MEN WHO GET THINGS
All the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire. A vice is
a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within
reach, to control his little ones.
A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop
into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He
forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly
that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely
Hunger--a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or
a million dollars, runs away with him.
When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-control lies
in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and
centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world
would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of
hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes
of people, or hungering for themselves.
We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the
world--not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is
merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority
on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own
hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be
taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about
what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken
seriously.
I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers.
I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same
sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of
religion, would dare to do what they have done.
But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with
sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point.
And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers,
or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:
First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive
and imperative. It must be obeyed.
Second, I do not care what they think.
What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the act of being
scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty
years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies,
are not practical. What a man who despairs of everybody except himself
thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work. The fact that the
dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the
employers' fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches,
the schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever side
in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the
other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be
the side that will get the most control.
If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw materials,
machinery, and management of modern industry out of the hands of the
capitalists and run the world, the one shrewd, invincible way for Labour
to do it is going to be to want more things for more people than
capitalists can want.
The only people, to-day, who are going to be competent to run a world,
or who can get hold of even one end of it to try to run it, are going to
be the people who want a world, who have a habit, who may be said to be
almost in a rut, of wanting things all day, every day, for a world--men
who cannot keep narrowed down very long at a time to wanting things for
themselves.
There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being
obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an
uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes are merely
wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers
who are getting the bigger sorts of things--things like worlds into
their hands. The me-man and the class-man, under our modern conditions,
are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places,
the me-places and class-places, by the men who want more things than
they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others.
The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he
wants.
But he does not get it. It is the class-man who gets it for him.
The class-man may see what he wants for his class clearly and may say
what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him.
It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that God
has worked it out!
It is one of His usual paradoxes.
The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more
than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.
He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies
around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and
the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or
try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they
believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he
wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what
he can--in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.
The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get
outside of himself into his class, who, in being a good class-man, can
overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he
wants.
I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial
world, as at present constituted in our coöperative age, the men who can
get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who
have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other
people.
If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage
for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben
Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.
Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and
desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a
minute and they were sorry the day after.
And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause--a
prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of
Labour--that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow
little prayer, should dare to represent Labour.
In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all
those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off
before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial,
guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No God and no
Master"--it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of
Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets,
singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and
"One is our Master, even Christ"--thousands of men who had never been
inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse
in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, snatching
up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know,
all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea
that the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial
Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed to represent
for one moment the manhood and the courage, the faithfulness and (even
in the hour of their extremity) the quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty
and self-forgetfulness, the moral dignity of the American workingman.
It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring man, whether
in America or England, is a coward; that he has no desire, no courage,
for any one except for himself and for his own class. Mr. O'Connor of
the Dockers' Organization in the East of Scotland, said at the time of
the strike of the dockers in London: "This kind of business of the
bureaucratic labour men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work
all over the country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of
England. It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement
with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it."
It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening
seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the World
when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and that Labour
alone can save the world. He knows that any scheme of social and
industrial reform which leaves any class out, rich or poor, which does
not see that everybody is to blame, which does not see that everybody is
responsible, which does not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and
expectation for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not
do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial.
If we are going to have a society that is for all of us, it will take
all of us, and all of us together, to make it. Mutual expectation alone
can make a great society. Mutual expectation, or courage for others,
persistently and patiently and flexibly applied--applied to details by
small men, applied to wholes by bigger ones--is going to be the next big
serious, unsentimental, practical industrial achievement. And I do not
believe that for sheer sentiment's sake we are going to begin by rooting
up millionaires and, with one glorious thoughtless sweep, saying, "We
will have a new world," without asking at least some of the owners of
it to help, or at least letting them in on good behaviour. Nor are we
going to begin by rooting up trade unions and labour leaders.
The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are daily
engaged, through competition and experiment and observation, in
educating one another and finding out what they really want and what
they can really do; and it is equally true that the great organizations
of labour, in the same way, are educating one another.
The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational fight. And
the fight is being conducted, not between Labour and Capital, but
between the labouring men who have courage for Capital and labouring men
who have not, and between capitalists who have courage for Labour and
those who have not. To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day
is between those who have courage and those who have not.
It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage and men
who have not, which will win.
Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world will be the
most safe in the hands of the men who have the most courage.
There are four items of courage I would like to see duly discussed in
the meetings of the trades unions in America and England.
First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when the leaders
of trades unions come to know employers better than the other men do and
begin to see the other side and to have some courage about employers and
to become practicable and reasonable, the unions drop them?
Second, Why is it that, in a large degree, the big employers, when they
succeed in getting skilled representatives or managers who come to know
and to understand their labouring men better than they do, do _not_ drop
them? Why is it that, day by day, on all sides in America and England,
one sees the employing class advancing men who have a genius for being
believed in, to at first questioned, and then to almost unquestioned,
control of their business? If this is true, does it not seem on the
whole that industry is safer in the hands of employers who have courage
for both sides and who see both sides than of employees who do not? Does
not the remedy for trades unions and employees, if they want to get
control, seem to be, instead of fighting, to see if they cannot see both
sides quicker, and see them better, than their employers do?
Third, A discussion of efficiency in a National Labour Party from the
point of view of the trend of national efficiency in business.
Apparently the most efficient and shrewd business men in England and
America are the men who are running what might be called lubricated
industries--who are making their industries succeed on the principle of
sympathetic, smooth-running, mutual interests. If the successful modern
business man who owns factories is not running each factory as a small
civil war, is it not true that the only practical and successful Labour
Party in England, the only party that can get things done for labour and
that can hold power, is bound to be the party that succeeds in having
the most courage for both sides, in seeing the most mutual interests,
and in seeing how these interests can be put together, and in seeing it
first and acting on it before any other merely one-sided party would be
able to think it out?
Fourth, A discussion of the selection of the best labour leaders to
place at the head of the unions.
Nearly every man who succeeds in business notably, succeeds in believing
something about the people with whom he deals that the men around him
have not believed before, or in believing something which, if they did
believe it, they had not applied or acted as if they had believed
before. If, in order to succeed, a business man does not believe
something that needs to be believed before other people believe it, he
hires somebody who does believe it to believe it for him.
Perhaps Labour would find it profitable to act on this principle too,
and to see to it that the leaders chosen to act for them are not the
noisiest minded, but the most creative men, the men who can express
original, shrewd faiths in the men with whom they have to deal--faiths
that the men around them will be grateful (after a second thought) to
have expressed next.
* * * * *
In the meantime, whether among the labourers or the capitalists, however
long it may take, it is not hard to see, on every hand to-day, the world
about us slowly, implacably getting into the hands of the men, poor or
rich, who have the most keen, patient courage about other people, the
men who are "good" (God save the word!), the men who have practical,
working human sympathies and a sense of possibilities in those above
them and beneath them with whom they work--the men who most clearly,
eagerly, and doggedly want things for others, who have the most courage
for others.
I have thought that if we could find out what this courage is, how it
works, how it can be had, and where it comes from, it might be more
worth our while to know than any other one thing in the world.
I would like to try to consider a few of the sources of this courage for
others.