God
knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings'
worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties
separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a
radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot,
or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour of a war, with somebody.
The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this. But it might have
been.
In the United States some forty years ago, being a new country, and
being a country where everything a man did was in the nature of things,
felt to be a first experiment, everybody felt democratic and
independent, and as if he were making the laws of the universe just for
himself as he went along.
There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of thread and
bit of dress goods--everything that people wore on their bodies or put
in their months, and everything that they read, came up and had to be
considered as an original first proposition, as if there never had been
a spool of thread before, as if each bit of dress goods was, or was
capable of being, a new fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on
it; and before we knew it a moral nagging and edging and hitching had
set in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and fixing
itself by daily repetition upon the imagination of the people.
The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psychologist's point
of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevocable, most
implacable meter there can ever be of the religion a country really has.
There was no clergyman in America who could have made the slightest
impression on this great national list or trend of always getting things
for less than they were worth--this rut of never doing as one would be
done by. What was there that could be done with an obstinate, pervasive,
unceasing habit of the people like this?
What was there that could be done to touch the imagination of the crowd?
Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A.T. Stewart's great
store on Broadway at that time. A.T. Stewart announced to New York
suddenly in huge letters one day, that from that day forward there
should be one price for everything sold in his store, and that that
price would be paid for it by everybody.
A.T. Stewart's store was the largest, most successful, original, and
most closely watched store in America.
The six thousand women became one thousand.
Then two thousand. Some of them had found that they finished their
shopping sooner; the better class of women, those whose time was worth
the most, and whose custom was the largest, gradually found they did not
want to shop anywhere else. The two thousand became three thousand, four
thousand, six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand.
Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to come to them. They
announced the one price.
Hardware stores did it. Groceries announced one price. Then everybody.
Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sunday for months,
could have done very much in the way of seriously touching the
imagination of the crowd on the moral unworthiness, the intellectual
degradation, the national danger of picking out the one thing that
nearly all the people all do, and had to do, all day, every day, and
making that thing mean, incompetent, and small. No one had thought out
what it would lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would
always be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing
all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they were
selling--taking a spool of thread, for instance--and packing it, or
packing their action with it, as full of adulterated motives and of
fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they
could think up--a little innocent spool of thread--wreaking all their
sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments
on it as an offering....
It was A.T. Stewart, a very ordinary-looking, practical man in a plain,
everyday business, who arrested the attention of a nation and changed
the habit of thought and trend of mind of a great people, and made them
a candid, direct people, a people that went with great sunny prairies
and high mountains, a yea and nay people, straightforward, and free from
palavering forever. A.T. Stewart was accustomed, in his own personal
dealings from day to day, to cut people short when they tried to heckle
with him. He liked to take things for granted, drive through to the
point, and go on to the next one. This might have ended, of course, in a
kind of _cul de sac_ of being a merely personal trait in a clean-cut,
manful, straightforward American gentleman; and if Stewart had been a
snob or a Puritan, or had felt superior, or if he had thought other
people--the great crowds of them who flocked through his store--could
never expect to be as good as he was, nothing would ever have come of
it.
It is not likely that he was conscious of the long train of spiritual
results he had set in motion; of the way he had taken the habit of mind,
the daily, hourly psychology of a great people, and had wrought it
through with his own spirit; or of the way he had saved up, and set
where it could be used, everyday religion in America, and had freed the
business genius of a nation for its most characteristic and most
effective self-expression.
He merely was conscious that he could not endure palavering in doing
business himself, and that he would not submit to being obliged to
endure it, and he believed millions of people in America were as
clean-cut and straightforward as he was.
And the millions of people stood by him.
Perhaps A.T. Stewart touched the imagination of the crowd because he had
let the crowd touch his and had seen what crowds, in spite of
appearances, were really like.
The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness,
which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has
to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large
degree unconscious of it. There are few department stores in England or
America that would expect to be called pious, but if one is deeply and
obstinately interested in the Golden Rule, and in getting crowds of
people to believe in it at a time, it is impossible not to think what
sweeps of opportunity department stores would have with it--with the
Golden Rule. With thousands of people flowing in and out all the week,
and with hundreds of clerks to attend to it, eight hours a day, there
would hardly seem to be any limit to what such a store could do in
making the Golden Rule a direct, a pointed and personal thing, a thing
that could not be evaded and could not be forgotten by thousands of
people. The same people all going in and out of department stores, vast
congregations of them, eight hours a day, which ministers can only get
at in small lots, three hundred or so, twenty minutes a week, and can
only get at with words even then--all of them being convinced in terms
they understand, and in terms they keenly feel, convinced in hats that
they will see over and over again, convinced in velvets that they are
going to put on and off for years, in laces, in waistcoats, shoes, in
dining-room chairs, convinced in the very underclothes next to their
skins, the clothes they sleep in all night, in the very plates on which
they eat, while all the time they keep remembering, or being reminded,
just how the things were bought, and just what was claimed for them and
what was not claimed for them, and thinking how the claims came true or
how they did not.
* * * * *
I just saw lying on the table as I came through the hall a moment ago a
hat which (out of all the long rows of hats I can see faintly reaching
across the years) will always be to me a memorable hat. I am free to say
that, after all the ladies it has been taken off to, my great memory of
that hat is now and always will be, as long as I live, the department
store at which I bought it, and the things the department store, before
I got through with it, managed to make the hat say.
I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad daylight,
with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat which was a
quarter of a size too large. To clinch the matter, I had ordered four
ventilating holes to be punched in it, and had it sent to my rooms to be
my hat--implacably my hat as I supposed, for better for worse, for
richer for poorer--always. The next morning, after standing before a
mirror and trying hopefully for a few minutes to see if I could not look
more intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly. I had made
up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that that hat made me
look, at any cost. The store was not responsible according to the letter
either for the hat or for the way I looked in it. I had deliberately
chosen it, looked at myself in cold blood in it, had those dreadful,
irremovable, eternal air-holes dug into it. I would buy a new one. I
jumped into a cab, and a moment after I arrived I found myself before
the clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head, and was
just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my astonishment, I
heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department Store Itself, in the
gentle accents of a young man with a yellow moustache, saying: "I'm
sorry"--all seven storys of it gathering itself up softly, apparently,
and saying "I'm sorry!" The young man explained that he was afraid the
hat was wrong the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so,
that the store would not want me to pay for the mistake.
I came home a changed man. I had been hit by the Golden Rule before in
department stores, but always rather subtly--never with such a broad,
beautiful flourish! I made some faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten
what, and rushed out of the store.
But I have never gone past the store since, on a 'bus, or in a taxi, or
sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have looked up to
it--to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest pillars fronting a
world.
I take off my hat to it.
But it gave me more than a hat.
I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a thousand
places on this old planet, could do in touching the imagination of the
world--every day, day by day, cityfuls at a time.
I had found a department store that had absolutely identified itself
with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a wife would--a
department store that looked forward to a permanent relation with me--a
great live machine that could be glad and sorry--that really took me in,
knew how I felt about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the
street. Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took
back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it--just where no one
else would ever have had them. I am human. I always feel about the
store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by it now as if, in
spite of all the difficulties, it wanted me--to be beautiful! I at least
feel and know that the people who were the brain, the daily moving
consciousness behind the face--wanted me to be a becoming customer to
them. They did not want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be
helped, in that hat any more!
* * * * *
I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because it is in any
way extraordinary, but because it is not. The same thing, or something
quite like it, expressing the same spirit, might have happened in any
one of the best hundred department stores in the world.
Most people can remember a time, only a very little while ago, when
clerks in our huge department stores or selling machines were not
expected to be people who would think of things like this to do, or who
would know how, or who would think to consider them good business if
they did.
The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a
high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for
their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their
shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests
with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the
public, had not been thought of a little while ago.
All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things. It was
an employer's business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of
his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him. It was
their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as
they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they
dared.
The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who
believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical
Man. And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he
seemed the most successful. Naturally there came to be a general
impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and
character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great
department stores.
I used often to go into ----'s. Everybody remembers it. I went in, as a
rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as a mere attaché of the
truly wise and good. All I ever did or was expected to do was to stand
by and look wise and discriminating a minute about dress goods, when
spoken to. I used to put in my time looking behind the counters--all
those busy, pale, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying
to be human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs,
crowds of women staring by them and picking at things. Always that
moving sidewalk of questions--that dull, eager stream of consciousness
sweeping by. No sunlight--just the crowds of covetousness and
shrewdness. I used to wonder about the clerks, many of them, and what
they would be like at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of
blue sky to go with them. They used to seem in those days, as I looked,
mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway of Things
in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with his little study
or trick or knack of appearances, standing there and selling people
their good looks day after day at so much a yard.
To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops where one
would get, standing and looking on idly, totally different impressions.
There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have made
being a clerk a new thing in the world. The public has already had its
imagination touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a
class, on a different level.
This has been brought to pass because the employer has been thought of,
or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for in clerks the
highest qualities in human nature that he can get. He picks out and puts
in power, and persuades to be clerks, people who would have felt
superior to it in days gone by--men and women who habitually depend for
their efficiency in showing and selling goods upon their more generous
emotions and insights, their imaginations about other people. They
gather in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and
regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people, and
through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work.
When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the
consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most
self-revealing experience that people can have together. Every bargain
is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A bargain tells everything
about people--who they are, and what they are like. It also tells what
they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they
are not going to be like too sometimes, and why.
The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who
determines in what spirit and by what method the people under him shall
conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ----, at the head of
his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five
hundred men and women. He is in the business of determining their
religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six
days a week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most
penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world. He
is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of
goodness. If he does not work his way through to a man's imagination one
minute or one day, he does the next. If he cannot open up a man's
imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another. If he
cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind
of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another,
and another--the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed
nearly every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep from
doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not surround,
besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff, every customer who
slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the
Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way--confronts him
with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer.
In ----'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of
the two thousand five hundred clerks are men. If I were a minister
wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance
at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I
imagine, to the head of ----'s department store, sitting at that quiet,
calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his
big building in ---- Street, with nothing but those little six or seven
buttons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand
men.
And he does not even need the buttons. Every man knows and feels,
personally and intimately, what the man at the desk is asking him to do
with a particular customer who stands before him at the moment. As soon
as the customer is there, the man at the desk practically is there too.
His religion works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a
huge stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He makes
regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty to sixty
pastoral calls (with every sale they make) on a thousand men a day. He
is not dependent, as the ordinary minister often is, on their dying, or
on their babies, or on their wives, for a chance to get at men with his
religion.
If I wanted to take a spiritual census of modern civilization and get at
the actual scientific facts, what we would have to call, probably the
foot-tons of religion in the world to-day, I would not look for them in
the year-books of the churches, I would get them by going about in the
great department stores, by moving among the men and women in them day
after day, and standing by and looking on invisibly. Like a shadow or a
light I would watch them registering their goodness daily, hourly, on
their counters, over their counters, measuring out their souls before
God in dress goods, shoes, boas, hats, silk, and bread and butter!
This may not be true of the Orient, but it is true, and getting to be
more true every day, of Europe and America.
It is especially true of America. In the things which we borrow in
America, we are far behind the rest of the world. It is to the things
that we create, that we must look alone, for our larger destiny, and our
world-service.
Naturally, in so far as civilization is a race of borrowing, nations
like England and France and Germany a few hundred miles apart from one
another, set the pace for a nation that is three thousand miles away
from where it can borrow, like the United States. It is a far cry from
the land of the Greeks with their still sunny temples and dreams, and
from England with its quiet-singing churches, to New York with its
practical sky-scraping hewing prayer!
New York--scooping its will out of the very heavens!
New York--the World's last, most stern, perhaps most manful prayer of
all--half-asking and half-grasping out of the hand of God!
Here is America's religion! Half afraid at first, half glad, slowly,
solemnly triumphant, as on the edge of an abyss, I have seen America's
religion! I have seen my brother Americans hewing it out--day by day,
night by night, have I seen them--in these huge steel sub-cellars of the
sky!
I have accepted the challenge.
If it is not a religion, then it shall be to us a religion to make it a
religion.
The Metropolitan Tower with its big clock dial, with its three stories
of telling what time it is, and its great bell singing hymns above the
dizzy flocks of the skyscrapers, is the soul of New York, to me.
If one could see a soul--if one could see the soul of New York, it would
look more like the Metropolitan Tower than anything else.
It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the whiteness and the
light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-hearted city.
I write as an American. To me there is something about it as I come up
the harbour that fills my heart with a big ringing, as if all the world
were ringing, ringing once more--ringing all over again--up in this
white tower of ours in its new bit of blue sky! I glory in England with
it, in Greece, in Bethlehem. It is as an outpost on Space and Time, for
all of us gathering up all history in it softly--once more and pointing
it to God!
It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower--the mighty
Child among the steeples of the world. The lonely towers of Cologne
stretching with that grave and empty nave against the sky, out of that
old and faded region of religion, far away, tremulously send greetings
to it--to this white tower in the west--to where it goes up with its
crowds of people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping
and dying in it, and strikes heaven!
It may be perhaps only the American blood in me. Perhaps it is raw and
new to be so happy. I do not know. I only know that to me the
Metropolitan Tower is saying something that has been never quite said
before--something that has been given in some special sense to us as a
trust from the world. It is to me the steeple of democracy--of our
democracy, England's democracy--the world's democracy. The hollow domes
of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy
other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of
religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world--are not to me
so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower--as the
souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at
last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them
up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to
heaven!
I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the big bell in it
and when I look up to where the tower is in that still place like a
sea--look up to where that little white country belfry sits in the
light, in the dark above the vast and roaring city!
To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets
the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe,
tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian
Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our
time. Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of
business and singing great hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in
it--prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below.
I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it--one more
look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyielding, alive, sinewy,
imperturbable, lifting up within itself the steel and soul of the world.
I am content to go to sleep.
It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world. I would rather
have said that business needed a steeple before until I saw the
Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the streets. But I had
always wanted (without knowing it), in a modern office building, a great
solemn bell to remind us what the common day was. I like to hear it
striking a common hour and what can be done in it. I stop in the street
to listen--to listen while that great hive of people tolls--tolls not the
reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the religion
of business--of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty
street and the faces of the men and the women.
CHAPTER X
THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL
The imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most successfully
when it is appealed to in one of four ways:
THE STUPENDOUS. THE UNUSUAL. THE MONOTONOUS. THE SUCCESSFUL.
Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or the successful
are the most in evidence, and have something showy about them, so that
we can look at them afterward, and point out at a glance what they have
done. But probably the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its
imagination, the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a
crowd's ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds are
like inside--is the Monotonous.
The man who tells the most people what they shall be like in this world
is not the great man or the unusual man. He is the monotonous man.
He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious beat and
rhythm with which we live our daily lives.
If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular
crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go
to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines
the crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives--the man, if
we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat.
It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines
the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has the most dominion over the
imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of
our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night
after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world
above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and
motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is
the man to whom we look for our daily bread.
It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all
relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom
we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those
huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of
attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through
the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what
really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall
be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the
way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of
its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no--the feeling that they
come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably
the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and
the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the
subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and hells
are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and
roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over
us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the
man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I
won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight
and the manhole of life.
The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk,
one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window,
the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand--it is
these, godlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our
unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath
and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our
lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think and let us know
enough to think shall be a part of the inner substance of our being. It
shall be a part of growing of the grass to us, and shall be as water and
food and sleep. It shall be to us as the shouts of boys at play in the
field and as the crying of our children in the night. To most men
Employers are the great doors that creak at the end of the world.
It is not the houses that people live in, or the theatres that they go
to, or the churches to which they belong, or the street and number--the
East End look or the West End look the great city carves on the faces of
these men I see in the street--that determines what the men are like.
Their daily work lies deeper in them than their faces. One finds one's
self as one flashes by being told things in their walk, in the way they
hold their hands and swing their feet.
And what is it their hands and feet, umbrellas, bundles, and the
wrinkles in their clothes tell us about them?
They tell us how they earn their money. Their hopes, their sorrow, their
fears and curses, their convictions, their very religions are the
silent, irrevocable, heavenly minded, diabolical by-products of what
their Employers think they can afford to let them know enough to think.
"Fight for yourselves. Your masters hate you. They would shoot
you down like rabbits, but they need your labour for their
huge profits. Don't go in till you get your minimum. No Royal
Commission, no promise in the future. Leaders only want your
votes; they will sell you. They lie. Parliament lies, and will
not help you, but is trying to sell you. Don't touch a tool
till you get your minimum. Win, win, win! It is up to all
workers to support the miners."
If a man happens to be an employer, and happens to know that he is not
this sort of man, and finds that he cannot successfully carry on his
business unless he can make five hundred men in his factory believe it,
what can he do? How can he touch their imaginations? What language is
there, either of words or of action, that will lead them to see that he
is a really a fair-minded, competent employer, a representative of the
interests of all, a fellow-citizen, a Crowdman, and that his men can
afford to believe in him and coöperate with them?
If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it is because they
have not the remotest idea what he is really like. They have not noticed
him. They have no imagination about him, have not put themselves in his
place. How can he get their attention?
CHAPTER XI
THE SUCCESSFUL
A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a
Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going
about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her
cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up
the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy
with her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not interest the
boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of
course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get
out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking
at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he
could. Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see--it
was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood
him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown
head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it
there--on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo--until....
I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking
how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it
inside.
The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the _London Times_,
and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of
one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and
steer heads inside.
This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art
of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is
also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a
successful and permanent business. It is hard to believe how largely,
for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the
real key of the labour problem--this art of steering people's heads
inside.
We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good deal of time in
finding fault with labouring men for thinking too much about themselves
and about their class, and for emphasizing their wages more than their
work, and for not having more noble and disinterested characters.
Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years
about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through
reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and
through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory
rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their
thoughts to higher things.
A great many wise things have been said to Labour--masterpieces, miles
of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their
walls.
But in vain!
And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in
our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have
not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial.
It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk
to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something
to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that
his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more
terrible than that--that he is starving inside, that his soul is
starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting
something to eat--if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's
imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very
lightly.
And it is the most important thing in the world. The one thing now
necessary to society, to industry, is to get hold of the men who are in
it, one by one, and touch their imaginations about themselves. We have
millions of men working without their thoughts and expectations being
ventilated or passed along, year after year.
One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands of factories, doing
their work without any draught. We already have tall chimneys for our
coal furnaces; we have next to see the value of tall chimneys, great
flues to the sky, on the lives and thought and the inner energies of
men. The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get him to glow
up and work is to cut through an opening in the top of his life.
Just where to cut this opening, and just how to cut it in each man's
life--each man considered as a problem by himself--is the Labour
problem.
There are certain general principles that might be put down in passing.
To begin with, we must not feel ashamed to begin implacably with the
actual man just as he is, and with the wants and the motives that he
actually has. We should feel ashamed rather to begin in any other way.
It would not be bright or thoughtful to begin on him with motives he is
going to have; and it certainly would not be religious or worthy of us
to try to make him begin with ours. Perhaps ours are better--for us.
Perhaps, too, ours will be better for him when he is like us (if we can
give him any reason to want to be). In the meantime, what is there that
can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is and in
allowing a sliding scale of motives in people? Starving people and
slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful, _i.e._, not really quite
bright toward others, who impute mean, inaccurate motives to them, can
only be patiently expected to have a very small area or even mote of
unselfishness at first. A cross-section of our society to-day represents
the entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years. We
need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go down the street.
All history is here this minute.
We wish that Labour had better motives. We wish to get our workmen to
understand us better and believe in us more and work for us harder.
We agree that we must begin with them, if we propose to do this, where
they are.
Where are they?
There are certain general observations that might seem to the point.
1. If a man is a sane and sound man and works hard, he must feel that
everything he does, every minute, is definitely connected with the main
through-train purpose in his life.
2. If the main purpose in his life is domestic and consists in having
his family live well and giving his children a chance, he must feel and
be absolutely sure when he is working better or working worse for his
employer that he is working better or worse for himself and for those
for whom he lives.
3. In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness or house
patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit. It is the elementary
form of his national or human enthusiasm. It is the form of
disinterestedness that has to be attended to in men first; and the way
for society to get the labouring man to be public-spirited, to have the
habit of considering the rights of others, is for society to have the
habit of considering his rights in his daily work. An intelligent, live
man must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish on, if
only in the privacy of his own family. Unselfishness begins in small
circles. The starving man must be allowed a smaller range of
unselfishness than the man who has enough. It is not uncomplimentary or
unworthy in human nature to admit that this is so--to demand that the
human being who is starving must be allowed to be selfish. If he is not
bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous to
society. We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and help him in it.
Virtue is a surplus.
4. This is the first humble, stuttering speech the competent modern
employer who proposes to express himself to his men, and get them to
understand him and work with him, is going to make. He is going to pick
out one by one every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly
desire to be selfish, and help him in it. He is going to do something or
say something that will make the man see, that will make him believe for
life, that the most powerful, the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted
man he can find in the world to be his partner in being decently,
soundly, and respectfully selfish--is his employer.
No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man except by
working down through to the inner organic desire in the man as a man,
except by waking his selfishness up and by making it a larger, fuller,
nobler, weightier selfishness, and turning the full weight of it every
minute, every hour, on his daily work.
The best language an employer can find to express this desire at first
to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest copartnership.
5. The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination about other people
because he is not allowed any about himself. The moment he is, and the
moment his employer arranges his work so that he sees every minute all
day that the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent. better counts.
30 per cent. more on his own main purpose in life, his imagination is
touched about himself and he begins to work like a human being. When a
man has been allowed to work awhile as a human being he will begin to be
human with a wider range. Being a partner touches the imagination and
wakes the man's humanness up. He not only works better, but he loves his
family better when he sees he can do something for them. He serves his
town better and his lodge better when he sees he can do something for
them.
6. Being a partner wakes the man's imagination toward those who work
with him, and toward the public and the markets and the goods and the
cities where the goods go. He reads newspapers with a new eye. He
becomes interested in people who buy the goods, and in people who do
not. Why do they not? He gropes toward a general interest in human
nature, and begins to live.
7. A man who is being paid wages one night in a week, has his
imagination touched about his work one night in the week. He is merely
being a wage-earner. In being a partner he is being paid, and feels his
pay coming in, every thirty seconds, in the better way he moves his
hands or does not move his hands. This makes him a man.
8. And, finally, as he knows he is being paid, and that he always will
be paid, what he earns, he stops thinking of the sick, tired side of his
work--the pay he gets out of it, and begins to love the work itself, and
begins to be perfect in it for its own sake. This makes him a gentleman.
9. Being a partner makes a man actively and keenly reasonable and
practical, not only about his own labour, but about the superior value
of other people with whom he works. He wants the best people in the best
places. He begins to have a practical partner's imagination about the
men who are over him, and about their knowing more than he does. If he
is merely paid wages, he is superstitious, and jealous toward those who
know more than he does. If he is paid profits, he is glad that they do,
and strikes in and helps.
10. Another complete range of motives is soon offered to the employee
who is a partner. He feels the joy of being a part of a big, splendid
whole, a disinterested delight and pride in others. He grows young with
it, like a boy in school.
Here is the factory over him, around him--his own vast hockey team--and
over that is the nation, and over that is the world!
An employer can touch the imagination of most men, of the rank and file
of the people, ninety-nine times where other people can touch it once.
And every time he touches it, he touches it to the point.
If men in general do not believe to-day in religion and do not want it,
it is because they have employers who have not seen any place in their
business where they could get their religion in, and have kept the
people (in the one place where they could really learn what religion is)
from learning anything about it. The moment the more common employers
see what the great ones see now, that business is the one particular
place in this world where religion really works, works the hardest, the
longest, and the best, works as it had never been dreamed a religion
could be made to work before--the day school teachers of the world, put
the Golden Rule in the Course everybody will know it.
It only takes a moment's thought to see what the employers of the world
could do with the Golden Rule the moment they take hold of it.
One has but to consider what they have done with it already.
One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen years
they have made everybody not believe in it.
The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a day to everybody
that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant, inefficient, worsted motto
on a parlour wall.
Everybody has believed it.
And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are saying
exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now that all the
employers are trying to get their employees to be efficient (to do by
their employers as they would be done by), and now that they are trying
to be efficient themselves (are trying to do to their employees as they
would have their employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the
imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the Golden Rule
works. They watch it working every day in the things they know about.
Then they believe in it for other things.
CHAPTER XII
THE NECKS OF THE WICKED
A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author
of "The Shadow Christ," which is a study of the religious values in
suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that
honesty is the best policy.
I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy.
These two men use exactly the same words "Honesty is the best policy."
One man says it.
The other man sings it.
One man is honest because it pays.
The other man is honest because he likes it.
"Honesty is the best policy" as a motive cannot be called religious, but
"Honesty is the best policy" as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in
his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is
religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of
worship.
It is like a great gentle mass.
It is like taking softly up one's own planet and offering it to God.
Here it is--the planet. Honesty is organized in the rocks on it and in
the oak trees on it and in the people. The rivers flow to the sea and
the heart of Man flows to God. On this one planet, at least, God is a
success.
Possibly it is because many other people beside myself have been slow in
clearly making this distinction between "Honesty is the best policy" as
a motive or a Te Deum, that I have come upon so many religious men and
women in the last two or three years, who, in the finest spirit, have
seemed to me to be doing all that they could to discourage everybody
especially to discourage me, about the Golden Rule.
The first objection which they put forward to the Golden Rule is that it
is a failure.
When I try to deal with this or try to tell them about Non-Gregarious,
the second objection that they put forward is, that it is a success.
If they cannot discourage me with one of these objections they try to
discourage me with the other.
They point to the Cross.
Some days I cannot help wondering what Christ would think if He were to
come back and find people, all these good Christian people everywhere
using the Cross--the Cross of all things in the world as an objection to
the Golden Rule and to its working properly, or as a general argument
against expecting anything of anybody.
I do not know that I have any philosophy about it that would be of any
value to others.
I only know that I am angry all through when I hear a certain sort of
man saying, and apparently proving, that the Golden Rule does not work.
And I am angry at other people who are listening with me because they
are not angry too.
Why are people so complacent about crosses? And why are they willing to
keep on having and expecting to have in this world all the good people
on crosses? Why do they keep on treating these crosses year after year,
century after century, in a dull tired way as if they had become a kind
of conventionality of God's, a kind of good old church custom, something
that He and the Church by this time, after two thousand years, could not
really expect to try to get over or improve upon?
I do not know that I ought to feel as I do.
I only know that the moment I see evil triumphing in this world, there
is one thing that that evil comes up against.
It comes up against my will.
My will, so far as it goes, is a spiritual fact.
I do not argue about it, nor do I know that I wish to justify it. I
merely accept my will as it is, as one spiritual fact.
I propose to know what to do with it next.
The first thing that I have done, of course, has been to find out that
there are millions of other so-called Christian people who have
encountered this same fact that I have encountered.
There are at least some of us who stand together. Our wills are set
against having any more people die on crosses in this world than can be
helped. If there is any kind of skill, craftmanship, technique,
psychology, knowledge of human nature which can be brought to bear,
which will keep the best people in this world not only from being, but
from belonging on crosses in it, we propose to bring these things to
bear. We are not willing to believe that crowds are not inclined to
Goodness. We are not willing to slump down on any general slovenly
assumption about the world that goodness cannot be made to work in it.
If goodness is not efficient in this world we will make it efficient.
Our reason for saying this is that we honestly glory in this world. We
believe that at this moment while we are still on it, it is in the act
of being a great world, that it is God's world, and in God's Name we
will defend its reputation.
We do not deny that it may be better spiritual etiquette, more heroic
looking and may have a certain moral grace, so far as a man himself is
concerned, if the world makes him suffer for being honest. But after all
he is only one man, and whether he dislikes his suffering or likes it
and feels fine and spiritual over it, it is only one man's suffering.
But why is it that when the world makes a man suffer, everybody should
seem always to be thinking of the man? Why does not anybody think of the
world?
Is not the fact that a whole world, eternal and innumerable, is supposed
to be such a mean, dishonest sort of a world that it will make a man
suffer for being good a more important fact than the man's suffering is?
It seems to me to be taking not lower but higher ground when one insists
on believing in the race one belongs to and in believing that it is a
human race that can be believed in. After two thousand years of Christ,
it is a lazy, tired, anæmic slander on the world to believe that it does
not pay to be good in it. The man who believes it, and acts as if he
believed it, is to-day and has been from the beginning of time the
supreme enemy of us all. He is guilty before heaven and before us all
and in all nations of high treason to the human race. One of the next
most important things to do in modern religion is going to be to get all
these morally dressed-up, noble-looking people who enjoy feeling how
good they are because they have failed, to examine their hearts, stop
enjoying themselves and think.
For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs and we have
learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of cooped-up patriotism for
our own nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic
toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for
centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow
trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their
lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they
would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them--in doing
something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some
thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into
his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the
sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three
thousand years. I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form,
with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory
Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire,
with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them, I have
the profoundest sympathy.
David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is
allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David
felt that it was partly his--and being a king--very much his, and as he
was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to
help.
What he really meant--what lay in the background of his petition--the
real spirit that made him speak out in that naïve bold way before the
Lord, and before everybody--that made him ask the great God in heaven
all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and
jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for
his own use that he was going to make the world more decent. He was
spirited about it. If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came
to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him. To
put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the
necks of his enemies.
Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we
would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a
little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked--just for us--nor
would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and
attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being
jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David's particular
request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it. We
would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way
and according to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought,
we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we
would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now.
As we look at it, it ought not to be necessary to jump on the necks of
the wicked to make them good, that is, to make them understand what they
would wish they had done in twenty years. We live in a more reasoning
and precise age and what more particularly concerns us in the wicked is
not their necks, but their heads and their hearts. It seems to us that
they are not using them very much and that the moment they do and we can
get them to, they will be good. Possibly it was a mere matter of
language, a concession to the then state of the language--David's
wanting their necks to be jumped on so that he could get their attention
at first and make them stop and think and understand. More subtle ways
of expressing things to the wicked have been thought of to-day than of
jumping on their necks, but the principle David had in mind has not
changed, the principle of being loyal to the human race, the principle
of standing up for people and insisting that they were really meant to
be better than they were or than they thought they could be--a kind of
holy patriotism David had for this world. The main fact about David
seems to be that he believed he belonged to a great human race.
Incidentally he believed he belonged to a human race that was really
quite bright, bright enough at least to make people sorry for doing
wrong in it--a human race that was getting so shrewd and so just and so
honest that it took stupider and stupider people every year to be
wicked, and when he found, judging from recent events in Judea, that
this for the time being was not so, he had a hateful feeling about it,
which it seems to some of us, vastly improved him and would improve many
of us. We do not claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David's best,
but they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones.
* * * * *
We may be wrong. But it has come to be an important religious duty to
some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate the prosperity of the
wicked. We hate the prosperity of the wicked, not because it is their
prosperity and not ours, but because their prosperity constitutes a
sneer or slander on the world. We have no idea of wanting to go about
faithfully jumping upon the necks of the wicked. What we want is to feel
that we are in a world where the good people are happy and are making
goodness reasonable, successful, profitable and practical in it. We want
an earth with crowds on it who see things as they are, and who guess so
well on what they want (_i.e._, who are good) that other people who do
not know what they want and are not good, will be lonesome.
We have made up our minds to live in a world not where the wicked will
feel that their necks are going to be jumped on (which is really a
rather interesting and prominent feeling on the whole), but a world
where the wicked will be made to feel that nobody notices their necks,
that they are not worth being jumped on, a world where nobody will have
time to go out back and jump on them, a world where the wicked will not
be able to think of anything important to do, and where the wicked
things that are left to do will be so small and so stupid that nobody
will notice. They will be ignored like boys with catcalls in the street.
When we can make people who do wrong feel unimportant enough, there is
going to be some chance for the good.
If we could find some sweet, proper, gentle, Christian-looking way of
conveying to these people for a few swift, keen minutes how little
difference it makes when they and people like them do wrong, they would
steal over in a body and do right.
This is our program. We are making preliminary arrangements for a world
in which after this, very soon now, righteousness is going to attend
strictly to its own business and unrighteousness is going to be crowded
out. No one will feel that he has time in two or three hundred years
from now to go out of his way into some obscure corner of the world and
jump on the necks of the wicked.
But this is a matter of form. The main fundamental manful instinct David
had--the idea that there should not be any more people dying on crosses
than could be helped--that collective society should take hold of Evil
and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us
absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who
love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to
have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a
whole. So we believe that Society should proceed to making goodness and
honesty pay. If Society will not do it _we_ will do it. The world may be
against us at first but we will at least clear off a small place on
it--in our own business for instance--where our goodness can command the
most shrewdness and the most technique--and we will do what we can
slowly--one industry at a time, to remove the slander on goodness that
goodness is not inefficient, and the slander on the world that goodness
cannot be self-supporting, self-respecting (and without disgrace), even
comfortable in it.
The old hymn with which many of us are familiar is well and true enough.
But it does not seem that standing up for Jesus is the most important
point in the world just now. A great many people are doing it. What we
need more is people who will stand up for the world. When people who are
standing up for the world stand and sing "Stand up for Jesus" it will
begin to count. Let four hundred Nons sing it; and we will all go to
church.
If nine of the people out of ten who are singing "Stand up for Jesus"
would stand up for the world, that is, if they would stop trading with
their grocer when they find he slides in regularly one bad orange out of
twelve and promptly look up a grocer who does not do such things, and
trade with him, it would not be necessary for people to do as they so
often do nowadays, fall back on a little wistful half discouraged last
resort like "standing up for Jesus."
Standing up for the world means standing by men who believe in it,
standing by men who make everything they do in business a declaration of
their faith in God and their faith in the credit of human nature, men
who put up money daily in their advertising, their buying and selling,
on the loyalty, common sense, brains, courage, goodness, and righteous
indignation of the people.
The idea that goodness is sweet and helpless and that Jesus was meek and
lowly and has to be stood up for is now and always has been a slander.
It does not seem to some of us that He would want to be stood up for and
we do not like the way some people call Him meek and lowly. It would be
more true to say that He merely looks meek and lowly; that is, if most
men had done or not done or had said or not said things in the way he
did, they would have been considered meek and lowly for it. He had a way
of using a soft answer to turn away wrath. But there was not anything
really meek and lowly about his giving the soft answer. No meek and
lowly man would ever have thought of such a thing as turning away wrath
with a soft answer. He would have been afraid of looking weak. He would
not have had the energy or the honesty or the spiritual address to know
or to think of a soft answer that would do it.
The spirit of fighting evil with good--a kind of glorious self-will for
goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it
work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the
last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd's
latest cry to its God. Crowds will always crucify and crosses will never
go by. But we are going to have a higher ideal for crosses. We are not
going (out of sheer shame for the world), to think seriously any longer
of dying on a cross, or letting any one else die on one for a little
rudimentary platitude, a quiet, sensible, everyday business motto for
any competent business man like "Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you."
CHAPTER XIII
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?
We are having and are about to have notably and truly successful men who
have the humility and faithfulness, the spiritual distinction of true
and great success.
I want to interpret, if I can, these men. I would like to put with the
great martyrs, with the immortal heroes of failure, these modern silent,
unspoken, unsung mighty men, the heroes of success. I look forward to
seeing them placed among the trophies of religion, in the heart of
mankind at last.
I cannot stand by and watch these men being looked upon by good people
as men the New Testament made no room for, secretly disapproved of by
religious men and women, as being successes, as being little, noisy,
disturbing, contradictions of the New Testament as talking back to the
Cross.
These things I have been trying to say about the Cross as a means of
expressing goodness to crowds have brought me as time goes on into close
quarters with many men to whom I pay grateful tribute, men of high
spirit, who strenuously disagree with me.
I am not content unless I can find common ground with men like these.
They are wont to tell me when we argue about it that whatever I may be
able to say for success as a means of touching the imaginations of
crowds with goodness, great or attractive or enthralling characters are
not produced by success. Success does not produce great characters. It
is now and always has been failure that develops the characters of the
men who a truly great.
Perhaps failure is not the only way.
* * * * *
When I was talking with ---- a little while ago about Non-Gregarious's
goodness and how it succeeded, he was afraid that if his goodness
succeeded there must have been something the matter with it.
I could see that he was wondering what it was.
Non's success troubled him. He did not think it was exactly religious.
"Real religion" he said, "was self-sacrifice. There always had to be
something of the Cross about real religion."
I said that Non's religion was touched at every point with the Cross.
It seemed to me that it was the spirit of eagerness in it that was the
great thing about the Cross. If Non would all but have died to make the
Golden Rule work in this world, if he daily faced ruin and risked the
loss of everything he had in this life to prove that the Golden Rule was
a success, that is if he really had a Cross and if he really faced
it--dying on it, or not dying on it, could not have made him one whit
more religious or less religious than he was. What Non was willing to
die for, was his belief in the world, and scores of good Christian
people tried in those early days of his business struggle to keep him
from believing in the world. There was hardly a day at first but some
good Christian would step into Non's office and tell him the world would
make him suffer for it if he kept on recklessly believing in it and
doing all those unexpected, unconventional, honest things that somehow,
apparently, he could not help doing.
They all told him he could not succeed. They said he was a failure. He
would suffer for it.
I would like to express if I can, what seems to be Non's point of view
toward success and failure.
If Non were trying to express his idea of the suffering of Christ, I
imagine he would say that in the hardest time of all when his body was
hanging on the Cross, the thing that was really troubling Christ was not
that he was being killed. The thing that was troubling him was that the
world really seemed, at least for the time being, the sort of world that
could do such things. He did not take his own cross too personally or
too literally as the world's permanent or fixed attitude toward goodness
or every degree of goodness. There was a sense in which he did not
believe except temporarily in his own cross. He did not think that the
world meant it or that it would ever own up that it meant it.
Probably if we had crosses to-day the hard part of dying on one would
be, not dying on it, but thinking while one was dying on it that one was
in the sort of world that could do such things.
It is Non's religion not to believe every morning as he goes down to his
office that he is in a mean world, a world that would want to crucify
him for doing his work as well as he could.
Perhaps this was the spirit of the first Cross, too. We have every
reason to believe that if Christ could have come back in the flesh three
days after the crucifixion and lived thirty-three years longer in it, he
would have occupied himself exclusively in standing up for the world
that had crucified him, in saying that it was a small party in a small
province that did it, that it was temporary and that they did it because
they were in a hurry.
It was not Christ, but the comparatively faint-believing, worldly minded
saints that have enjoyed dying on crosses since, who have been proud of
being martyrs.
Among those who have tried the martyr way of doing things Jesus is
almost the only one who has not in his heart abused the world. Most
martyrs have made a kind of religion out of not expecting anything of it
and of trying to get out of it. "And ye, all ye people, are ye suitable
or possible people for me to be religious with?" the typical martyr
exclaims to all the cities, to all the inventors, to the scientists and
to the earth-redeemers, to his neighbours and his fellow men. It was
not until science in the person of Galileo came to the rescue of
Christianity and began slowly to bring it back to where Christ started
it--as a noble, happy enterprise of standing up for this world and of
asserting that these men who were in it are good enough to be religious
here and to be the sons of God now--that Christianity began to function.
Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve
hundred years, a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave
for holiness for the eternal, and for the infinite.
Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the
people who knew how to be good without being crucified. Sometimes it has
been the other way. It would have been just as holy in Non to make the
gospel work in New York as to make a blaze, a show or advertisement of
how wicked the world was, and of how inefficient the gospel was--by
going into insolvency.
He has had his cross, but instead of dying on it, he has taken it up and
carried it. Scores of risks and difficulties that he has grappled with
would have become crosses at once if equally good, but less resourceful
men, had had them. Letting one's self be threatened with the cross a
thousand times is quite as brave as dying on one once. The spirit, or at
least the shadow, of a cross must always fall daily on any life that is
stretching the world, that is freeing the lives of other men against
their wills. The whole issue of whether there will be a cross or the
threat of a cross turns on a man's insight into human nature and his
quiet and practical imagination concentrated upon his work.
Not dying on a cross is a matter of technique. One sees how not to, and
one does not. It might be said that the world has two kinds of
redeemers, its cross-redeemers and its success-redeemers. The very best
are on crosses, many of them. Perhaps in the development of the truth
the cross-redeemers come first; they are the pioneers. Then come the
success-redeemers, then everybody!
CHAPTER XIV
IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?
Of course the most stupendous success that has ever been made--the
world's most successful undertaking from a technical point of view as an
adaptation of means to ends was the attempt that was made by a man in
Galilee years and years ago to get not only the attention of a whole
world, but to get the attention of a whole world for two thousand years.
This purpose of arresting the attention of a world and of holding it for
two thousand years was accomplished by the use of success and of failure
alternately.
Christ tried success or failure according to which method (time and
place considered) would seem to work best.
His first success was with the doctors.
His next success was based on His instinct for psychology, His power of
divining people's minds, which made possible to Him those extraordinary
feats in the way of telling short stories that would arrest and hold the
attention of crowds so that they would think and live with them for
weeks to come.
His next success was a success based on the power of His personality,
and His knowledge of the human spirit and his victory over His own
spirit--his success in curing people's diseases and His extraordinary
roll of miracles.
He finally tried failure at the end, or what looked like failure,
because the Cross completed what he had had to say.
It made His success seem greater.
The world had put to death the man who had had such great successes.
People thought of His successes when they thought of Him on the Cross,
and they have kept thinking of them for thousands of years.
But the Cross itself, or the use of failure was a sowing of the seed, a
taking the truth out of the light and the sunshine and putting it in the
dark ground.
The Cross was promptly contradicted with the Resurrection. All this, it
seems to some of us, is the most stupendous and successful undertaking
from a purely technical point of view that the world has seen. In the
last analysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was
His technique that made Christ the Son of God and the Master of the
Nations of the Earth.
* * * * *
I think that while Christ would not have understood Frederick Taylor's
technique, his tables of figures or foot-tons or logarithms he would
have understood Frederick Taylor.
Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in
dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the
thing that Frederick Taylor did. He went up to men--to hundreds of men a
day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising
their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one
else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show
what could be done with them.
This is Frederick Taylor's profession.
The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be
successful if they knew how--if they had a vision. It proceeded to give
them the vision. It began with giving them a vision for the things that
they had, told them how even the very things that they had always
thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a
great use of. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those that
hunger; blessed are the meek."
And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler and more
free from the cares and weights of this earth they could be if they
wanted to be, than they had dared to believe. He told the people who
were around Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was
or could be than any one had ever claimed for people in this world
before. They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified Him because
they thought He was too hopeful about them, and about human nature or
because, as they would have put it, He was blasphemous and said every
man was a Son of God.
As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better
means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all
men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a
success human nature was, of what men really could be like.
But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to
try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the
same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would
be conducted in a very different manner.
There is a picture of Albert Durer's which hangs near my desk, and once
more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it. It is the
familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and
with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it
and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old,
bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.
If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the
first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the
scientist's head.
There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing,
at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick
Taylor's tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a
pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.
But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to
do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of
all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick
Taylor did, by--being concrete. If He wanted to get men in general, men
in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out
some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a
certain particular place could afford to love one another.
He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and
pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of
common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit
together. I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick
Taylor did.
He would not say much about the Golden Rule. He would give each man a
vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men's work
and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself. This is all
the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.
For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after
Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another.
The idea is a perfectly familiar one. When Christ said it two thousand
years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and
as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth.
Everybody believes it now--that it is a true remark--but like a score of
other remarks that have been made and some of the noblest Christ made,
is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being
a remark, gone by? There is no one who has not heard about our loving
one another. The remark we want now is how we can do it. This is the
remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made. It is not very eloquent. It
is a mere statement of fact. It has taken him nearly thirty-three years
to make it.
The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and the
pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, have been
devoted to one another and to one another's interests and acting all day
every day as if of course their interests were the same, and it has been
found that employees when their employers coöperated with them could
lift forty-seven tons instead of twelve and a half a day, and were
getting 60 per cent. more wages.
Everybody listens. Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to
making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one
remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two
thousand years.
* * * * *
The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St.
Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get. It was all that the
Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had
to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd
could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting
crowds know things.
To-day there is no reason why the Cross as a contrivance for attracting
the attention of all people to goodness should be exclusively relied
upon.
Possibly the Cross was intended, at the time, as the best possible way
of starting a religion, when there was none, or possibly for keeping it
up when there was very little of it.
But now that Christianity has been occupied two thousand years in
putting in the groundwork, in laying down the principles of success, and
in organizing them into the world, has been slowly making it possible
with crowds that could not be long deceived for success to be decent.
The leaven has worked into human nature and Christianity has produced
The Successful Temperament.
Success has become a spiritual institution. In other words, the hour of
the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the man who sees how, the
man of The Successful Temperament is at hand.
Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this
day--must reckon with him--with the Man Who Sees How.
CHAPTER XV
THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT
I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success."
I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that
ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great
Men with all their funny trappings on,--their hoods, and their ribbons,
and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great
Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their
voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows
of Prosperity from the street.
And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb
in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of
The Little Great go by.
I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my
heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own
side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing
faintly in my ears have gone my way.
But I keep coming back to the curb again.
I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt
carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans
or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes,
the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented,
gurgling, wallowing millionaires--I cannot help standing once more and
looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who
may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking.
I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or
humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than
they can help, and are trying to do better.
They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it
again and again.
They are the great men.
The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get
himself made out of anything he finds at hand.
If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make
success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes
failure express it.
But this book is not about great men and goodness. It is about touching
the imagination of crowds with goodness, about making goodness
democratic and making goodness available for common people.
* * * * *
A stupendous success in goodness will advertise it as well as a
stupendous failure.
Goodness has had its cross-redeemers to attract the attention of half a
world.
Possibly it is having now its success-redeemers to attract the attention
of the other half.
The people the success-redeemers reach would turn out to be, possibly,
very much more than half.
The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more
common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was
apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church
purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or
as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of
attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness
in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure--in the power
of steady daily pulling on men's minds, has done as much for goodness as
success.
It is doubtful if, except as an ideal or conventional symbol the cross
has ever been or ever could be what might be called a spiritually
middle-class institution. It has been reserved for men of genius,
pioneers and world-designers to have those colossal and glorious crosses
that have been worshipped in all ages, and must be worshipped in all
ages as the great memorials of the human race.
But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design
worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of
goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of
goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the
natural form of success.
It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to
challenge fatalism, to defy a cross. He would almost boast that nobody
could make him die on it. This spirit in men too is a religious spirit.
It is the next hail of goodness. Goodness posts up its next huge notice
on the world:
[SUCCESS]
It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and
it is going to make them notice it in everyday things. It does not admit
that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater
souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in
failure.
It believes that goodness is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses,
to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The
common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy
imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not
impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the
western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to
be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type
of man in the world--the scientific and practical type as we see it in
the western nations all about us to-day.
We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can
do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are
expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of
things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament.
And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do
not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that
we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die
on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for platitudes, to
get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on
the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of
action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds
are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make
them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved
up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing
year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the
eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be
the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it.
And it is this new eagerness in the modern spirit, a kind of hurrying up
of the souls of the world that is inspiring us to employ our western
genius in inventing and defending and applying the means of goodness and
in finding ways of making goodness work. We will not admit that men were
intended to die on crosses from a sheer, beautiful, heavenly
shiftlessness, vague-mindedness, mere unwillingness to take pains to
express themselves or unwillingness to think things out and to make
things plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to
employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It
seems to us that it goes naturally with the scientific and technical
temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and
it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study
of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a
certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and
with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the
pragmatic temperament, of the inductive mind. The modern mind is
interested in facts and cannot make a religion out of not knowing them.
There was a time once when people used to take their bodily diseases as
acts of God. We have made up our minds not to have these same bodily
diseases now. We have discovered by hard work and constant study that
they are not necessary. The same is true of our moral diseases and of
our great social maladies.
It is going to be the same with crosses. It is a sin and a slander and
affront to human nature and to God to die on a cross if it can be helped
by hard work and close thinking, or by touching the imaginations of
others.
Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses.
We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to. Crosses are only
reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and
most rare men. They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means
of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things
by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds
see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are
merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain,
simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the
Golden Rule. The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on
the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where
men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MEN AHEAD PULL
Writing a hopeful book about the human race with the New York _Sun_,
Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard Shaw looking on is uphill work.
Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could refer to when I
am writing about this one, one every one knows. The one on Mars, for
instance, if one could calmly point to it in the middle of an argument,
shut people off with a wave of one's hand and say, "Mars this" and "Mars
that" would be convenient.
The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking to it about
itself, it thinks it is It.
It is not It yet.
The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling softly through
the sky.
Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and cathedrals and
all) is a Child crying in the night.
* * * * *
It is not necessary for me to prove to the satisfaction of the New York
_Sun_ and Bernard Shaw that the Golden Rule has not reached the superior
moral stage of being taken as a platitude by all of our people who are
engaged in business. It is enough to submit that the most creative and
forceful business men--the men who set the pace, the foremen of the
world, are taking it so, and that others are trying to be as much like
them as they can. Wickedness in this world is not going to stop with a
jerk. It is merely being better distributed. Possibly this is all there
is to the problem, getting sin better distributed. The Devil has never
had a very great outfit or any great weight, but he has always known
where to throw it, and he has always done an immense business on a small
capital and the only way he has managed to get on at all, is by
organizing, and by getting the attention of a few people at the top. Now
that the moral sense of the world has become quickened, and that rapid
transit and newspapers and science and the fact-spirit have gained their
hold, the sins of the world are being rapidly distributed, not so much
among the men who determine things as among those who cannot.
Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world and everything
in it, is falling into the hands of the men who cannot be cheated about
facts, who get the facts first and who get them right.
The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly--a little ponderously
perhaps at first--into the hands of good men. To say that the world is
falling into the hands of men who cannot be cheated and to say that it
is falling into the hands of good men is to say the same thing.
The men who get the things that they want, get them by seeing the things
as they are. Goodness and efficiency both boil down to the same quality
in the modern man, his faculty for not being a romantic person and for
not being cheated.
A good man may be said to be a man who has formed a habit, an intimate
personal habit of not being cheated. Everything he does is full of this
habit. The sinful man, as he is usually called, is a man who is off in
his facts, a man who does not know what he really wants even for
himself. In a matter-of-fact civilization like ours, he cannot hope to
keep up. If a man can be cheated, even by himself--of course other
people can cheat him and everybody can take advantage of him. He
naturally grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are
slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow in
dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind hand in
dealing with other people. They cannot be men who determine what other
people shall do.
It is true that for the moment, it still seems--now that science has
only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil men in a large
degree are the men who still are standing in the gate and determining
opportunities and letting in and letting out Civilization as they
please. But their time is limited.
The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are the modern
man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men who are ahead are
getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four habit that is like music,
like rhythm. It becomes almost a passion, almost a self-indulgence in
their lives. Being honest with things, having a distaste for being
cheated by things, having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and
for cheating other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations
can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one another long
and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning his imagination upon the
world about him and upon the fact that really works in it. The
scientific man has taken hold of religion and righteousness is being
proved, melted down in the laboratory, welded together before us all and
riveted on to the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what
really works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the biggest
men may have found it out, but everybody is watching them. The most
important spiritual service that any man can render the present age is
to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some
business where nobody has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it
almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events,
anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world
that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging
on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One knows scores of
saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be a matter of principle
almost in a modern saint--to have ruddy cheeks.
I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York _Sun_, that
vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park
Row--that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting
fact in our modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will
have to face.
I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable,
imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as
catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.
He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.
He is successful because he is good.
Only religion works.
I am aware that the New York _Sun_ might quarrel with just exactly this
way of putting it.
I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again after saying
something else first. _Viz._: The man who is successful in business is
the man who can get people to do as much as they can do and a great deal
more than they think they can do.
Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can do this. He
has to have something in him very like the power of inventing people or
of making people over.
To be specific: In some big department stores, as one goes down the
aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks making fun of
customers.
One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent ones, those
who would keep coming and who have the best trade, go to other stores.
How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by a practical
employer? Can he stop it successfully by turning on his politeness?
Of course he can make his clerks polite-looking by turning on his
politeness. But politeness in a department store does not consist in
being polite-looking. Being polite-looking does not work, does not grip
the customer or strike in and do things and make the customer do things.
A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five hundred human
beings, which is carving out its will, its nature, stamping its pattern
on a city, on a million men, or on a nation, cannot be made to work
without religion. If the clerks are making fun of people, only religion
can stop it.
Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader? You have
observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people (making fun of you, for
instance), the assumption almost always is, that you are trying to be
like the Standard Person, and that this (they look at you pleasantly as
you go by) is as near as you can get to it! If an employer wishes to
make his clerk an especially valuable clerk, if he wishes to make his
clerk an expert in human nature or a good salesman, one who sees a
customer when he comes along as he really is, and as he is trying to be,
he will only be able to do it by touching something deep down in the
clerk's nature, something very like his religion--his power of putting
himself in the place of others. He can only do it by making a clerk feel
that this power in him of doing as he would be done by, and seeing how
to do it, _i.e._, the religion in him, is what he is hired for.
It is visionary to try to run a great department store, a great machine
of twenty-five hundred souls, a machine of human emotions, of five
thousand eyes and ears, a huge loom of enthusiasm, of love, hate,
covetousness, sorrow, disappointment, and joy without having it full of
clerks who are experts in human nature, putting themselves in the place
of crowds of other people, clerks who are essentially religious.
So we watch the men who are ahead driving one another into goodness. The
man who is not able to create, distribute or turn on, in his business
establishment, goodness, social insight, and customer-insight in it, can
only hope to-day to keep ahead in business by having competitors as
inefficient as he is.
The man who is ahead has discovered himself. Everything the man ahead
is doing eight hours a day, is seen at last narrowing him down,
cornering him into goodness.
Of course as long as people looked upon goodness as a Sunday affair, a
few hours a week put in on it, we were naturally discouraged about it.
It is still a little too fresh looking and it may be still a little too
clever for everybody, but slowly, irrevocably, we see it coming. We can
look up almost any day and watch some goodness--now--at least one
specimen or so, in every branch of business.
We watch daily the men who are ahead, pulling on the goodness of the
world and the Crowds pushing on it.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CROWDS PUSH
The men who are ahead make goodness start, but it is the crowds that
make it irresistible.
The final, slow, long, imperious lift on goodness is the one the crowd
gives. Of course, for the most part, modern business is largely done
with crowds. Crowds are doing it and crowds are nearly always watching
it.
The factory is slower than the department store in being good because
the men in it deal with crowds of things and crowds of wheels and not
with crowds of people.
All responsible people are forced to be good, with crowds around them,
expecting it of them.
Crowds at the very least are a kind of vast, insinuating, penetrating,
omnipresent, permeating police force of righteousness.
In a department store, the crowds, twelve thousand a day, are like some
huge coil of hose or vacuum cleaner, lying about the place, sucking up,
drawing out, and demanding goodness from the clerks. Clerks develop
human insight and powers faster in department stores than machinists do
in factories because they are exposed to more people and to larger
crowds. The stream clears itself.
The last forms of business to yield to the new spirit are to be the
lonely ones, the ones where light, air, human emotions, and crowds are
shut out.
The lonely forms of business will at last be vitalized and socialized by
men of organizing genius, who will invent the equivalent of crowds going
by, who will contrive ways of putting a few responsible persons in
sight or in a position where they will feel crowds going by their souls,
looking into them as if they were shop windows. Crowds can keep track of
a few. The crowds will see that these few are the kind of men who will
keep track of all.
Crowds in the end will not accept less than the best. With crowds of
people and crowds of places and crowds of times we are good. In all
things crowds can see or be made to see we are safe. Progress lies in
making crowds see through people, making crowds go past them. While they
are going past them, they lure their goodness on.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW
The people who are worried and discouraged about goodness in this world,
one finds when one studies them a little, are almost always worried in a
kind of general way. They do not worry about anything in particular.
Their religion seems to be a kind of good-hearted, pained vagueness.
The religion of the people who never worry at all, the thoughtless
optimists, is quite the same too, except that they have a kind of happy,
rosy-lighted vagueness instead.
For about two thousand years now, goodness has been in the hands of
vague people. Some of them have used their vagueness to cry with softly,
and some of them have used it to praise God with and to have many fine,
brave, general feelings about God.
I have tried faithfully, speaking for one, to be religious with both of
these sets of people.
They make one feel rather lonesome.
If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron joy in
seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches a great,
worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in New York, one looks
up and sees a new skyscraper going slowly up, unfolding into the sky
before one, lifting up its gigantic, restless, resistless face to God;
there comes to seem to be something about churches and about good people
and about the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and
doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy.
Perhaps one has just come from it and one's soul is filled with the
stern, glad singing of a great foundry, of the religious, victorious
praising spirit of man, dipping up steel in mighty spoonfuls--the stuff
the inside of the earth is made of, and flinging it together into a
great network or crust for the planet--into mighty floors or sidewalks
all round the earth for cities to tread on and there comes to seem
something so successful, so manlike, so godlike about it, about the way
these men who do these things do them and do what they set out to do,
that when I find myself suddenly, all in a few minutes on a Sunday
morning, thrown out of this atmosphere into a Christian church, find
myself sitting all still and waiting, with all these good people about
me, and when I find them offering me their religion so gravely, so
hopefully, it all comes to me with a great rush sometimes--comes to me
as out of great deeps of resentment, that religion could possibly be
made in a church to seem something so faint, so beautifully weary, so
dreamy, and as if it were humming softly, absently to itself.
I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether I am a
Christian or not--the quartet choirs, confections, the little, dainty,
faintly sweet sermons--it is as if--no I will not say it....
I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes. It is as if,
after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry,
the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were,
after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and
the things I saw about me were not hard true realities--as if going to
Church were like sitting in a cloud--some soft musical cloud or floating
island of goodness and drifting and drifting....
* * * * *
Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must
have happened to many men. I but record this blank space on this page,
as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man
trying to be good.
When this little experience of which the words have to be crossed out
after going to Church--finally settles down, there is still a grim truth
left in it.
The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church
and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the vigour and incisiveness of
the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts
like a god all the week--these remain with me as a daily and abiding
sense.
And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I
was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I
see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of
man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over
the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them,
those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting
backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the
foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying
another.
I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so?
I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are
in the hands of men who say How.
Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put
them for a while in the hands of the men who say how. If St. Francis,
for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr.
Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J. Campbell
were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go
at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to
goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit,
the spirit of "how" were brought to bear upon a great engineering
enterprise like goodness in this world.
Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God.
Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.
Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.
Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion.
Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is becoming touched with
the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the
inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is
saying how.
When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the
way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to
happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years
have never dreamed of yet.
In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century
Christianity will not be put off as a spirit. The right of Christianity
to be a spirit has lapsed.
Christianity is a Method.
What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been
understood, on the whole, very well. What He meant by saying He was the
Way, we are now beginning, to work out.
* * * * *
A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made
a bargain, it was their affair.
When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New
York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately
with ninety million people who are not there. They do this as well as
they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say,
and how they would like to be done by, if they were there.
The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do
and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring
the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their
bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they
will be able to do by them as they would be done by--these have scarcely
been arranged for yet.
In our machine age, with our railroads, and our telephones suddenly
heaping our lives up on one another's lives, almost before we have
noticed it, our religious machinery to go with our other machinery, our
machinery that we are going to be Christians with, has not been
invented yet.
Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family or two
family size or village size has been worked out. Religion as long as it
has been concerned with a few people and was a matter of love between
neighbours, or of skill in being neighbourly, has had no special or
imperative need for science or the scientific man.
Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding relation
between ninety million people, the spiritual genius, devotion, and
holiness of the scientific man, of the man who says "how" has come to be
the modern man's almost only access to his God.
A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual
engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, a
gigantic structural constructive achievement in human nature. Doing as
one would be done by, with a few people, is a thing that any man can sit
down and read his Bible a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can
manage to do as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But
how about doing as one would be done by with ninety million people--all
sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New Orleans, Seattle? How
about doing as one would be done by three thousand miles?
It is an understatement to say, as we look about our modern world, that
Christianity has not been tried yet.
Christianity has not been invented yet.
What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.
Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit.
It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think of it. It
is like being presented suddenly with a new world to think of it, to
think that all we have really done with Christianity as yet is to use it
as a breath or spirit.
I look at the vision of the earth to-day, of the great cities rushing
together at last and running around the world like children running
around a house--great cities shouting on the seas, suddenly sliding up
and down the globe, playing hopscotch on the equator, scrambling up the
poles--all these colossal children!... Here we all are!--a whiff of
steam from the Watts's steam kettle and a wave of Marconi across the air
and we have crept up from our little separate sunsets, all our little
private national bedrooms of light and darkness into the one single same
cunning dooryard of a world! Our religion, our politics, our Bibles,
kings, millionaires, crowds, bombs, prophets and railroads all hurling,
sweeping, crashing our lives together in a kind of vast international
collision of intimacy.
All the Christianity we can bring to bear or that we can use to run this
crash of intimacy with is a spirit, a breath.
We do not well to berate one another or to berate one another's motives
or to assail human nature or to grow satirical about God with all our
little battered helpless Christians about us and our unadjusted
religions.
We are a new human race grappling with a new world. Our Christianity has
not been invented yet and if we want a God, we will work like chemists,
like airmen, turn the inside of the earth out, dump the sky, move
mountains, face cities, love one another, and find Him!
In the meantime until we have done this, until we have worked as
chemists and airmen work, Christianity is a spirit.
It explains all this eager jumble of the world, brushes away our
objections, frees our hearts, gives us our program, makes us know what
we are for, to stop and think a moment of this--that Christianity is a
spirit.
Everything that is passing wonderful is a spirit at first. God begins
building a world as a world-spirit, out of a spirit brooding upon the
waters. Then for a long while the vague waters, then for a long while a
little vague land or spirit-of-planet before a real world.
And every real belief that man has had, has begun as a spirit.
For two thousand years Man has had the spirit of immortality. Homer had
it. Homer had moments when improvising his mighty song all alone, of
hearing or seeming to hear, faintly, choruses of men's voices singing
his songs after him, a thousand years away.
As he groped his way up in his singing, he felt them in spirit, perhaps,
the lonely wandering minstrels in little closed-in valleys, or on the
vast quiet hills, filling the world with his voice when he was dead,
going about with his singing, breaking it in upon the souls of children,
of the new boys and girls, and building new worlds and rebuilding old
worlds in the hearts of men. Homer had the spirit of hearing his own
voice forever, but the technique of it, the important point of seeing
how the thing could really be done, of seeing how people, instead of
listening to imitations or copies or awkward echoes of Homer, should
listen to Homer's voice itself--the timbre, the intimacy, the subtlety,
the strength of it--the depth of his heart singing out of it. All this
has had to wait to be thought out by Thomas A. Edison.
Man has not only for thousands of years had the spirit of immortality,
of keeping his voice filed away if any one wanted it on the earth,
forever, but he has had all the other spirits or ghosts of his mightier
self. He has had the spirit of being imperious and wilful with the sea,
of faring forth on a planet and playing with oceans, and now he has
worked out the details in ocean liners, in boats that fly up from the
water, and in boats which dive and swim beneath the sea. For thousands
of years he has had the spirit of the locomotive working through, troops
of runners or of dim men groping defiantly with camels through deserts,
or sweeping on on horses through the plains, and now with his banners of
steam at last he has great public trains of cars carrying cities.
For hundreds of years man has had the spirit of the motor-car--of having
his own private locomotive or his own special train drive up to his
door--the spirit of making every road his railway. For a great many
years he has had the spirit of the wireless telegraph and of using the
sky. Franklin tried using the sky years ago but all he got was
electricity. Marconi knew how better. Marconi has got ghosts of men's
voices out of the clouds, has made heaven a sounding board for great
congregations of cities, and faraway nations wrapped in darkness and
silence whisper round the rolling earth. Man has long had the spirit of
defying the seas. Now he has the technique and the motor-boat. He has
had the spirit of removing oceans and of building huge, underground
cities, the spirit of caves in the ground and mansions in the sky, and
now he has subways and skyscrapers. For a thousand years he has had the
spirit of Christ and now there is Frederick Taylor, Louis Brandeis,
Westfield Pure Food, Doctor Carrel, Jane Addams, and Filene's Store.
Vast networks--huge spiritual machines of goodness are crowding and
penetrating to-day, fifteen pounds to the square inch, the atmosphere of
the gospel into the very core of the matter of the world, into the
everyday things, into the solids of the lives of men.
It takes two great spirits of humanity to bring a great truth or a new
goodness into this world; one spirit creates it, the other conceives it,
gathers the earth about it and gives it birth. These two spirits seem to
be the spirits of the poet and the scientist.
We are taking to-day, many of us, an almost religious delight in them
both. We make no comparisons.
We note that the poet's inspiration comes first and consists in saying
something that is true, that cannot be proved.
A few people with imagination, here and there, believe it.
The scientist's inspiration comes second and consists in seeing ways of
proving it, of making it matter of fact.
He proves it by seeing how to do it.
Crowds believe it.
CHAPTER XIX
AND THE MACHINE STARTS
One of the things that makes one thoughtful in going about from city to
city and dropping into the churches is the way the people do not sing in
them and will not pray in them. In every new strange city where one
stops on a Sunday morning, one looks hopefully--while one hears the
chimes of bells--at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for
people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes
in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right,
faintly sing-song congregations.
One wonders about the churches.
What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel
like singing?
The one thing that the churches are for is news--news that would be
suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing
and pray after one had heard it.
There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news.
Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the
latest and biggest news in them.
News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they
have dared to get from God.
It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some
little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be
said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried. I cannot
conceive of Christ's coming back and saying anything just at the moment.
He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not
arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder
how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic,
visionary, and inefficient.
It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present
spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them,
instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into
business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of,
is being at last revealed to people--where news is being created.
Perhaps it would not be precisely true--what I have said, about Christ's
not saying anything. He probably would. But he would not say these same
merely rudimentary things. He would go on to the truths and applications
we have never heard or guessed. The rest of his time he would put in in
proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years
ago, could be done now. And He would do what He could toward having them
dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally
automatic and of-course machinery of the world.
The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion,
somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals.
All good manners are good in proportion as they become automatic. In
saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more
creative and newer levels. We are asserting that the literal belief in
honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery.
People ought to be honest automatically and by assumption, by dismissing
it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted.
This is what is going to happen.
Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars,
each copy.
With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about
six hundred dollars.
The second costs--twenty-nine cents.
The same principle holds good under the law of moral automatics.
Let the plates be cast. Everything follows. The fire in the Iroquois
Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies.
Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets
around a world.
Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.
They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for
making everybody know that they knew it--the moral and spiritual
machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all
swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been
set up.
Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead
bodies or three dead bodies--but the principle holds good--let the moral
plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively
little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to
more original things.
The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in
seeing how to make goodness in a city work.
Let the plates be once cast--say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa,
and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national
automatically.
Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission
government in three years.
* * * * *
The failure for the time being apparently of the more noble and
aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of
technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil
really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it.
Our religious inventors have failed to use the most scientific method.
We have gone at the matter of butting through evil without thinking
enough. Less butting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not
try any longer to butt a whole planet when we try to keep one man from
doing wrong.
We will butt our way through to the man who sees where to butt and how
to butt. Then all together!
Very few of the wrongs that are done to society by individuals would be
done if civilization were supplied with the slightest adequate machinery
or conveniences for bringing home to people vividly who the people are
they are wronging, how they are wronging them, and how the people feel
about it. This machinery for moral and social insight, this
intelligence-engine or apparatus of sympathy for a planet to-day, before
our eyes is being invented and set up.
* * * * *
Sometimes I almost think that history as a study or particularly as a
habit of mind ought to be partitioned off and not allowed to people in
general to-day. Only men of genius have imagination enough for handling
history so that it is not a nuisance, a provincialism and an
impertinence in the serene presence to-day of what is happening before
our eyes. History makes common people stop thinking or makes them think
wrong, about nine tenths of the area of human nature, particularly about
the next important things that are going to happen to it.
Our modern life is not an historian's problem. It is an inventor's
problem. The historian can stand by and can be consulted. But things
that seem to an historian quite reasonably impossible in human nature
are true and we must all of us act every day as if they were true. We
but change the temperature of human nature and in one moment new levels
and possibilities open up on every side.
Things that are true about water stop being true the moment it is heated
212 degrees Fahrenheit. It begins suddenly to act like a cloud and when
it is cooled off enough a cloud acts like a stone. Railroad trains are
run for hundreds of miles every year in Siberia across clouds that are
cold enough. We raise the temperature of human nature and the motives
with which men cannot act to-day suddenly around a world are the motives
with which they cannot help acting to-morrow.
The theory of raised temperatures alone, in human nature, will make
possible to us ranges of goodness, of social passion and vision, that
only a few men have been capable of before.
All the new inventions have new sins, even new manners that go with
them, new virtues and new faculties. The telephone, the motor-car, the
wireless telegraph, the airship and the motor-boat all make men act with
different insights, longer distances, and higher speeds.
Men who, like our modern men, have a going consciousness, see things
deeper by going faster.
They see how more clearly by going faster.
They see farther by going faster.
If a man is driving a motor-car three miles an hour all he needs to
attend to with his imagination is a few feet of the road ahead.
If he is driving his car thirty miles an hour and trying to get on by
anticipating his road a few feet ahead, he dies.
The faster a man goes--if he has the brains for it--the more people and
the more things in the way, his mind covers in a minute--the more
magnificently he sees how.
On a railway train any ordinary man any day in the year (if he goes fast
enough) can see through a board fence. It may be made of vertical slats
five inches across and half an inch apart. He sees through the slits
between the slats the whole country for miles. If he goes fast enough a
man can see through a solid freight train.
All our modern industrial social problems are problems of gearing people
up. Ordinary men are living on trains now--on moral trains.
Their social consciousness is being geared up. They are seeing more
other people and more other things and more things beyond the Fence.
The increased vibration in human nature and in the human brain and heart
that go with the motor-car habit, the increased speed of the human
motor, the gearing up of the central power house in society everywhere
is going to make men capable of unheard-of social technique. The social
consciousness is becoming the common man's daily habit. Laws of social
technique and laws of human nature which were theories once are habits
now.
There is a certain sense in which it may be said that the modern man
enjoys daily his moral imagination. He is angered and delighted with his
social consciousness. He boils with rage or sings when he hears of all
the new machines of good and machines of evil that people are setting up
in our modern world.
There is a sense in which he glories in the Golden Rule. The
moral-machinist's joy is in him. He is not content to watch it go round
and round like some smooth-running Corliss engine which is not connected
up yet--that nobody really uses except as a kind of model under glass or
a miniature for theological schools. He cannot bear the Golden Rule
under glass. He wants to see it going round and round, look up at it,
immense, silent, masterful, running a world. He delights in the Golden
Rule as a part of his love of nature. It is as the falling of apples to
him. He delights in it as he delights in frost and fire and in the
glorious, modest, implacable, hushed way they work!
We are in an age in which a Golden Rule can sing. The men around us are
in a new temper. They have the passion, almost, the religion of
precision that goes with machines.
While I have been sitting at my desk and writing these last words, the
two half-past-eight trains, at full speed, have met in the meadow.
There is something a little impersonal, almost abstracted, about the way
the trains meet out here on their lonely sidewalk through the meadow,
twenty inches apart--morning after morning. It always seems as if this
time--this one next time--they would not do it right. One argues it all
out unconsciously that of course there is a kind of understanding
between them as they come bearing down on each other and it's all been
arranged beforehand when they left their stations; and yet somehow as I
watch them flying up out of the distance, those two still, swift
thoughts, or shots of cities--dark, monstrous (it's as if Springfield
and Northampton had caught some people up and were firing them at each
other)--I am always wondering if this particular time there will not be
a report, after all, a clang on the landscape, on all the hills, and a
long story in the _Republican_ the next morning.
Then they softly crash together and pass on--two or three quiet whiffs
at each other--as if nothing had happened.
I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act
of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty
engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches
from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty
strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a
wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full
of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still
valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal
souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through
Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad
boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of
stern singing.
I know well enough, of course, that it is a platitude, this meeting of
two trains in a meadow, but it never acts like one. I sometimes stand
and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it.
Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet
trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss
his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in
things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and
in God.
I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like
the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him
and death but a few telegraph ticks--the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly
the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great
creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into
the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile
after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a
Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a
whistle, the way Calvin believed in God.
BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI
_"Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
Hast thrust
Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
Where are the deeds that needs must be,
The dreams, the high delights,
That I once more may hear my voice
From cloudy door to door rejoice--
May stretch the boundaries of love
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
To the faint-remembered glory of those years--
May lift my soul
And reach this Heaven of thine
With mine?"
"Come up here, dear little Child
To fly in the clouds and winds with me,
and play with the measureless light!"_
PART ONE
WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES
CHAPTER I
MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP
As I was wandering through space the other day--just aeroplaning past on
my way over from Mars--I came suddenly upon a neat, snug little
property, with a huge sign stuck in the middle of it:
THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET. Rockefeller,
Carnegie, Morgan & Co.
I was just about to pass it by, inferring naturally that it must be a
mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it occurred to me it
might do no harm to stop over on it, and see. I thought I might at least
drop in and inquire what kind of a firm it was that was handling it, and
what was their idea, and what, if anything, they thought their little
planet was for, and what they proposed to do with it.
I found, on meeting Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan, to
my astonishment, that they did not propose to do anything with it at
all. They had merely got it; that was as far as they had thought the
thing out apparently--to get it. They seemed to be depending, so far as
I could judge, in a vague, pained way, on somebody's happening along who
would think perhaps of something that could be done with it.
Of course, as Mr. Carnegie (who was the talking member of the firm)
pointed out, if they only owned a part of it, and could sell one part of
it to the other part there would still be something left that they could
do, at least it would be their line; but merely owning all of it, so, as
they did, was embarrassing. He had tried, Mr. Carnegie told me, to think
of a few things himself, but was discouraged; and he intimated he was
devoting his life just now to pulling himself together at the end, and
dying a poor man. But that was not much, he admitted, and it was really
not a very great service on his part to a world, he thought--his merely
dying poor in it.
When I asked him if there was anything else he had been able to think of
to do for the world--
"No," he said, "nothing really; nothing except chucking down libraries
on it--safes for old books."
"And Mr. Morgan?" I said.
"Oh! He is chucking down old china on it, old pictures, and things."
"And Mr. Rockefeller?"
"Mussing with colleges, some," he said, "just now. But he doesn't, as a
matter of fact, see anything--not of his own--that can really be done
with them, except to make them more systematized and businesslike, make
them over into sort of Standard Oil Spiritual Refineries, fill them with
millions more of little Rockefellers--and they won't let him do that. Of
course, as you might see, what they want to do practically is to take
the Rockefeller money and leave the Rockefeller out. Nobody will really
let him do anything. Everything goes this way when we seriously try to
do things. The fact is, it is a pretty small, helpless business, owning
a world," sighed Mr. Carnegie.
"This is why we are selling out, if anybody happens along. Anybody, that
is, who really sees what this piece of property is for and how to
develop it, can have it," said Mr. Carnegie, "and have it cheap."
Mr. Carnegie spoke these last words very slowly and wearily, and with
his most wistful look; and then, recalling himself suddenly, and handing
me a glass to look at New York with and see what I thought of it, he
asked to be excused for a moment, and saying, "I have fourteen libraries
to give away before a quarter past twelve," he hurried out of the room.
CHAPTER II
MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ
I found, as I was studying the general view of New York as seen from the
top through Mr. Carnegie's glass, that there appeared to be a great many
dots--long rows of dots for the most part--possibly very high buildings,
but there was one building, wide and white and low, and more spread-out
and important-looking than any of the others, which especially attracted
my attention. It looked as if it might be a kind of monument or
mausoleum to somebody. On looking again I found that it was filled with
books, and was the Carnegie Public Library. There were forty more
Libraries for New York Mr. Carnegie was having put up, I was told, and
he had dotted them--thousands of them almost everywhere one could look,
apparently, on his own particular part of the planet.
A few days later, when I began to do things at a closer range, I took a
little trip to New York, and visited the Library; and I asked the man
who seemed to have it in charge, who there was who was writing books for
Mr. Carnegie's Libraries just now, or if there was any really adequate
arrangement Mr. Carnegie had made for having a few great books written
for all these fine buildings--all these really noble book-racks, he had
had put up. The man seemed rather taken aback, and hesitated. Finally, I
asked him point blank to give me the name of the supposed greatest
living author who had written anything for all these miles of Carnegie
Libraries, and he mentioned doubtfully a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. I
at once asked for his books, of course, and sat down without delay to
find out if he was the greatest living author the planet had, what it
was he had to say for it and about it, and more particularly, of course,
what he had to to say it was for.
I found among his books some beautiful and quite refined interpretations
of tigers and serpents, a really noble interpretation or conception of
what the beasts were for all the glorious gentlemanly beasts--and of
what machines were for--all the young, fresh, mighty, worshipful
engines--and what soldiers were for. But when I looked at what he
thought men were for, at what the planet was for, there was practically
almost nothing. The nearest I came to it was a remark, apparently in a
magazine interview which I cannot quote correctly now, but which
amounted to something like this: "We will never have a great world until
we have some one great artist or poet in it, who sees it as a whole,
focuses it, composes it, makes a picture of it, and gives the men who
are in it a vision to live for."
* * * * *
Since then I have been trying to see what Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie,
and Morgan could do to produce and arrange what seemed to me the one
most important, imperative, and immediate convenience their planet could
have, namely, as Mr. Kipling intimated, some man on it, some great
creative genius, who would gather it all up in his imagination--the
beasts, and the people, and the sciences, and the machines--in short,
the planet as a whole, and say what it was for. It is from this point of
view that I have been drawn into writing the following pages on the next
important improvements--what one might call the spiritual Unreal-Estate
Improvements, for Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan's property
which will have to be installed. I have been going over the property
more or less carefully in my own way since, studying it and noting what
had been done by the owners, and what possibly might be done toward
arranging authors, inventors, seers, artists, or engineers or other
efficient persons who would be able to inquire, to think out for a
world, to express for it, some faint idea of what it was for.
CHAPTER III
MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE
Not unnaturally, of course, I turned to see what had already been done
by the more powerful men the planet had produced, in the way of
arranging for the necessary seers and geniuses to run the world with,
and I soon found that by far the most intelligent and far-seeing attempt
that had been made yet in this direction had been made by an inspired,
or semi-inspired, millionaire in Sweden, named Alfred Nobel, an
idealist, who had made a large but unhappy fortune out of an explosive
to stop war with. His general idea had been that dynamite would make war
so terrible that it would shock people into not fighting any more, and
that gradually people, not having to spend their time in thinking of
ways of killing one another, would have more time than they had ever had
before to think of other and more important things. It was the
disappointment of his life that his invention, instead of being used
creatively, used to free men from fighting and make men think of things,
had been used largely as an arrangement for making people so afraid of
war that they could not think of anything else. Whichever way he turned
he saw the world in a kind of panic, all the old and gentle-minded
nations with their fair fields, their factories and art galleries, all
hard at work piling up explosives around themselves until they could
hardly see over them. As this was the precise contrary of what he had
intended, and he had not managed to do what he had meant to do with
making his money, he thought he would try to see if he could not yet do
what he had meant to do in spending it. He sat down to write his Will,
and in this Will, writing as an inventor and a man of genius, he tried
to express, in the terms of money, his five great desires for the world.
He wished to spend forty thousand dollars a year, every year forever,
after he was dead, on each of these five great desires. There were five
great Inventors that he wanted, and he wanted the whole world searched
through for them, for each of them, once more every year, to see if they
could be found. Mr. Nobel expressed his desire for these five Inventors
as people often manage to express things in wills, in such a way that
not everybody had been sure what he meant. There seems to have been
comparatively little trouble, from year to year, in awarding the prizes
to some adequate inventor in the domain of Peace, of Physics, of
Chemistry, and of Medicine; but the Nobel Prize Trustees, in trying to
pick out an award each year to some man who could be regarded as a true
inventor in Literature, have met with considerable difficulty in
deciding just what sort of a man Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set
aside his forty thousand dollars for when he directed that it should
go--to quote from the Will--"To the person who shall have produced in
the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic
tendency."
Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in Stockholm, invented
and published a book four years ago, called the "New Word," which was so
idealistic and distinguished a book, and so full of new ideas and of new
combinations of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in
England who did not instinctively recognize it, who did not see that it
would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange and
original and too important a book for him to publish, and after a long
delay the book was finally printed in Geneva.
A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees.
One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that here was
precisely the sort of situation that Alfred Nobel, who had been the
struggling inventor of a great invention that would not pay at once
himself, would have been looking for. A book so inventive, so far ahead,
that publishers praised it and would not invest in it, one would have
imagined to be the one book of all others for which Alfred Nobel stood
ready and waiting to put down his forty thousand dollars.
But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a comparatively
obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had written a book to build a
world with, or at least a great preliminary design, or sketch, toward a
world. The Nobel Prize Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand
dollars to Allen Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations
until their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when they
saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five dollars a word,
they came over quietly to where he was and put softly down on him forty
thousand dollars more.
I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling himself would
rather have had Allen Upward have it.
I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely trying to think
things out and understand. But it certainly is a question that cannot
but keep recurring to one's mind--the unfortunate, and perhaps rather
unlooked-for, way in which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been
wondering what there is that might be done, the world being the kind of
world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees to so
administer the Will that its practical weight on the side of Idealism,
and especially upon the crisis of idealism in young authors, would be
where Mr. Nobel meant to have it.
One must hasten to admit that Mr. Upward's book is open to question;
that, in fact, it is the main trait of Mr. Upward's book that it raises
a thousand questions; and that it would be a particularly hard book for
most men to give a prize to, quietly go home, and sleep that night. I
must hasten to admit also that, judging from their own point of view,
the Nobel Prize Trustees have so far done quite well. They have
attained a kind of triumph of doing safe things--things that they could
not be criticised for; and they could well reply to this present
criticism that there was no other course that they could take. Unless
they had a large fund for butting through all nations for obscure
geniuses, and for turning up stones everywhere to look for embryo
authors--unless they had a fund for going about among the great
newspapers, the big magazines, and peeping under them through all the
world for geniuses--and unless they had still another large fund for
guaranteeing their decision when they had found one, a fund for
convincing the world that they were right, and that they were not
wasting their forty thousand dollars--the Trustees have taken a fairly
plausible position. Their position being that, in default of perfectly
fresh, brand-new, great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like
this that geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of
course, lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest
thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the drift of
public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the course of noting
carefully what the world thought were really its great men, and then (at
a discreet and dignified distance, of course) tagging the public, and
wherever they saw a crowd, a rather nice crowd, round a man, standing up
softly at the last moment and handing him over his forty thousand
dollars. This has been the history of the Nobel Trustees of Idealism,
thus far.
But in a way, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the problem of
the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the problem of all of us. We
are interested as well as they in trying to find out how to recognize
and reward men of genius. What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel
Prize Trustees? Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to
achieve for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand
dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an idealistic
tendency?
To take a concrete case, I can only record that it has seemed to me
that if Alfred Nobel himself could have been on hand that particular
year, and could have read Mr. Upward's book, he would have given the
prize of forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward. He would not have given
the prize to Mr. Kipling--he would have given it twenty years before;
but in this particular year of which I am writing, when he saw these two
men together, I believe he would have given the prize to Allen Upward,
and he would have hurried.
I would like to put forward at this point two inquiries. First, why did
the Trustees not award the prize to Allen Upward? And second, what would
have happened if they had?
First, the Trustees could not be sure that Mr. Upward in his work of
genius was telling the truth.
Second, they could not be sure that the world would approve of his
having forty thousand dollars for telling the truth. Perhaps the world
would have rather had him paid forty thousand dollars for not telling
it.
Third, Mr. Kipling was safe. No creative work had to be done on Kipling;
all they had to do was to send him the cheque. Great crowds had swept in
from all over the world, and nominated Mr. Kipling; the Committee merely
had to confirm the nomination.
Fourth, Mr. Upward, like all idealists, like all men who have the power
of throwing this world into the melting-pot and bringing it out new
again partly unrecognizable (which, of course, is the regular
historical, almost conventional, thing for an idealist to do with a
world), bewildered the Nobel Prize Committee. They could not be sure but
that Mr. Upward's next book would be thought in the wrong, and make
their having given him forty thousand dollars to write it ridiculous.
* * * * *
What would have happened if the Trustees had given the prize to Mr.
Upward?
First, practically no one would have known who he was, and twenty-five
nations would have been reading his book in a week, to see why the prize
was given to him. The book would have been given the most widespread,
highly stimulated, forty-thousand-dollar-power attention that any book
in any age has had.
Only now and then would a man go over and take down his old Kiplings
from the shelf and read them, because he had heard that Mr. Kipling had
forty thousand dollars more than he had had before.
Secondly, Mr. Upward's new book would have the stimulus of his knowing
while he was writing it that every word would be read by everybody. All
the draught on the fire of his genius of the whole listening world would
result in a work that even Mr. Upward himself perhaps would hardly
believe he had written. As events turned out, and Mr. Upward did not get
the prize there might be many reasons to believe that his next book
might be out of focus, might be a mere petulant, scolding book, his
exultation spent or dwindled, because his last tremendous wager--that
the world wanted the truth--was lost.
Scolding in a book means, as a rule, either juvenility or it means
relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul--the focussing and
fusing power in a man. I have sometimes wondered if even Christ, if He
had not died in His thirty-third year, made His great dare for the world
on the cross early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently in
other people at about forty or forty-five or so, and would not have
spent the rest of His days in railing at them, and in being very bitter
and helpless and eloquent about Rome and Jerusalem. I have caught myself
once or twice being glad Abraham Lincoln died suddenly just when he did,
his great faith and love all warm in him, and his great oath for the
world--that it was good--still fresh upon his lips!
Writing a book like Allen Upward's for a planet with a vision of a
thousand years singing splendidly through it, and then just reading it
all alone afterward when he has written it, and going over the score all
alone by himself, would seem to be a good deal of a strain. To be
contradicted out loud and gloriously by a world might be inspiring, but
to be contradicted by a solid phalanx of silent nations, trooping up
behind one another, unanimous, impervious, is enough to make any
radiant, long-accumulated genius pause in full career, question himself,
question his vision as a chimera, as some faintly lighted Northern
Lights upon the world, that would never mean anything, that was an
illusion, that would just flicker in the great dark once more and go
out.
I do not say that this is true, or that it would be true of Allen
Upward.
But I have read his book. I should think it might be true.
What Alfred Nobel had in mind, his whole idea in his Will, it seems to
some of us, was to put in his forty thousand dollars at the working end
of some man's mind, at the end of the man's mind where the forty
thousand dollars would itself be creative, where the forty thousand
dollars would get into the man, and work out through the man and through
his genius into the world. It does not seem to me that he wanted to put
his forty thousand dollars at the idle, old remembering end of a man's
mind; that he meant it should be used as a mere reward for idealism. I
doubt if it even so much as occurred to Alfred Nobel, who was an
idealist himself, that idealism, after a man had managed to have some in
this world, would be rewarded, or could possibly be paid for, by any
one. He knew, if ever a man knew, that idealism was its own reward, and
that it was priceless, and that any attempt to reward it with money, to
pay a man for it after he had had it, and after it was all over, would
make forty thousand dollars look shabby, or at least pathetic and
ridiculous. What he wanted to do was to build his forty thousand dollars
over into a Man. He wanted to feel that this money that he had made out
of dynamite, out of destruction, would be wrought, through this man,
into exultation, into life. He had proposed that this forty thousand
dollars should become poetry in this man's book, that it should become
light and heat, a power-house of thought, of great events. What Alfred
Nobel had in mind, I think, with his little forty thousand dollars, was
that it should be given a chance to become an intimate part of some
man's genius; that it should become perhaps at last a Great Book--that
great foundry of men's souls, where the moulds of History are patterned
out, and where the hopes of nations and the prayers of women and
children and of great men are, and where the ideals of men--those huge
drive-wheels of the world--are cast in a strange light and silence.
I wondered if they could have thought of this when they voted on Allen
Upward's book that day three years ago--those twenty grave, quiet
gentlemen in frockcoats in Stockholm!
* * * * *
I have picked out Mr. Upward's book because it is the most difficult,
the most hazardous, and the least fortunate one I know, to make my point
with; and because a great many people will get the reaction of
disagreeing with me, and feeling about it probably, the way the Nobel
Prizes Trustees did. I have wanted to take a book which has the traits
in it for which men of genius are persecuted or crucified or
ignored--our more modern timid or anonymous form of the cross. If Mr.
Upward had been given the Prize by the Nobel Prize Trustees, it will
have to be admitted a howl would have gone up round the world that would
not have quieted down yet; and it is this howl that Mr. Nobel intended
his Prize for, and that he thought a man would need about forty thousand
dollars to meet.
I might have taken any one of several other books, and they would have
illustrated my point snugly and more conveniently; but just that right
touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great
experiment of spirit--the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado
before God and man and before Time, that swinging one's self out on
Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been
lacking. K---- (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I
know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy and strangely
emancipated when he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as
if he had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated being, a
psychic effect that genius often has; and K---- admitted to me
confidentially that he felt that possibly he and Upward were being a
little crazy and happy together by themselves, breaking out into
infinite space so, and he took the book over to W----, and left it on
his desk slinkingly and half-ashamed and without saying anything about
it. He said he was enormously relieved next time he saw W----, felt as
if he had just been pulled out of Bedlam to find that there was at least
one other man in the world apparently in his right mind, who valued the
book as he did.
This is the precise feeling, it seems to me, that the Nobel Prize was
intended to champion and to stand by and temporarily defend in a new
author--the feeling he gives us of being in the presence of unseen
forces, of incalculableness. It was this way Allen Upward has of taking
his reader apart or up into a high place (like the Devil), and dizzying
him, taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind. He
wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on providing for the world
one more book which would give the ordinary man the personal feeling of
being with a genius, cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill
wind of All Space Outside blowing through--a book which is a sort of
God's Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their ordinary plain senses
round them move about dazed a little and as trees walking--a great,
gaunt, naked book.
Alfred Nobel was the inventor of an explosive, a rearranger of things
assumed and things unbedded, and it was this same expansive,
half-terrible, half-sublime power in other men and other men's books he
wanted to endow--the power to free and mobilize the elements in a world,
make it budge over a little toward a new one. He wanted to spend forty
thousand dollars a year on the man in literature who had the pent-up
power in him to crash the world's mind open once more every year like a
Seed, and send groping up out of it once more its hidden thought.
I may not be right in anticipating the eventual opinion of Allen
Upward's book; but even if I am wrong, it will have helped perhaps to
call attention to the essential failure of the Nobel Prize Trustees to
side with the darers and experimenters in literature, to take a serious
part in those great creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men
in which new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us.
For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible, the Nobel
Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. Nobel intended, but certainly
in Literature it will have to be classed as one more of our humdrum
regular millionaire arrangements for patting successful people
expensively on the back. It acts twenty years too late, falls into line
with our usual worldly ornamental D.D., LL.D. habit, and has become, so
far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, doddering Old
Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm. It adds itself as one
more futile effort of men of wealth--or world owners to be creative and
lively with money, very much on the premises with money, after they are
dead.
CHAPTER IV
PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS
I have sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post the following sign
up on his Libraries, on the outside where people are passing, and on the
inside in the room where people sit and think:
A MILLION DOLLARS REWARD.
WANTED, A GREAT LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOR FOR MY LIBRARIES IN THE
UNITED STATES. AT PRESENT OUR GREAT AUTHOR IN AMERICA APPEARS
TO HAVE BEEN LOST OR MISLAID; ANY ONE FINDING HIM, OR ANY ONE
THAT MIGHT DO FOR HIM TEMPORARILY, PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME.
ANDREW CARNEGIE.
Mr. Carnegie's Libraries must be a source of constant regret to the
author of "Triumphant Democracy." They are generally made up of books
written in the Old World. It would be interesting to know what are the
real reasons great Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in
America, and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can do
about it. They are certainly going to be written in America some time,
and certainly, unless the best and greatest part of the Carnegie Library
of the future is to be the American part of it, the best our Carnegie
Libraries will do for America will be to remind us of what we are not.
Unless we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie's Libraries loom in
the world as big as Mr. Carnegie's chimneys, America--which is the last
newest experiment station of the world--is a failure.
It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a
point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have
inadvertently overlooked.
If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a
Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be
called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of
inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this
temperament in others--men in all specialities, in all walks of life,
who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do
them--and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and
another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are
doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--he would
soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in
thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men,
of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as
compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless,
innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing.
Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say
that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the
great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine,
and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his
fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to
find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself
for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that
boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five
hours a day to pick him out, it would be--well, all I can say is, all
those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings,
would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that
boy!
There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation
in his pocket, a system of railroads--a boy with a national cure for
tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody--there is a boy with
cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with
mountainsful of forests in his heart.
This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big,
stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar
bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned,
inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums
of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the
policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them--with all
this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or
how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting
about for himself? He could only be hunted out by people all wrought
through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to
find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy--by some special
kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or
by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about
and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this
boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere
getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them
about thickly, among the books in his libraries--those huge anatomies
and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great
literary steel-works--men would soon begin to be discovered, to be
created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now....
Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at
the windows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks
of learning on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary people
that dribble in from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down
listless in them--in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you
never thought that somewhere all about them, somewhere in this same
library, there must be some white, silent, sunny country of the future,
full of children and of singing, full of something very different from
these iron walls of wisdom? And have you never thought what it would
mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties for people
among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the
books in it, became, as it were, wired throughout with live, splendid,
delighted men and women, to make connections, to establish the current
between the people and the books, to discover the people one by one and
follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives, and take out
the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers and poets, and the
Kossuths, Cæsars, the Florence Nightingales...?
It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small,
invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work
can be done. It must be delicate and wonderful workmanship, like the
magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like
love, like hope--sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting
itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon
the earth: but it would pay.
The same people too, specialists in detecting and developing inventors,
could be supplied also to all other possible callings. They would
constitute a universal profession, penetrating all the others. They
would go hunting among foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced
geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts.
They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking
over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors. They
would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets.
We do not a little for the Submerged Tenth and the sons of the poor, and
we have schools or missions for the sons of the rich, but one of the
things we need next to-day is that something should be done for the
sons of the great neglected respectable classes. Far more important than
one more library--say in Denver, for instance would be a Denver Bureau
of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced, spirited men, of
expert humanists, to study difficulties, and devise methods and missions
for putting all society in Denver through filters or placers, and
finding out the rich human ore, finding out where everybody really
belonged, and what all the clever misplaced people were really for. Of
course it would take money to do all this, and flocks of free people who
are doing the work they love. But it is not book-racks, nor paper, nor
ink, nor stone steps, nor white pillars--it is free men and free women
America and England are asking of their Andrew Carnegies to-day.
Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his libraries. If
Society were fitted up all through with electric connections, men with a
genius for discovering continents in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses;
and if there were established everywhere a current between every boy and
the great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie could
make a great beginning with the little mite of his fortune. If we were
to have even one city fitted up in this way, it would be hard to say how
much it would mean--one city with enough people in it who were free to
do beautiful things, free to be curious about the others, free to follow
clues of greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still,
faint little springs and beginnings of things. It would soon be a
memorable city. A world would watch it, and other cities would grope
toward it. Instead of this we have these big, hollow, unmanned libraries
of Mr. Carnegie's everywhere, with no people practically to go with
them, no great hive of happy living men and women in and out all day
cross-fertilizing boys and books.
There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a
Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the
spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it. They have come to
seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains--all these impervious,
unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should think it would be a
terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see them flocking
across the country from your window, all these huge smoke-stacks of
books in their weary, sordid cities; and the boys who might be great
men, the small Lincolns with nations in their pockets, the little Bells
with worlds in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos
and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the streets!
CHAPTER V
THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE
Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological
Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires,
that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed
to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always
seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along
the middle of his life. The change seemed to be associated in some way,
Mr. Zangwill thought with his money. He reminded one of the
patent-medicine advertisements, "Before and After Taking."
I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire
reminds people--as Mr. Zangwill says he does--of a patent-medicine
advertisement, "Before and After Taking."
I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together
a small collection of pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each,
one before and the other after taking--and having them mounted in the
most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and
asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought--he,
Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist--really
thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they
looked.
I imagine he would say--and practically without looking at the
pictures--that of course to him or to me perhaps, or to any especially
interested student of human nature, millionaires are not really
different at all "Before and After Taking"; that they merely had a
slightly different outer look. They would merely look different, Mr.
Zangwill would say, to the common run or majority of people--the people
one meets in the streets.
But would they?
One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is
that the people--the ordinary people one meets in the streets--are
beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see
that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men,
indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves;
and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary
people who pass in the streets would be deceived by these simple little
pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are
they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I
have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of
pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one Before and the other
After Taking--to a millionaire--of course some really reformed or cured
one--and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the
_Times_, and of the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily Chronicle_,
and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of
having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a
social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their
honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before
and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in
millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be
right in his estimate of our common people to-day.
I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common people are
seeing that millionaires are not changed Before and After Taking that
the majority of time millionaires we have to-day have come to be looked
upon as one of the charges--one of the great spiritual charges and
burdens modern Society has to carry.
Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our
modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what
there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich.
We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us--these great
spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up
around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally,
keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by
day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the
girders of the world--the faith of men in men, and the credit of God,
which alone can hold a world together.
It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his
money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking
objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places. And it is
not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things. He
quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or
almost never changes himself. He is not one man when he is putting money
into his pocket and another when he is taking it out.
We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets
all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost
never does.
Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make a man a new and
beautiful creature, and one soon sees that the typical millionaire is
governed by the same bargain principles, is bullied and domineered over
by the same personal limitations, the same old something-for-nothing
habits. If he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of
getting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better of
people when he gives it to them or to their causes. He takes it out of
their souls. There never has been a millionaire who runs his business
on the old humdrum principle of merely making all the money he can who
does not run his very philanthropies afterward on the same general
principle of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody--and of doing
people good in a way that makes them wish they were dead. Philanthropy
as a philosophy, and even as an institution, is getting to be nearly
futile to-day, for the reason that millionaires--valid, authentic cases
of millionaires who are really cured--who are changed either in their
motives or their methods with regard to what they do with money, except
in rare cases, do not exist.
The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar
Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed
because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it. If enough
millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it
could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select
millionaires coöperating with the public and with artists of all
classes, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has
been since, to start all over again on a new basis. The blunders in
creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always
sure to make had to be made first. They nearly always have to be made
first. There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in
which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely
threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and
by paying too much attention to what they think. If our people were
generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire's
life "before and after," and if millionaires were looked over
discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public
enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the
hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things
that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the
new men that would begin to function in them.
Of course, if what a great vision for the people--_i.e._, a public
enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be different. The mere
millionaire might understand, and his understanding might help. But if
an institution is founded (like a great theatre) to be a superb and
noble masterpiece of understanding and changing human nature; if it is
founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to build up the
ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay the foundations of the
daily thoughts and the daily motives of a great people, the mere
millionaire finds, if he tries to manage it, that he is getting in
beyond his depth. A man who has made his money by exploiting and taking
advantage of the public can only be expected, in conducting a Theatre,
to be an authority on how to exploit a public and take advantage of it
still more, and how to make it go to the play that merely looks like the
play that it wants.
Millionaires as a class, unless they are men who have made their money
in the artist's or the inventor's spirit, really ought to be expected by
this time, except in the size of their cheques, to be modest and
thoughtful, to stand back a little and watch other people. The
millionaires themselves, if they thought about it, would be the first to
advise us not to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large
things, and they know that the only way to do, in conducting great
enterprises, is to select and use men (whether millionaires or not) for
the particular efficiencies they have developed. If we are conducting
what is called a charity, we will not expect that a millionaire can do
good things unless he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the
wrong people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things unless he
has lived his life and done his business in the spirit and the
temperament of the artist. He will not know which the artists are or
what the artists are like inside; and he will not like them and they
will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in
working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament
try to do with the common run of millionaires--all these huge, blind,
imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people
about--ends in the same way--in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear,
compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or
before the public, of course, the Institution will have the same old,
bland, familiar air of looking successful and of looking intelligent,
and yet of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a
hair's breadth.
The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling
interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be
different before and after making their money. Everybody is coming to
see this, sooner or later. It is already getting very hard to raise
money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or
bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest.
The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very
decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer
lend to them either their brains or their money. Mere millionaires will
soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and
they will then soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put in
control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the
size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our
public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospitals,
settlements, art galleries, and all other great public causes, instead
of boring everybody and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody
and attracting everybody's money. They will be full of character,
courage, and vision. Our present great, vague, helpless, plaintive
public enterprises--one third art, one third millionaire, one third
deficit--drag along financially because they are listless compromises,
because they have no souls or vision, and are not interesting--not even
interesting to themselves.
Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into
ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of
people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied
that millionaires and artists get together in time; but the particular
point that seems to be interesting to consider is how the millionaires
and artists can be got together before the artists are dead, and before
the millionaires stop growing and stop being creative and understanding
creative men.
It might be well to consider the present situation in the concrete--the
theatre, for instance--and see how the situation lies, and where one
would have to begin, and how one would have to go to work to change it.
The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is best in modern
art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic.
If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way the best
things that are offered can succeed with them is by having these best
things held before them long and steadily enough for them slowly to
compare them with other things, and see that they are better than the
other things, and that they are what they want.
Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what they want. If
things are tried long enough with them they do. When they have been
tried long enough with them they support them themselves.
The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with sufficient
capital.
The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be obtained is by
having millionaires who appreciate fine things, and believe in them, and
believe the public in time will believe in them.
The only way in which a millionaire can recognize and believe in the
fine things and in the best artists is by being, in spirit and
temperament at least, an artist himself.
The only way in which a millionaire can be an artist is to work every
day in the spirit in which the artist works.
This means the artist in business.
(1) The artist in business is the man who makes things people already
want enough to make money, and who makes things he is going to make
people want enough to make new values and to be of some use.
(2) The artist in business is the employer who makes new things and men
together. He lets the men who make new things with him become new men;
and when the things are made, they go forth in their turn and make new
men and make new publics. New publics have had to be made for
everything: for the first umbrellas, for the first telephones, the first
typewriters. New publics have had to be made for Wagner, for Sunlight
Soap, for Bernard Shaw; and it is the men who make new publics--be it
for big or little things--who are artists. They are in spirit, prophets,
kings, and world-builders.
(3) Incidentally, the artist in business--the employer who creates new
values and is creative himself--will like creative men in his factory,
and will treat them so that they will put their creativeness into his
business; he not only will be an artist himself, but he will have,
comparatively speaking, a factory full of artists working with him. And
when the factories pour out the men at night, and the smoke and the
murmur cease, and the windows are dark, they will go to creative and
live men's plays.
So it has come to pass that the modern business man of the artist sort
holds the arts of modern times in the hollow of his hand. He is a
past-master of creating new publics.
(4) The artist in business is the man who educates and draws out, at
every point where his business touches them, every day, all day, the men
with whom he works. He educates and develops the men who make the
things. He educates and develops the men who buy them. Even the people
who wish they had bought them, are educated or secreted, by the artist
in business. He is a maker of new publics, a world-builder, whichever
way he turns. A business man who merely makes for people what they want,
and who does not get the prestige with men of making for them things
that they did not know they wanted, is a failure and falls behind in his
business. All the big men in business work in future tenses. They are
prophets, historians, and they are Now-men, men who work by seeing the
truth all round the present moment, the present persons, and the present
market, and before it and behind it. Millionaires who are making their
money in this spirit will understand and believe in plays that are
written in this spirit, and the people who work for such employers will
like to go to such plays, and the theatre managers, instead of being the
bullies and tyrants of the world of art, will be held in the power of
the men who see things and who make things--men who in vast sweeps
called audiences, night after night, make new men upon the earth.
PART TWO
IRON MACHINES
CHAPTER I
STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS
I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King
and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others,
into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of
watchful darkness where I sat I saw--there must have been thousands of
them--crowds of camels running.
And crowds of elephants went swinging past.
I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand
years and looking off at a world.
It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and
watch civilizations swinging past.
Then suddenly it became near and human--the spirit of playgrounds and of
shouting and boyish laughter ran through it. And we watched the
elephants, naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake and lying down
to be scrubbed in it with comfortable low snorting and slow rolling in
the water, and the men standing by all the while like little play-nurses
and tending them, their big bungling babies, at the bath. A few minutes
later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty
toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in
our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all the time still those
little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them
invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless--those great
engines of the flesh! I shall never forget it or live without it, that
slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions,
their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants
past--the long panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all
those little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those
mighty necks!
I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or
Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and
it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives--those unconscious,
forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and
listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead
working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on
Space, and on Time while we slept?
My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts--the
crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants--all being driven along by the
little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, "Why don't their
elephants turn around on them and chase them?"
I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.
Our elephants chase us--most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming
quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people,
chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry
whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great
cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust,
for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of
times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing
them--chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands
of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen
ordering around people--who pay them for it--in any city of our modern
world.
Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a
gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.
There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any
civilization that would be called great.
First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second: And if--as in our
Western civilization--the men have made their own elephants, why should
they be chased by them?
There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative
inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps
organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by
organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who
have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with
all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones
that organs can do best--the music that machines like.
Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a
machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the
mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of brass horns, wooden
flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins.
He made violins sing him.
Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization.
Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever
been dreamed in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by
its elephants. The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our
world of machines and crowds to-day turns on our producing
Machine-Trainers.
Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired, men
possessed by churches or religion-machines cannot be prophets, men
possessed by school-machines cannot be educators.
The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet,
discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing a minor
poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect,
in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines? And why should
human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect
to keep very long from losing their souls?
The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is
that this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at
the machines. They blame the locomotive.
A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the locomotive,
and stop running along out of breath beside it, and climb up into the
cab.
This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization--climbing up
into the cab.
First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines. Then the
other poets.
In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and
dells and love and above, the better.
Poetry must make a few iron-handed, gentle-hearted, mighty men next. It
is because we demand and expect the beautiful that we say that poetry
must make men next.
The elephants have been running around in the garden long enough.
CHAPTER II
BELLS AND WHEELS
We are living in a day of the great rebellion of the machines. Out of a
thousand thousand roundhouses and factories, vast cities and nations of
machines on the land and on the sea have risen before the soul of man
and said, "We have served you; now, you serve us."
A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere;
they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white
breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the
great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and
again, all in chorus, _"We have served you, now, you serve us!"_
It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.
But why should we serve them?
I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume
and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.
And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be
serious.
And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky,
beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then
perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and
run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself,
tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of
gentlemanly disappointment.
And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.
When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of
professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station,
and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces the great truth in my
ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to
deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is
that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending
themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath
of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines,
that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer
the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen.
At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford
gentleman.
A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest
self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes
the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the
movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his
will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full
meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him.
The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not
do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit.
I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is. I go alone,
and sadly if I must, and for a little time--without the deep bells and
without the stained-glass windows, without all that dear, familiar
beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles--I take my stand
beside the Great Western Railway! I claim the Great Western Railway for
the spirit of man and for the will of God!
With its vast shuttle of steam and shining engines, its little,
whispering telegraph office, the Great Western Railway is a part of my
body. I lay my will on the heart of London with it, or I sleep in the
old house in Lynmouth with it. I am the Great Western Railway, and the
Great Western Railway is ME. And from the heart of the roar of London
to the slow, sleepy surge of the sea in my window at Lynmouth it is
mine! Though it be iron and wood, switches, whistles, and white steam,
it is my body, and I inform it with my spirit, or I die. With the will
of God I endow it, with the glory of the world, with the desires of my
heart, and with the prayers of the hurrying men and women.
I declare that that same glory I have known before, and that I will
always know, and will never give up, in the old quiet quadrangles of
Oxford and in the deep bells and in the still waters, as in some
strange, new, and mighty Child, is in the Great Western Railway too.
When I am in the train it sings. Strangely and hoarsely It sings! I lie
down to rest. It whistles on ahead my ideals down the slope of the
world. It roars softly, while I sleep, my religion in my ears.
CHAPTER III
DEW AND ENGINES
When I was small, and wanted suddenly to play tag or duck-on-the-rock I
had a little square half-mile of boys near by to play with.
My daughter plays tag or plays dolls, any minute she likes, with a whole
city. She is not surprised at the telephone; she takes it for granted
like sunshine and milk. It is a part of the gray matter in her brain--a
whole city, six or seven square miles of it. A little mouthpiece on a
desk, a number, and two hundred little girls are hers in a minute, to
play dolls with. She thinks in miles when she plays, where I thought in
door-yards. The whole city is a part of the daily, hourly furniture of
her mind. The little gray molecules in the structure of her brain are
different from those in mine.
I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger
body, more awful, more reverent and free than he has had before.
A few minutes ago, here where I am writing, an engine all in bright,
soft, lit-up green with little lines of yellow on it and flashing silver
feet, like a vision, swept past--through my still glass window, through
the quiet green fields--like a great, swift, gleaming whisper of London.
And now, all in six seconds, this great quiet air about me is waked to
vast vibrations of the mighty city. Out over the red pines, the lonely
gorse fields, I have seen passing the spirit of the Strand. I have seen
the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul's in communion
with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, all
in six seconds, when an engine, with its vision like a cloud of glory
swept past.
And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is
in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of
making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that
it has nothing to do with art. They can but watch the machines, the
earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations
and rolling under the souls of men.
I cannot see it so. I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and
green fields to the stones of London. I see the desires of the earth
hastening. The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of
cities on the seas and on the sky. With the machines I have taken a
whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands. I gesture with the
earth. I hand up oceans to my God.
CHAPTER IV
DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!
There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot
make for beauty, because machines are dead.
I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.
I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of
Man like nails, like vast antennæ--a kind of enormous, more unconscious
sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue
than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of
course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live
and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the
difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea a live
thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every
minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to
the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it. I have
known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is
really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its
old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month
by month are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can
always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through
the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought.
We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or
half-dead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such
a thing as tired steel. What people do to steel makes a difference to
it. Steel is sensitive to people. My human spirit grows my arm and moves
it and guides it and expresses itself in it, keeps re-creating it and
destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new
lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more
stolid fashion, responds to my spirit too. Two men changing typewriters
or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots.
Sewing machines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who
use them, and they come to express those particular people and the ways
in which they are different from others. A Titian-haired typewriter girl
makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one.
Typewriters never like to have their people take the liberty of lending
them. Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little
expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have
lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their
wills and made them what they are.
It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover
the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over
his machines. Man, at the present moment, with all his new machines
about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as
self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms
and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh and blood ones. The force
in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created
the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of
glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being
spiritual, and for overflowing everything we touch and everything we use
with our own wills and with the ideals and desires of our souls. The
Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art;
the American has expressed himself in the motor-car; the Englishman has
expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry upon the hills,
and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation. He has made his
walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very treetops express his deep,
silent joy in the earth. So the great, fresh young nations to-day, with
a kind of new, stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed
to their souls expression through machinery. Our Engines and our radium
shall cry to God! Our wheels sing in the sun!
Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his
hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his
house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him,
and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and
furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul,
the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in
his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast,
cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes
for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and
dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and re-moulding the world.
He is making these things intimate, sensitive, and colossal expressions
of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal,
semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred,
and as full of light or of darkness.
So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like
archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We
do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again,
on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for
knowledge--like a great Fish--along the bottom of the sea. We beat up
our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our
faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our
hearts all still and happy, in the face of God!
CHAPTER V
AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON
The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal,
spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of
unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own
souls--the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way
with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a
poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of
the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking
down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as
matter belonging to matter--matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way,
just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls,
with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the
little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already
irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded
scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million
little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the
Lord?
And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or
afraid of becoming like it?
I daily thank God that I have been allowed to belong to this generation.
I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance. I
can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still
coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that
to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron
is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive
in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another
kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars
and to heat and cold, to time and space and to human souls. It is
singing every minute low and strange, night and day, in its little grim
blackness, of the glory of Things. I am filled with the same feeling,
the same sense of kindred, of triumphant companionship, when I go out
among them and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the
engines, those mighty Innocents, those new awful sons of God, going
abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them,
unblinking and without sin!
Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent,
godlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows,
starlight, they say what we make them say. They are alive with the life
that is in us.
The first element of power in a man, in getting control of his life in
our modern era, is to have spirit enough to know what matter is like.
The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like. He
is the man who conceives of iron-and-wood machines, in his daily habit
of thought, as alive. He has discovered ways in which he can produce an
impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will. He
goes about making iron-and-wood machines do live things.
It is never the machines that are dead.
It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead.
CHAPTER VI
THE MACHINES' MACHINES
The fate of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are
morbidly like machines on the one hand, or by people who are morbidly
unmechanical, on the other.
People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic
and mechanical-minded part of the time and in some things, people who
try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and
hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their
actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead.
People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead
already.
It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives
ourselves--real, true, hand-made individual lives--to have to fight all
these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into
humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear
people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one's own
flesh and blood. Does not one see them--see them everywhere--one's own
flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts,
lawn-mowers?
Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical
people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.
There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right
time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right
time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be
mechanical and unmechanical at will.
The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of
machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their
souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like
radium and railroads, and who know when and when not and how and how not
to use them who are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully,
that they do not let the machines outwit them and unman them.
Who are these men?
How do they do it?
They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines,
who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make
people-machines and iron machines run softly together.
CHAPTER VII
THE MEN'S MACHINES
There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods
stores could be human. They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls
of the people who owned them.
When machinery was invented and when organization was invented--machines
of people--drygoods stores became vast selling machines.
We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five
hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store with fifteen.
This problem has been essentially and in principle solved. At least we
know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit--most of us--that
it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man
at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his
clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature.
What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores
work--the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and
everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while
vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow
past the clerks--thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over
their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears
itself.
But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the
practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the
ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make
himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the
ground?
In a department store the employer expresses himself to his clerks
through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle and stir
their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to
all of them through them all.
But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark hole in the
ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with
nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of
other holes men work, each with his helper, all alone. The utmost the
helper can do is to grow like the man he works with, or like his own
pick, or like the coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost
the man who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his
helper.
In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an
employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through
the steel machine he works with--through its being a new, good, fair
machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be
good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a
foreman pacing down the aisles.
The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very
largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I
have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air,
water and fire and silence to express myself to my workmen in. I have
long monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron,
strips of wood, bells, whistles, clocks--to express myself, to express
my human spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way
in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as
expressive of the human as a department store?"
This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to
answer.
All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the
freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it.
Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the
machines away."
Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make
our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines."
We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first chance. What
is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men,
evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the
machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of
men? How can he touch and wake the solar plexus of labour?
If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most
common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him
and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or
light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as
cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit,
and how is he going to do it?
Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men
to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of
against them, they would do it.
What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an
employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and
to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in
him and understand him?
The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of
his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by
day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes
out, and asking him--now with despair, now with a kind of grim,
implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can
be made as human as a department store?"
This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron
machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they
work--who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really
for, and how they work. They will base all that they do upon certain
resemblances and certain differences between people and machines.
They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron.
They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human
nature.
There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and
general principles concerning the natural working relation between men
and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a
basis for a possible solution.
What are our machines after all? How are the machines like us? And on
what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a
world like this to run softly together? These are the questions men are
going to answer next. In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man
who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in
our civilization--because they are machines--is likely to be able to do
much to save the men in it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD
Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his
back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All
the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual
conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little
mighty brain in the small of a man's back.
About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their
headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.
It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to
keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human
race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of
thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him.
It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday
hard work of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his
thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the cupola of his
being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private
personal brain--a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair.
He holds on to his own particular identity with it. The great lower
brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of
eternity--while he goes by.
It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the use of as long
as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements.
This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for, this keeping
the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stopcock for one's infinity,
for screwing on or screwing off one's vast race-consciousness, one's
all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human
energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly
and heavenly desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for
seventy years, by a whole human race.
A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the
various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to
them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up
in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing
these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he
occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the
things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone
can do--the things which, at least in their present initial formative or
creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that
can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself
personally, by the handiwork of his own thought.
The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong,
and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the
basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for
discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up
power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at
will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away
for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his
very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with.
The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard,
civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls
these men, in their generation, men of genius.
Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.
The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try to compete
with him is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is
always the first thing one notices about a man of genius--the incredible
number of things that he manages to get done for him, apparently the
things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do
himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his
senses, the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body, the
way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer
knowledge to him, the power he has in return of informing this outer
knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all,
so that he is always able afterward to rely on his senses to work out
things beautifully for him quite by themselves, and to hand up to him,
when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge--all the things he
wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment--it is these that
make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and better factory
than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and
body. Having all these things done for him, he is naturally more free
than others and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is
swung free to build new worlds--to take walks with God, until at last we
come to look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superstitiously.
We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves that he
gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him,
we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his
thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent everywhereness. His songs and
joys, sometimes, to us, his very sorrows, look miraculous.
And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic
equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions, down in the basement
of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we
are obliged to do ourselves, and give up all of our time to. He is not
held back as we are, and moves freely. So he dives under the sea
familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies
in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or
sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little new
still-undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out
of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try,
or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these
funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of
the same old earth and sky everybody else had had, he makes new kinds
and new sizes of men with a thought like some mighty, serene child
playing with dolls!
It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and
dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out
the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the
ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind. It is really
because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders
once for all, from his spirit. We would never wonder that everything a
genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized
what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work
automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking
up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and
everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new
body, keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of
finer and yet finer things to do automatically. The great spiritual
genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction
and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations
into his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power into
light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really
be seen living--in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet
transmutes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist,
into colour or sound or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his
subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into
stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative
genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some
man's body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious,
high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in
his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would
have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work
out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.
The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of
his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory
of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all
working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things
that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with
which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him
inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real
spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.
So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty have been
free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful and
improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of
us have.
And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that fierce,
silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and
through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator's
footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then
throwing up new little worlds to Him like His worlds, saying, "Look, O
God, look at THIS!"--the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look
poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and
automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation,
have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches of thought
and vast new orbits of desire, like gods.
All the great men of the world have always had machinery.
Now, everybody is having it. The power to get little things,
innumerable, omnipresent, for-ever-and-ever things, tiny just-so things,
done for us automatically so that we can go on to our inspirations is no
longer to-day the special prerogative of men of genius. It is for all
of us. Machinery is the stored-up spirit, the old saved-up inspiration
of the world turned on for every man. And as the greatness of a man
turns on his command over machinery, on his power to free his soul by
making his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization turns upon
its getting machines to do its work. The more of our living we can learn
to do to-day, automatically, the more inspired and creative and godlike
and unmechanical our civilization becomes.
Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
CHAPTER IX
THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS
I would not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house that is not
hand-made. I have come to believe that machinery is going to make it
possible for everybody to have hand-made things in their homes, things
that have been made by people who love to make them, and by people who,
thinks to the machines, are soon bound to have time to make them. Some
will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made ideas.
Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to enjoy hand-made
ideas, to enjoy hand-made books--and enjoy reading books by hand. We may
have time for following an author in a book in the slow, old, deep,
loving, happy, hand-made fashion we used to know--when we have enough
machines.
It looks as if it might be something like this.
Every man is going to spend his mornings in the basement of society,
taking orders and being a servant and executing automatically, like a
machine if need be, the will of the world, making what the world wants
in the way it wants it, expressing society and subordinating himself. In
the afternoon he shall come up out of the basement, and take his stand
on the ground floor of the world, stop being a part of the machinery,
and be a man, express himself and give orders to himself and do some
work he loves to do in the way he loves to do it, express his soul in
his labour, and be an artist. He will not select his work in the
morning, or select his employer, or say how the work shall be done. He
will himself be selected, like a young tree or like an iron nail,
because he is the best made and best fitted thing at hand to be used in
a certain place and in a certain way.
When the man has been selected for his latent capacities, his employer
sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics,
hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature,
heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold
his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to
breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he
could get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary,
thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall be
lent him to show him how his work can be done. The accumulated science
and genius, the imagination and experience, of hundreds of years, of all
climates, of all countries, of all temperaments shall be heaped up by
his employers, gathered about the man's mind, wrought through his limbs,
and help him to do his work.
All labour down in the basement of society shall be skilled labour. The
brains of men of genius and of experts shall be pumped into labour from
above until every man in the basement shall earn as much money in three
hours a day as he formerly had earned in nine.
Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the time he saves
by having the brains of great men and geniuses to work with, it will be
possible for men to do enough work for other people down in the basement
of the world in a few hours to shut the whole basement up, if we want
to, by three o'clock. Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest
of his time in planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and
in creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things like an
artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a man or like a
human being.
Every man owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing his
own soul. The world needs him. Society cannot afford to let him merely
give to it his feet and his hands. It wants the joy in him, the
creative desire in him, the slow, stupid, hopeful initiative, in him to
help run the world. Society wants to use the man's soul too--the man's
will. It is going to demand the soul in a man, the essence or good-will
in him, if only to protect itself, and to keep the man from being
dangerous. Men who have lost or suppressed their souls, and who go about
cursing at the world every day they live in it, are not a safe, social
investment.
But while every man is going to see that he owes it to society to use a
part of his time in it in expressing himself, his own desires, in his
own way, he is going to see also that he owes it to society to spend
part of his time in expressing others and in expressing the desires and
the needs of others. The two processes could be best effected at first
probably by alternating, by keeping the man in equilibrium, balancing
the mechanical and the spiritual in his life. Eventually and ideally, he
will manage to have time in a higher state of society to put them
together, to express in the same act at the same time, and not
alternating or reciprocally, himself and others. And he will succeed in
doing what the great and free artist does already. He will make his
individual self-expression so great and so generous that it is also the
expression of the universal self. Every man will be treated according to
his own nature. Doubtless some men have not brains enough in a week to
supply them for one hour a day of self-directed work. It would take them
five hours a day to think how to do one hour's worth of work. Men who
prefer, as many will, not to think, and who like the basement better,
can substitute in the basement for their sons, and buy if they like, the
freedom of sons who prefer thinking, who would like to work harder than
their fathers would care to work, up on the ground floor of the world.
But as time goes on, it is to be hoped that every man will climb up
slowly, and will belong less and less of his time to the staff that
borrows brains, and more and more of his time to the staff that hands
brains down, and that directs the machinery of the world. The time of
alternation in dealing with different callings will probably be adjusted
differently, and might be made weeks instead of days, but the principle
would be the same. The forces that are going to help, apparently, in
this evolution will be the labour exchange--the centre for the
mobilization of labour, the produce exchange, the inventor's spirit in
the labour unions and employers' associations, and the gradual
organization by inventors of the common vision of all men, and setting
it at work on the supreme task of modern life--the task of drawing out,
evoking each particular man in the world, and in behalf of all, freeing
him for his own particular place.
CHAPTER X
THE MACHINE-TRAINERS
The fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-assertion.
The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is machinery.
Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the coöperative action of
individuals.
If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them together
according to their nature, we can only make vast masses of men work by
putting them together according to their nature.
So far we have been trying to make vast masses of men work together in
precisely the same way we make levers and iron wheels work together. We
have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible
men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and
instincts of the materials of which they are made.
We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines. We have
let our iron machines assert themselves against us. We have let our iron
machines be models for us. We have overlooked the difference in the
nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men.
A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has
to be reproduced by somebody else.
In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be
allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own
acts.
In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are individuals.
Society is organically, irrevocably dependent upon each man, and upon
what each man chooses according to his own nature to do himself.
The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and
running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of each man
who is, as we look him over and take him up, and propose to put him into
it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you
want?" "How can you get it?"
Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal,
patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him,
inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us
know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it,
and let us work it into the common end.
In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which
we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made
machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure
in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of
ourselves.
Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least
dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made
by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and
to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up
possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find
out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life
they will grow up.
Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is
based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out
the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the passion,
if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing,
self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him.
Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all employers
alike. Employers have very largely overlooked it.
It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine
civilization. We need not be discouraged about machines, because the
secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed.
The elephants are running around in the garden. But they have merely
taken us by surprise. It is their first and their last chance. The men
about us are seeing what to do. We are to get control of the elephants,
first, by getting control of ourselves. We are beginning to organize our
people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in
them can keep on being people, and being better ones. And as our
people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron
machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and help. As we
look about us we shall see our iron machines at last, about all the
world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million
machines a day making the crowd beautiful.
CHAPTER XI
MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS
A crowd civilization produces, as a matter of course, crowd art and art
for crowded conditions. This fact is at once the glory and the weakness
of the kind of art a democracy is bound to have.
The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd in a crowd age,
is such as can be found in its literature, especially in its
masterpieces.
The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the United States is
that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands with two
or three million people. The impressiveness of the Senator's Washington
voice, the voice on the floor of the Senate, consists in the mystical
undertone--the chorus in it--multitudes in smoking cities, men and
women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are
silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States.
The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life has a
corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The typical fact in
modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence
that immeasurably represents what it does not say. The difference
between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to
be that in Washington we have an epigram government, a government in
which ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider what
to do, and in which ninety million people are made to sit in one chair
to see that it is done. In Athens every man represented himself.
It may be said to be a good working distinction between modern and
classic art that in modern art words and colours and sounds stand for
things, and in classic art they said them. In the art of the Greek,
things were what they seemed, and they were all there. Hence simplicity.
It is a quality of the art of to-day that things are not what they seem
in it. If they were, we should not call it art at all. Everything stands
not only for itself and for what it says, but for an immeasurable
something that cannot be said. Every sound in music is the senator of a
thousand sounds, thoughts, and associations, and in literature every
word that is allowed to appear is the representative in three syllables
of three pages of a dictionary. The whistle of the locomotive, and the
ring of the telephone, and the still, swift rush of the elevator are
making themselves felt in the ideal world. They are proclaiming to the
ideal world that the real world is outstripping it. The twelve thousand
horsepower steamer does not find itself accurately expressed in iambics
on the leisurely fleet of Ulysses. It is seeking new expression. The
command has gone forth over all the beauty and over all the art of the
present world, crowded for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To
the nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side.
"Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and
"types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or
twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is
compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as
masterpieces. The novel has come into being--several hundred pages of
crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other to oblivion;
and now the novel, jostled into oblivion by the next novel, is becoming
the short story. Kipling's short stories sum the situation up. So far as
skeleton or plot is concerned, they are built up out of a bit of nothing
put with an infinity of Kipling; so far as meat is concerned, they are
the Liebig Beef Extract of fiction. A single jar of Kipling contains a
whole herd of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills.
The classic of any given world is a work of art that has passed through
the same process in being a work of art that that world has passed
through in being a world. Mr. Kipling represents a crowd age, because he
is crowded with it; because, above all others, he is the man who
produces art in the way the age he lives in is producing everything
else.
This is no mere circumstance of democracy. It is its manifest destiny
that it shall produce art for crowded conditions, that it shall have
crowd art. The kind of beauty that can be indefinitely multiplied is the
kind of beauty in which, in the nature of things, we have made our most
characteristic and most important progress. Our most considerable
success in pictures could not be otherwise than in black and white.
Black-and-white art is printing-press art; and art that can be produced
in endless copies, that can be subscribed for by crowds, finds an
extraordinary demand, and artists have applied themselves to supplying
it. All the improvements, moving on through the use of wood and steel
and copper, and the process of etching, to the photogravure, the
lithograph, the moving picture, and the latest photograph in colour,
whatever else may be said of them from the point of view of Titian or
Michael Angelo, constitute a most amazing and triumphant advance from
the point of view of making art a democracy, of making the rare and the
beautiful minister day and night to crowds. The fact that the mechanical
arts are so prominent in their relation to the fine arts may not seem to
argue a high ideal amongst us; but as the mechanical arts are the body
of beauty, and the fine arts are the soul of it, it is a necessary part
of the ideal to keep body and soul together until we can do better.
Mourning with Ruskin is not so much to the point as going to work with
William Morris. If we have deeper feelings about wall-papers than we
have about other things, it is going to the root of the matter to begin
with wall-papers, to make machinery say something as beautiful as
possible, inasmuch as it is bound to have, for a long time at least,
about all the say there is. The photograph does not go about the world
doing Murillos everywhere by pressing a button, but the camera habit is
doing more in the way of steady daily hydraulic lifting of great masses
of men to where they enjoy beauty in the world than Leonardo da Vinci
would have dared to dream in his far-off day; and Leonardo's pictures,
thanks to the same photograph, and everybody's pictures, films of paper,
countless spirits of themselves, pass around the world to every home in
Christendom. The printing press made literature a democracy, and
machinery is making all the arts democracies. The symphony piano, an
invention for making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very
poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a consummate
instance both of the limitation and the value of our contemporary
tendency in the arts. The pipe organ, though on a much higher plane, is
an equally characteristic contrivance making it possible for a man to be
a complete orchestra and a conductor all by himself, playing on a crowd
of instruments, to a crowd of people, with two hands and one pair of
feet. It is a crowd invention. The orchestra--a most distinctively
modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit of
the many in one--is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd
music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the
symphony. Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music is the
voice of multitudes. The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd
of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another
crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art
that the syndicate stands for in commerce. It is syndicate music; and in
proportion as a musical composition in this present day is an
aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion as it is suggestive,
complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd is complex, suggestive, and
paradoxical--provided it be wrought at the same time into some vast and
splendid unity--just in this proportion is it modern music. It gives
itself to the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in
modern life. The legacy of all the ages, is it not descended upon
us?--the spirit of a thousand nations? All our arts are thousand-nation
arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own. Italian
music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo
music--melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of
heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts,
its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer
to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and
featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming
of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting
each of these and each of all things, is revealed to us as the struggle
to express all things at once. Democracy is democracy for this very
reason, and for no other: that all things may be expressed at once in
it, and that all things may be given a chance to be expressed at once in
it. Being a race of hero-worshippers, the Greeks said the best, perhaps,
what could be said in sculpture; but the marbles and bronzes of a
democracy, having average men for subjects, and being done by average
men, are average marbles and bronzes. We express what we have. We are in
a transition stage. It is not without its significance, however, that we
have perfected the plaster cast--the establishment of democracy among
statues, and mobs of Greek gods mingling with the people can be seen
almost any day in every considerable city of the world. The same
principle is working itself out in our architecture. It is idle to
contend against the principle. The way out is the way through. However
eagerly we gaze at Parthenons on their ruined hills, if thirty-one-story
blocks are in our souls thirty-one-story blocks will be our
masterpieces, whether we like it or not. They will be our masterpieces
because they tell the truth about us; and while truth may not be
beautiful, it is the thing that must be told first before beauty can
begin. The beauty we are to have shall only be worked out from the truth
we have. Living as we do in a new era, not to see that the
thirty-one-story block is the expression of a new truth is to turn
ourselves away from the one way that beauty can ever be found by men, in
this era or in any other.
What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us?
The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of
numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of
lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and
characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live.
The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and
crowding is the logical architectural form of the city idea. The
thirty-one-story block is the statue of a crowd. It stands for a
spiritual fact, and it will never be beautiful until that fact is
beautiful. The only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful
(the crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful. The
most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next is to make
the crowd beautiful.
The typical city blocks, with their garrets in the lower stories of the
sky, were not possible in the ancient world, because steel had not been
invented; and the invention of steel, which is not the least of our
triumphs in the mechanical arts, is in many ways the most
characteristic. Steel is republican for stone. Putting whole quarries
into a single girder, it makes room for crowds; and what is more
significant than this, inasmuch as the steel pillar is an invention that
makes it possible to put floors up first, and build the walls around the
floors, instead of putting the walls up first and supporting the floors
upon the walls, as in the ancient world, it has come to pass that the
modern world being the ancient world turned upside down, modern
architecture is ancient architecture turned inside out, a symbol of many
things. The ancient world was a wall of individuals, supporting floor
after floor and stage after stage of society, from the lowest to the
highest; and it is a typical fact in this modern democratic world that
it grows from the inside, and that it supports itself from the inside.
When the mass in the centre has been finished, an ornamental stone
facing of great individuals will be built around it and supported by it,
and the work will be considered done.
The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts, and in
its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts are studying
what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts are studying what the
Greeks needed three thousand years ago. To be a real classic is, first,
to be a contemporary of one's own time; second, to be a contemporary of
one's own time so deeply and widely as to be a contemporary of all time.
The true Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks
did with theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting it.
As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of this present
age--the crowd principle, and the mechanical arts do not, the mechanical
arts are bound to have their way with us. And it were vastly better that
they should. Sincere and straightforward mechanical arts are not only
more beautiful than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point:
they are the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful
next. It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913 without
studying the mechanical ones; without finding one's self looking for
artistic material in the things that people are using, and that they are
obliged to use. The determining law of a thing of beauty being, in the
nature of things, what it is for, the very essence of the classic
attitude in a utilitarian age is to make the beautiful follow the useful
and inspire the useful with its spirit. The fine art of the next
thousand years shall be the transfiguring of the mechanical arts. The
modern hotel, having been made necessary by great natural forces in
modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now
puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One
of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the
twentieth-century Parthenon--a Parthenon not of the great and of the few
and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors,
day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and
lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel--the crowd
fireside--being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that
this civilization is about, the token of what it loves and of how it
lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall express
democracy. The hotel rotunda, the parlour for multitudes, is bound to be
made beautiful in ways we do not guess. Why should we guess? Multitudes
have never wanted parlours before. The idea of a parlour has been to get
out of a multitude. All the inevitable problems that come of having a
whole city of families live in one house have yet to be solved by the
fine arts as well as by the mechanical ones. We have barely begun. The
time is bound to come when the radiator, the crowd's fireplace-in-a-pipe,
shall be made beautiful; and when the electric light shall be taught
the secret of the candle; and when the especial problem of modern
life--of how to make two rooms as good as twelve--shall be mastered
æsthetically as well as mathematically; and when even the piano-folding,
bed-bookcase-toilet-stand-writing-desk--a crowd invention for living
in a crowd--shall either take beauty to itself or lead to beauty that
serves the same end.
While for the time being it seems to be true that the fine arts are
looking to the past, the mechanical arts are producing conditions in the
future that will bring the fine arts to terms, whether they want to be
brought to terms or not. The mechanical arts hold the situation in their
hands. It is decreed that people who cannot begin by making the things
they use beautiful shall be allowed no beauty in other things. We may
wish that Parthenons and cathedrals were within our souls; but what the
cathedral said of an age that had the cathedral mood, that had a
cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are bound to say
in some stupendous fashion of our own--something which, when it is built
at last, will be left worshipping upon the ground beneath the sky when
we are dead, as a memorial that we too have lived. The great cathedrals,
with the feet of the huddled and dreary poor upon their floors, and
saints and heroes shining on their pillars, and priests behind the
chancel with God to themselves, and the vast and vacant nave, symbol of
the heaven glimmering above that few could reach--it is not to these
that we shall look to get ourselves said to the nations that are now
unborn; rather, though it be strange to say it, we shall look to
something like the ocean steamship--cathedral of this huge unresting
modern world--under the wide heaven, on the infinite seas, with spars
for towers and the empty nave reversed filled with human beings'
souls--the cathedral of crowds hurrying to crowds. There are hundreds of
them throbbing and gleaming in the night--this very moment--lonely
cities in the hollow of the stars, bringing together the nations of the
earth.
When the spirit of our modern way of living, the idea in it, the bare
facts about our modern human nature have been noticed at last by our
modern artists, masterpieces shall come to us out of every great and
living activity in our lives. Art shall tell the things these lives are
about. When this is once realized in America as it was in Greece, the
fine arts shall cover the other arts as the waters cover the sea. The
Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across sky and sea,
comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess
to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a
spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New
York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful
expression of Athens. The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the
abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge, because
it expresses the bringing together of millions of men. It is the
architecture of crowds--this Brooklyn Bridge--with winds and sunsets and
the dark and the tides of souls upon it; it is the type and symbol of
the kind of thing that our modern genius is bound to make beautiful and
immortal before it dies. The very word "bridge" is the symbol of the
future of art and of everything else, the bringing together of things
that are apart--democracy. The bridge, which makes land across the
water, and the boat, which makes land on the water, and the cable, which
makes land and water alike--these are the physical forms of the spirit
of modern life, the democracy of matter. But the spirit has countless
forms. They are all new and they are all waiting to be made beautiful.
The dumb crowd waits in them. We have electricity--the life current of
the republican idea--characteristically our foremost invention, because
it takes all power that belongs to individual places and puts it on a
wire and carries it to all places. We have the telephone, an invention
which makes it possible for a man to live on a back street and be a
next-door neighbour to boulevards; and we have the trolley, the modern
reduction of the private carriage to its lowest terms, so that any man
for five cents can have as much carriage power as Napoleon with all his
chariots. We have the phonograph, an invention which gives a man a
thousand voices; which sets him to singing a thousand songs at the same
time to a thousand crowds; which makes it possible for the commonest man
to hear the whisper of Bismarck or Gladstone, to unwind crowds of great
men by the firelight of his own house. We have the elevator, an
invention for making the many as well off as the few, an approximate
arrangement for giving first floors to everybody, and putting all men on
a level at the same price--one more of a thousand instances of the
extraordinary manner in which the mechanical arts have devoted
themselves from first to last to the Constitution of the United States.
While it cannot be said of many of these tools of existence that they
are beautiful now, it is enough to affirm that when they are perfected
they will be beautiful; and that if we cannot make beautiful the things
that we need, we cannot expect to make beautiful the things that we
merely want. When the beauty of these things is at last brought out, we
shall have attained the most characteristic and original and expressive
and beautiful art that is in our power. It will be unprecedented
because it will tell unprecedented truths. It was the mission of
ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be
said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the
beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its
sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things
that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things
and of all souls together on the earth.
The fulfillment of the word that has been written, "Your valleys shall
be exalted, and your mountains shall be made low," is by no means a
beautiful process. Democracy is the grading principle of the beautiful.
The natural tendency the arts have had from the first to rise from the
level of the world, to make themselves into Switzerlands in it, is
finding itself confronted with the Constitution of the United States--a
Constitution which, whatever it may be said to mean in the years to
come, has placed itself on record up to the present time, at least, as
standing for the tableland.
The very least that can be granted to this Constitution is that it is so
consummate a political document that it has made itself the creed of our
theology, philosophy, and sociology; the principle of our commerce and
industry; the law of production, education, and journalism; the method
of our life; the controlling characteristic and the significant force in
our literature; and the thing our religion and our arts are about.
PART THREE
PEOPLE-MACHINES
CHAPTER I
NOW!
This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of
crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future. We want
daily a future. But, after all, it is a future.
I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something
now.
I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous
arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born. This
arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live
while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of
person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the
proper authorities.
In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps
the reader will remember. I said, "I want to be good now."
In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities: "I want
to be beautiful."
I want to be beautiful now.
I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these
same two requests. I find that the authorities do not seem to notice
their requests any more than they have noticed mine.
Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in
the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask a world--a great, vague thing
like the world in general--to make any slight arrangement we may need
for being beautiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in
particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in
particular with whom we can do it. There is getting to be but one course
open to a man if he wants to be beautiful. He must bone down and work
hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is
standing between him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular
persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be
allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire probably
first--his employer, for instance--to stop getting in his way, and at
least to step one side and let him reason with him. And when he cannot
ask his millionaire--his own particular humdrum millionaire--to step one
side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and
reason with him. After this he must ask crowds to please to step one
side and reason with him.
Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great,
imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful--the humdrum
millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds.
In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more
convenient. There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than
he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had
craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make
room and help.
Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask everybody. Every man
finds it the same. He must ask millions of people to let him be
something, one after the other in rows, that they do not want him to be
or do not care whether he is or not. He has to ask more people than he
could count, before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that
he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors.
I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for a man to
break through to being beautiful, past millionaires and past
iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the people-machines or
crowds, and how perhaps to break past them and be beautiful in behalf of
them, in spite of them.
CHAPTER II
COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES
The problem seems to be something like this. One finds one has been born
and put here whether or no, and that one is inextricably alive in a
state of society in which men are coming to live in a kind of vast
disease of being obliged to do everything together.
We are still old-fashioned enough to be born one at a time, but we are
educated in litters and we do our work in the world in herds and gangs.
Even the upper classes do their work in gangs, and with overseers and
little crowds called committees. Our latest idea consists in putting
parts of a great many different men together to make one great
one--forming a committee to make a man of genius.
There is no denying that, in a way, a committee does things; but what
becomes of the committee?
And the lower in the scale of life we go the more committees it takes to
do the work of one man and the more impossible it becomes to find
anything but parts of men to do things. I put it frankly to the reader.
The chances are nine out of ten that when you meet a man nowadays and
look at him hard or try to do something with him you find he is not a
man at all but is some subsection of a committee. You cannot even talk
with such a man without selecting some subsection of some subject which
interests him; and if you select any other subsection than his
subsection he will think you a bore; and if you select his subsection he
will think that you do not know anything.
And if you want to get anything done that is different, or that is the
least bit interesting, and want to get some one to do it, how will you
go about it? You will find yourself being sent from one person to
another; and before you know it you find yourself mixed up with nine or
ten subdivisions of nine or ten committees; and after you have got your
nine or ten subsections of nine or ten committees to get together to
consider what it is you want done, they will tell you, after due
deliberation, that it is not worth doing, or that you had better do it
yourself. Then every subsection of every committee will go home
muttering under its breath to every other subsection that a man who
wants slightly different and interesting things done in society is a
public nuisance; and that the man who does not know what subsection he
is in and what subsection of a man he was intended to be, and who tries
to do things, carries dismay and anger on every side around him. Drop
into your pigeonhole and be filed away, O Gentle Reader! Do you think
you are a soul? No; you are Series B. No. 2574, top row on the left.
In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory whose long
windows I often pass in the train, they have their machinery so
perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to make one shoe.
Query--If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four men who do
nothing else to make one shoe, how many machines would it take, and how
many shoes, to make one man?
Query--And when an employer in a shoe factory deals with his employee,
can it really be said, after all, that he is dealing with _him_? He is
dealing with _It_--with Nine Hours a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man.
The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to make a man feel that
he is, and always was, and always will be, immemorially, unanimously,
innumerably nobody.
Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle up over our
oblivion. Not long ago I saw a notice or letter in the _West
Bulletin_--probably from a member of something--ending like this: "...
I hope the readers of the _Bulletin_ will ponder over this suggestion of
_Number_ 29,619.--Sincerely yours, _No._ 11, 175."
CHAPTER III
THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN
I shall never forget one day I spent in New York some years ago--more
years than I thought at first. It was a wrong-headed day, but I cannot
help remembering it as a symbol of a dread I still feel at times in New
York--a feeling of being suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it
is like the undertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of
impersonality--swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or
emptiness of people. I had come fresh from my still country meadow and
mountain, my own trees and my own bobolinks and my own little island of
sky up over me, and in the vast and desolate solitude of men and women I
wandered about up and down the streets. Every block I saw, every window,
skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made me feel as if I
belonged to another world. Here was a great conspiracy in stone and iron
against my own life with myself. Was there a soul in all this huge roar
and spectacle of glass and stone and passion that cared for the things
that I cared for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one
shuffle of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or
desire of mine? The rain swept in my face, and I spent the day walking
up and down the streets looking at stones and glass and people. _"Here
we are!"_ say the great buildings crowding on the sky. _"Who are
you?"_....all the stone and the glass and the walls, the mighty
syndicate of matter everywhere, surrounded me--one little, shivering,
foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little foolish mote
of identity!
And I do not believe that I was all wrong. New York, like some vast,
implacable cone of ether, some merciless anæsthetic, was thrust down
over me and my breathing, and I still had a kind of left-over prejudice
that I wanted to be myself, with my own private self-respect, with my
own private, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete
personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he
fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the
right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the
appalling sights of New York to me--the spectacle of the helplessness,
the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another.
Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine
of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd
corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit that the man who
lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself
every day. He becomes a mere millionth of something. All these other
people he sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too. He
grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk of people if he is
to notice people at all. Unless he sees all the different kinds of
people and forms of life with his own eye, and feels human beings with
his hands, as it were, he does not know and sympathize with them. The
crowd-craving or love of continual city life on the part of many people
comes to be a sheer lack of imagination, an inability to live in
qualities instead of quantities in men. To live merely in a city is not
to know the real flavour of life any more than the daily paper knows
it--the daily paper, the huge dull monster of observation, the seer of
outsides. The whole effect of crowds on the individual man is to
emphasize scareheads and appearances, advertisements, and the huge
general showing off. The ride in the train from New Haven to New York is
the true portrait of a crowd. Crowds of soaps and patent medicines
straining on trees and signboard out of the gentle fields toward crowds
of men, culminating at last in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the marble
signposts of death flaunt themselves. Oblivion itself is advertised, and
the end of the show of a show world is placarded on our graves. Men buy
space in papers for cards, and bits of country scenery by the great
railroads to put up signboards, and they spend money and make constant
efforts to advertise that they are alive, and then they build expensive
monuments to advertise that they are dead....
The same craving for piled-up appearances is brought to bear by crowds
upon their arts. Even a gentle soul like Paderewski, full of a personal
and strange beauty that he could lend to everything he touched, finds
himself swept out of himself at last by the huge undertow of crowds.
Scarcely a season but his playing has become worn down at the end of it
into shrieks and hushes. Have I not watched him at the end of a tour,
when, one audience after the other, those huge Svengalis had hypnotized
him--thundering his very subtleties at them, hour after hour, in
Carnegie Hall? One could only wonder what had happened, sit by
helplessly, watch the crowd--thousands of headlong human beings lunging
their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping,
huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After every crash of new
crescendo, after every precipice of silence, they seemed to be crying,
"This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!" The feeling of a vast audience holding
its breath, no matter why it does it or whether it ought to do it or
not, seems to have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of
faces gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand
souls suspended in space all on one tiny little ivory lever at the end
of one man's forefinger ... dim lights shining on them and soft
vibrations floating round them ... going to hear Paderewski play at the
end of his season was going to hear a crowd at a piano singing with its
own hands and having a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember
that there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and possessed his
audience by being hypnotized and possessed by his own music. One liked
to remember him--the Paderewski who was really an artist and who
performed the function of the artist showering imperiously his own
visions on the hearts of the people.
And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One
keeps coming on it everywhere--the egotism of cities, the
self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists
from their functions, making them sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of
singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has
been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost to give up
going to the theatre except to very little ones, and we are wondering if
churches cannot possibly be made small enough to believe great things,
or if galleries cannot be arranged with few enough people in them to
allow us great paintings, or if there will not be an author so well
known to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper will
not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a circulation small
enough to tell the truth.
CHAPTER IV
LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT
So we face the issue.
Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the
crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful. No man who is
engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the
facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to
avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world--the
fact that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or worse,
the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is
capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made
beautiful?"
The answer to this question involves two difficulties: (1) A crowd
cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make
it beautiful.
The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of
history--the real-idealists--the men who love the crowd and the
beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of
them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that
living in a democratic country, a country where politics and æsthetics
can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large
part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a
country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United
States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the
common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is
sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to
subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful
and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the
average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man,
plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's
forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same
average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are
forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his
masters.
On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man
(which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really
is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.
The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the
world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless
art. The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to
be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient
for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more
uncomfortable than he does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of
saying how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man, and,
excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him,
the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more
beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his
side, in spite of him, and claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it
for himself. The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for
the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average
men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow
massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is
highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them
shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life,
where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if
the ideal of democracy is tableland--that is--mountains for
everybody--a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out
of.
Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization--having the extraordinary
men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having
the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary
ones--are equally impracticable.
This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd cannot be made
beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made
beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man
who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful
whether it allows him to or not.
When this man is born to us and looks out on the conditions around him,
he will find that to be born in a crowd civilization is to be born in a
civilization, first, in which every man can do as he pleases; second, in
which nobody does. Every man is given by the Government absolute
freedom; and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government says
to him, "Now if you can get enough other men, with their absolute
freedom, to put their absolute freedom with your absolute freedom, you
can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking
to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the
number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of
masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to
his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can
cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one
ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd
civilization becomes, not "What does a thing mean?" or "What is it
worth?" but "How much is there of it?" "If thou art a great man," says
civilization, "get thou a crowd for thy greatness. Then come with thy
crowd and we will deal with thee. It shall be even as thou wilt." The
pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, that men who
are of small or ordinary calibre can only be more pressed by it. They
are pressed smaller and smaller--the more they are civilized, the
smaller they are pressed; and we are being daily brought face to face
with the fact that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for
the evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd who can
withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say, the one solution of
a crowd civilization is the great-man solution--a solution which is none
the less true because by name, at least, it leaves most of us out or
because it is so familiar that we have forgotten it. The one method by
which a crowd can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the
great-man method--the method of crucifying and worshipping great men,
until by crucifying and worshipping great men enough, inch by inch, and
era by era, it is lifted to greatness itself.
Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of
infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock
protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived
to say to the older nations of the earth, "All men are created equal."
It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that
all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent.
better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would
not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had
said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had
ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years,
should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that
every man in America was free to try to be equal to. A civilization by
numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes,
could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to
live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the
hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question
whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall
among the civilizations of the earth. The main difference between the
heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and
the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom now, is that tyranny
now is crowding around the Rock, and climbing up on the Rock,
eighty-seven million strong, and that tyranny then was a half-idiot king
three thousand miles away.
* * * * *
We know or think we know, some of us--at least we have taken a certain
joy in working it out in our minds, and live with it every day--how
people in crowds are going to be beautiful by and by.
The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express. It seems
better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is before trying to
meet it.
And now we would like to try to meet it. How can we determine what is
the most practical and natural way for crowds of people to try to be
beautiful now?
It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd technique,
and of determining how human nature works.
All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim.
Everything turns on the method.
In the following chapters we will try to consider the technique of being
beautiful in crowds.
BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
TO WALT WHITMAN
_"And I saw the free souls of poets,
The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me
Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me
... O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
... I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me,
I will make cities and civilizations defer to me
This is what I have learnt from America--
I will confront these shows of the day and night
I will know if I am to be less than they,
I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and
ships have meaning,
... I am for those that have never been mastered,
For men and women whose tempers have never been mastered,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.
I am for those who walk abreast of the whole earth
Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all."_
CHAPTER I
THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO
I was spending a little time not long ago with a man of singularly
devoted and noble spirit who had dedicated his life and his fortune to
the Socialist movement. We had had several talks before, and always with
a little flurry at first of hopefulness toward one another's ideas. We
both felt that the other, for a mere Socialist or for a mere
Individualist, was really rather reasonable. We admitted great tracts of
things to one another, and we always felt as if by this one next
argument, perchance, or by one further illustration, we would convince
the other and rescue him like a brand from the burning.
The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as we
climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing. He was studying
up the heroes of the American Revolution, and was writing something to
show that they were not really heroes after all. All manner of things
were the matter with them. They had always troubled him, he said. He
knew there was something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter
settled. He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and
thought they did a great deal of harm--even dead ones. Heroes, he said,
always deceived the people. They kept people from seeing that nothing
could be done in our modern society by any one man. Only crowds could do
things, he intimated--each man, like one little wave on the world,
wavering up to the shore and dying away.
As the evening wore on our conversation became more concrete, and I
began to drag in, of course, every now and then, naturally, an inspired
or semi-inspired millionaire or so.
I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with enthusiasm.
Finally, I turned on him. "What is it that makes you so angry (and
nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear something good, something
you cannot deny is good, about a successful business man? If I brought a
row of inspired millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the
other, into your library this minute, you would get hotter and hotter
with every one, wouldn't you? You would scarcely speak to me."
---- intimated that he was afraid I was deceived; he was afraid that I
was going about deceiving other people about its being possible for mere
individual men to be good; he was afraid I was doing a great deal of
damage.
He then confided to me that not so very long ago he dropped in one
Monday morning into his guest-chamber just after his guest had gone and
found a copy of "Inspired Millionaires," which his guest had obviously
been reading over Sunday, lying on the little reading-table at the head
of the bed.
He said that he took the book back to his library, took out two or three
encyclopædias from the shelf in the corner, put my inspired millionaires
in behind them, put the encyclopædias back, and that they had been there
to this day.
With this very generous and kindly introduction we went on to a frank
talk on the general attitude of Socialists toward the instinct of
hero-worship in human nature.
A Socialist had said only a few days before, speaking of a certain
municipal movement in which the people were interested, that he thought
it really had a very good chance to succeed "if only the heroes could be
staved off a little longer." He deprecated the almost incurable idea
people seemed to have that nothing could ever be done in this world
without being all mixed up with heroes.
My mind kept recurring in a perplexed way to this remark for a few days
after I had heard it, and I soon came on the following letter from a
prominent Socialist which had been read at a dinner the night before:
"I am glad to join with others of my comrades in conveying
greetings to Comrade Cahan on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of his birth and in recognition of the eminent
services that he has rendered in the Socialist movement.
"Yet my gladness is not untinged with a certain note of
apprehension lest in expressing so conspicuously our esteem of
an honoured comrade we obscure the broader scene which, if
equally illumined, would disclose tens of thousands of other
comrades, labouring with equal devotion, and each no less
worthy of praise....
"In our rejoicing over the services of Comrade Cahan let us
not forget that the facilities that he and that each of us
enjoy are the products of thousands of other men and women,
and sometimes of children too.
"In our rejoicing let us recall that we cannot safely assume
that any comrade's services to the movement have been greater
than the movement's services to him; that we are but
fellow-workers together, deriving help and perhaps inspiration
one from another and each from all.
"In our rejoicing let us place the emphasis rather upon the
services of the many to each, than upon the services of any
one of the many."
I have not quoted from this letter because I disagree with the idea in
it. I am ready to admit that though the idea is a somewhat dampening one
perhaps for a banquet, that it is true and important.
What I object to in the letter is the Fear in it.
In spite of the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know,
underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary.
I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of nobly sick way, visionary,
unpractical, and socially destructive.
I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the quality
of many heroes, possibly about most heroes. I would agree in a large
measure that the heroes the crowds choose are the wrong ones.
But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as to our
practical working policy in getting the things for crowds that we both
want for them. It seems to me that he does not believe in crowds. He is
filled with fear that they would select the wrong heroes. He says they
must not have heroes, or must be allowed as few as possible.
I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the
hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select from, the
finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the more deeply,
truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the more nobly they
will express themselves.
But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd
in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves
the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's ideal of the beautiful in
conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical,
hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the
crowd, what the crowd wants.
I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street
keeping step. It was a band that held them together. A band is a
practical thing.
Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of
economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of
music? What economics needs now is a march.
We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we
have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the
worship in them, and make them want to do something. The hero is the man
who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all
through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.
It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of
human nature which we have called hero-worship.