INVENTION
If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London
to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd
who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them.
The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would be far less
desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but it
is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all
classes who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any
one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds.
I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at
Hendon--those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of
themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one--that imperturbable
happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half
science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast
countenance of the future--watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of times
I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to
watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky
machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world
of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid.
One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all the new
people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt a vast
light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence of the picked
people who had come to see this first vast initiative of man toward
Space, toward the stars, the people who had waited for four thousand
years to see it; to see at last Little Man (as it would seem to God) in
this his first clumsy, beautiful childlike tottering up the sky.
One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the
practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle
fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel
identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of
initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world
if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got
it.
* * * * *
The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming
down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed
to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling
under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the
street.
Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking
the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies
in the box.
The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the
_Times_ saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was
missing.
He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had
sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people--to
anybody Who Happened Along the Strand--to a Foundling Hospital.
* * * * *
The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it
because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human
nature. He thought he ought to encourage me.
I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion.
I think it would have been better to have had just a few of those
pennies in the Strand say seven or eight missing.
On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would
have been missing--I hope.
And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand.
There are two ways to get relief from this story.
First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would
have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies
between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear
little foundlings got them--the letter in the _Times_ said. They were
presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand.
Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a
sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the _Times_
and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the
pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in
the _Times_ to come out at the other.
Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off.
But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon.
If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that
memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened
in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it.
It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with
enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try
stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like.
The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling
ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it
again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash
drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United
States.
At all events the last thing that I would be willing to believe is that
either America or England would be capable of producing a chance crowd
in the street that out of sheer laziness or moral thoughtlessness would
not be able to work up at least one boy in it who would have a sudden
flash of imagination about a penny rolling around a man's leg--if he
picked it up and--did not put it in the box.
The crowd in the Strand, of course, like any other real crowd, was a
stew of development, a huge laboratory of people. All stages of
experience were in it.
Some of the people in the crowd that day had a new refreshing thought,
when they saw those pennies rolling around everybody. They thought they
would try and see what stealing a penny was like. Then they did it.
Others in the crowd thought of stealing a penny too, and then they had
still another thought. They thought of not stealing it. And this second
thought interested them more.
Others did not think of stealing a penny at all because they had thought
of it so often before had got used to it and had got used to dismissing
it.
Others thought of stealing a penny and then they thought how ashamed
they were of having thought of it. Others looked thoughtfully at the
pennies and thought they would wait for guineas.
But whatever it was or may have been that was taking place in that crowd
that day--they all thought.
And after all what is really important to a nation is that the people in
it--any chance crowd in a street in it should think. I confess I care
very little one way or the other about the pennies being saved, or about
the brewer's little touch of moral poetry, his idea that this particular
crowd was solid Sunday-school from one end to the other, all through.
Whether it was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did
not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them think,
made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the individuality or
invention in them, the personal self-control, the social responsibility
in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. And I am glad, for one, that the
box of pennies was dumped in the street.
I would like to see shillings tried next time.
Then guineas might be used.
A box of guineas dumped in the street would do more good than a box of
pennies because there are many people who would think more with the
guineas rolling around out of sight around a man's legs than they would
with a penny's doing it.
In this way a box of guineas would do more good.
* * * * *
Thousands of men and women that we have sent to India from this Western
World have been trying with Bibles, and good deeds, and kind faces, and
Sunday-schools to get the Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin
to kill the rats and stop the bubonic plague.
Nothing came of it.
In due time General Booth-Tucker appeared on the scene.
He came too, of course, with a Bible and with his kind face like the
others, and of course, too, he went to Sunday-school regularly.
And while he was watching the bubonic plague sweeping up cities, he
tried too, like the others, to tell the people about a God who would not
be displeased if they killed the rats and stopped the plague.
But he could not convince anybody, or at best a few here and there.
The next thing that was known about General Booth-Tucker's work in India
was, that he had (still with his Bible, of course, and with his kind
look) slipped away and established in the south of France a factory for
the manufacture of gloves.
He then returned to his poor superstitious people in India who would not
believe him, and told them that he knew and knew absolutely that they
would not be punished for killing the rats, that the rats were not
sacred, and that he could prove it.
He offered the people so much apiece for the skins of the rats.
The poorest and most desperate of the natives then began killing the
rats secretly and bringing in the skins.
They waited for the wrath of Heaven to fall upon them. Nothing happened,
then they told others. The others are telling everybody.
General Booth-Tucker's factory to-day in the south of France is very
busy making money for the Salvation Army, turning out Christian gloves
for the West and turning out Christians or the beginnings of Christians
for the East, and the ancient, obstinate theological idea of the
holiness of the rats which the Hindoos have had is being ceaselessly,
happily, and stupendously, all day and all night, disproved.
Incidentally the little religious glove factory of General
Booth-Tucker's in the south of France is giving India the first serious
and fair chance it has ever had to stop being a pest house on the world,
and to bring the bubonic plague with its threat at a planet to an end.
General Booth-Tucker's Bible was just like anybody else's Bible. But
there must have been something about the way he read his Bible that made
him think of things. And there must have been something about his kind
look. He looked kindly at something in particular, and he was determined
to make that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had the
gloves, and he had the Hindoo's--and he made them do, and before he knew
it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became a saviour or inventor.
In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had wedged in a God.
* * * * *
I wonder if General Booth-Tucker--that is, the original, very small
edition of General Booth-Tucker--had been in that memorable crowd, that
memorable day in the Strand when nobody (with a report that was heard
around the world) stole a penny--I wonder if General Booth-Tucker would
have been A Very Good Little Boy.
One of the pennies might have been missing.
I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his
goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid
that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be
hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back
the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics,
its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering,
is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first
and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up
or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug,
proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never
running a risk, his moral anæmia, he blocks all progress in churches, in
legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and
May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the
moment they are grown up.
They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little
hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking
forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy
of Never Making a Mistake.
If I had been given the appointment and were about to set to work
to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would begin by getting together
all the people in this one that I knew, or had noticed anywhere, who
seemed to have in them the spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man
or woman that I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds
and different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and
faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that they
really knew about them for themselves--would be let in. I would put
these people for a time in a place by themselves where the people who
want to keep them from trying or learning, could not get at them.
Then I would let them try.
I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let
them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them
respectabilize.
Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people
in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would
allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in--to do what
they were told.
Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy.
Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But
what is the matter with them would be useful.
And everybody would be happy.
* * * * *
When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on
deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting
out the people who should die from the people who should live--if one
was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die.
No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable
one that could have been made.
But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship's
officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not
hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human
difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people
who should live from the people who should die than a difference in
organs of reproduction.
The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was
the way the men felt. It expressed the men who were on the deck that
night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they
had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it.
But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and
conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in
their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's
children would do for the world if they lived no one would have
quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no
doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking
discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the
people who should die.
Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point
of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making
a kind of world where _Titanic_ disasters could not happen, would have
chosen on the deck of the _Titanic_ that night, very much the way God
would.
From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in
favour of a woman because she was a woman.
The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard
coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man
who had invented a ship that could not sink.
There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in
the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.
If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in
this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want
to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?
The women who are with child.
And the men who are about to have ideas.
And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's name and in the
name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who
are about to have ideas.
The world is different from the _Titanic_. We do not need to line up our
immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in a minute on a world and
say to them, "Go here and die!" "Go there and live!" We are able to
spend on a world at least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all
these immortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like,
in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value, and in
deciding where they belong and what a world can do with them.
We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have more time to
think.
What would we try to do if we took the time to think? Would there be any
way of fixing upon an order for saving people on a world? What would be
the most noble, the most universal, the most Godlike and democratic
schedule for souls to be saved on--on a world?
I think the man that would save the most other people should be saved
first. It would not be democratic to save an ordinary man, a man who
could just save himself, just think for himself, when saving the man
next to him instead would be saving a man who would save a thousand
ordinary men, or men who have gifts for thinking only of themselves.
Of course one man who thinks merely of himself is as good as another man
who thinks merely of himself, but from the point of view of a democracy
every common man has an inalienable right--the right to have the man who
saves common men saved first.
And the moment we get in this world, our first democracy, the moment the
common man really believes in democracy, this aristocracy or people who
save others (the common man himself will see to it) will be saved first.
He will make mistakes in applying the principle of democracy, that is in
collecting his aristocracies, his strategic men, his linchpins of
society, but he will believe in the principle all through. It will be
not merely in his brain, but in his instincts, in his unconscious
hero-worship, in his sinews and his bones, and it will stir in his
blood, that some men should be saved before others.
But if the world is not a _Titanic_, and if we have on the average
thirty-five years apiece to decide about men on a world and put them
where they belong, it might not be amiss to try to unite for the time
being on a few fundamental principles. What would seem to us to be a few
fundamental principles for the act of world-assimilation, that vast,
slow, unconscious crowd-process, that peristaltic action of society of
gathering up and stowing away men--all these little numberless cells of
humanity where they belong?
No one cell can have much to say about it. But we can watch.
And as we watch it seems to us that men may be said to be dividing
themselves roughly and flowingly at all times into three great streams
or classes.
They are either Inventors, or they are Artists, or they are Hewers.
Of course in classifying men it is necessary to bear in mind that their
getting out of their classifications is what the classifications are
for.
And it is also necessary to bear in mind that men can only be classified
with regard to their emphasis and may belong in one class in regard to
one thing and in another class with regard to another, but in any
particular place, or at any particular time a man is doing a thing in
this world, he is probably for the time being, while he is doing it,
doing it as an Inventor (or genius), as an Artist (or organizer), or as
a Hewer. Most men, it must be said, settle down in their
classifications. They are very apt to decide for life whether they are
Inventors or Artists or Hewers.
But as has been said before, being on a world and not on a _Titanic_, we
have time to think.
On what principles could we make out a schedule or inventory of human
nature, and decide on world-values in men?
When I was a boy I played in the hollow of a great butternut tree--the
one my mother was married under. When I was in college I used to go back
to it. I used to wonder a little that it was still there. When we had
all grown up we all came back and got together under it one happy day
and there it still stood, its great arms from out of the sky bent over
lovers and over children on its little island, its wide river singing
round it, still that glorious old hollow in it, full of dreams and
childhood and mystery, and that old sudden sunshine in it through the
knots like portholes ... then we stood there all of us together. And the
mother watched her daughter married under it.
I can remember many days standing beneath it as a small boy (my small
insides full of butternuts, a thousand more butternuts up on the tree),
and I used to look up in its branches and wonder about it, wonder how it
could keep on so with its butternuts and with its leaves, with its
winters and with its summers, its cool shadows and sunshines, still
being a butternut tree, with that huge hollow in it.
I have learned since that if a few ounces or whittlings of wood in a
tree are chipped out in a ring around it under the bark, cords of wood
in the limbs all up across the sky would die in a week--if one chips out
those few little ounces of wood.
Cords of wood can be taken out of the inside of the tree and it will not
mind.
It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the juice runs up to
the sun that makes the tree alive or dead.
The part that must be saved first and provided for first is that
slippery little shiny streak under the bark.
One could dig out a huge brush-heap of roots and the tree would live.
One could pick off millions of leaves, could cut cords of branches out
of it, or one could make long hollows up to the sun, tubes to the sky
out of trees, and they would live, if one still managed to save those
little delicate pipe lines for Sap, running up and running down, day and
night, night and day, between the light in heaven and the darkness in
the ground.
Perhaps Men are valuable in proportion as it would be difficult to
produce promptly other men to perform their functions, or to take their
places.
If we cut away in society men of genius, leaves, and blossoms, in trees,
men who reach down Heaven to us, they grow out again.
If we cut away in society great masses of roots, common men who hew out
the earth in the ground and get earth ready to be heaved up to the
sky--the roots grow out again.
But if we cut a little faint rim around it of artists, of inventive
men-controllers, of the Sap-conductors, the men who make the Hewers run
up to the sky and who make the geniuses come down to the ground, the men
who run the tree together, who out of dark earth and bright sunshine
build it softly--if we destroy these, this little rim of great men or
men who save others, a totally new tree has to be begun.
It is the essence of a democracy to acknowledge that some men for the
time being are more important in it than others, and that these men,
whosoever they are, in whatever order of society they may be--poor,
rich, famous, obscure--these men who think for others, who save others
and invent others, who make it possible for others to invent themselves,
these men shall be saved first.
* * * * *
One always thinks at first that one would like to make a diagram of
human nature. It would be neat and convenient.
Then one discovers that no diagram one can make of human nature--unless
one makes what might be called a kind of squirming diagram will really
work.
Then one tries to imagine what a flowing diagram would be like.
Then it occurs to one, one has seen a flowing diagram.
A Tree is a flowing diagram.
So I am putting down on this page for what it may be worth, what I have
called A Family Tree of Folks.
_Read across_:
=INVENTORS= =ARTISTS= =HEWERS=
Inventors Organizers Labourers
Imagination Applied Imagination Tool or Mechanism
Fecundity Control Activity
Seer Poet Actor
{ The Man who Sees the }
The Man who Generalizes {General in the Particular} Action
The Deeper Permanent {The Immediate Significance} Hewing
Significance { or Meaning }
Light Applied Light or Heat Applied Heat or
Motion
Stevenson and Wall James J. Hill Railway Hands
Creating Creative Selecting Hewing
The Democrat {The Aristocrat or} The Crowd
{ Crowdman }
Gods Heroes Men
Centrifugal Power Equilibrium Centripetal Power
The Whirl-Out People The Centre People The Whirl-In People
Alexander Graham Bell Telephone-Vail Hands
Architect Contractor Carpenter
Genius Artist Workmen
Columbus Columbus Isabella and the
sailors
The Prospector The Engineer }Scoopers, Grabbers
}(in mind or body),
}Hewers
David the poet David the king David the soldier
Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare