stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great
while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to
the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long
aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it.
One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach
up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks
of the smoking cities, "Where are you all?" The bell would boom out,
"What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?" One wonders if
one could not get a coloured page in the middle of the _Atlantic_ or the
_North American Review_ or _Everybody's_ and at least make a great book
as prominent as a great soap--almost make it loom up in a country like a
Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush.
The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson's
"Religion of Democracy." I have always wondered why only people here and
there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge
masses of real things, gigantic, half-godlike, looming like towers or
mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that
Columbus felt that first morning!
But as Columbus went on, what he struck after all was real land, some
piece of real land in particular. The mist of vision did precipitate
into something one could walk on, and I found as I went on with Mr.
Ferguson's book that if there was going to be any real land, somebody
would have to make some.
But for the time being Charles Ferguson's book--all those glorious
generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful,
intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete--came to me in
my speechless, happy gratitude as a kind of first sign in the heavens,
as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in
the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to
be.
If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when
the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson's book.
It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of
piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are
competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what
it will do for us.
When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their
order now.
In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks.
All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring
steel girders with the blue through them--America!
Ah, my God! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope,
from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco--does not the very sun itself
racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope?
Here it is!--Our World.
Let me, for one, say what I want.
It is already as if I had seen it--one big, heroic imagination at work
at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great
cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast
joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers
of the air and with the iron in the earth!--the big, speechless cities
that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent
about their souls!
It is true we are crude and young.
Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths!
In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no
one sing a hymn to the Derricks?
Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding?
Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.
Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.
Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them,
out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of
faith against the sky, and write a book and call it "Beliefs American
Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could."
CHAPTER XII
NEWS-BOOKS II
A nation's religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for
stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday
life.
A nation's literature is its power of so stating its ideals that we will
not need to be shrewd for them--its power of expressing its ideals in
words, of tracing out ideals on white paper, so that ideals shall
enthrall the people, so that ideals shall be contagious, shall breathe
and be breathed into us, so that ideals shall be caught up in the voices
of men and sung in the streets.
Ideals, intangible, electric, implacable irresistible, all-enfolding
ideals, shall hold and grip a continent the way a climate grips a
continent, like sunshine around a helpless thing, in the hollow of its
hand, and possess the hearts of the people.
What our government needs now is a National band in Washington.
America is a Tune.
America is not a formula. America is not statistics, even graphic
statistics. A great nation cannot be made, cannot be discovered, and
then be laid coldly together like a census. America is a Tune. It must
be sung together.
The next thing statesmen are going to learn in this country is that from
a practical point of view in making a great nation only our Tune in
America and only our singing our Tune can save us. A great nation can be
made out of the truth about us. The truth may be--must be
probably,--plain. But the truth must sing.
It will not be the government that first gets the truth that will govern
us. The government that gets the truth big enough to sing first, and
sings it, will be the government that will govern us. The political
party in this country that will first be practical with the people, and
that will first get what it wants, will be the political party that
first takes Literature seriously. Our first great practical government
is going to see how a great book, searching the heart of a nation,
expressing and singing the men in it, governs a people. Being a
President in a day like this, if it does not consist in being a poet,
consists in being the kind of President who can be, at least, in
partnership with a poet.
It is not every President who can be his own David, who can rule with
one hand and write psalms and chants for his people with the other.
The call is out, the people have put in their order to the authors of
America, to the boys in the colleges, and to the young women in the
great schools--Our President wants a book.
Before much time has passed, he is going to have one.
Being a President in this country has never been expressed in a book.
The President is going to have a book that expresses him to the people
and that says what he is trying to do. He will live confidentially with
the book. It shall be in his times of trial and loneliness like a great
people coming to him softly. He shall feel with such a book, be it day
or night, the nation by him, by his desk, by his bedside, by his
silence, by his questioning, standing by, and lifting.
In the book the people shall sing to the President. He shall be kept
reminded that we are there. He shall feel daily what America is like.
America shall be focussed into melody. We shall have a literature once
more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all
great ages, shall go singing through the streets.
There is no singing for a President now. All a President can do when he
is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing
four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation.
When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the
news of what was happening to people about him from week to week.
Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913?
Why is no one stuttering out our Bible--one the President could have to
refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the
symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the
air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground
beneath our feet?
* * * * *
It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news
about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is
there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table,
to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a
people?
One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the
presidents, but where is the portrait of the people? The portrait of the
people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture. Each
man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South
Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine. This picture or vision of a
nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes
in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House.
A literature is the expression on the face of a nation. A literature is
the eyes of a great people looking at one.
It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the
future.
A newspaper can set a nation's focus for a morning, adjusting it one way
or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a
book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can
act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and
morning to morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast,
stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone
with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the
perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent
self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. At
last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its
daily life lying out before it, threading its way to God!
CHAPTER XIII
NEWS-PAPERS
I went one day six months ago to the Mansion House and heard Lord Grey,
and Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. T.C. Taylor and others address the annual
meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association.
I found myself in the presence of a body of men who believe that
Englishmen are capable of bigger and better things than many men believe
they are capable of. They refuse to evade the issue of the coal strike
and to agree with the socialists who have given up believing that
English employers can be competent and who merely believe that we will
have to rely on our governments now to be employers, and they refuse to
agree with the syndicalists, who believe in human nature still less and
have given up on employers and on governments both.
I have retained three impressions as a result of the meeting.
The first was that it was the most significant and impressive event
since the coal strike, that it brought the whole industrial issue to a
point and summed the coal strike up.
The second impression was one of surprise that the hall was not full.
The third impression came the next day when I looked through the papers
for accounts of what had been said and of what it stood for.
It was noted pleasantly and hurriedly as one of the day's events. It was
just one more of those shadowy things that flicker on the big foolish,
drifting, rolling attention of a world a second and are gone.
People were given a few inches.
I read in the papers that same day a quite long account of a discussion
of nine bishops for five hours (meeting at the same time) on a matter of
proper clothes for clergymen.
I would have said of that meeting of the Labour Copartnership
Association--that it was a meeting of a Society for Defence and
Protection of Longer Possible Religion on the Earth--but the clergy out
of all the invitations, did not seem very largely to have had time to be
there.
I wondered too a little about the papers, as I hunted through them.
It set one to thinking if anything serious to the nation would have
happened, if possibly during the coal strike the London papers had
devoted as much attention to T.C. Taylor--a mutual interest
employer--and to how he runs his business--as to Horatio Bottomley?
Possibly too what Mr. Sandow prefers to have people drink is not so
important--perhaps whole pages of it at a time--as Amos Mann and how he
runs his shoe business without strikes, or as Joseph Bibby and how he
makes oil cakes and loyal workmen together.
I read the other day of a clergyman in New Jersey--who was organizing a
league of all the left-handed men in the world. Everything is being
organized, whether or no. Some one has financed him. There will be some
one very soon now who will pay the bill for organizing the attention of
a world and for deciding the fate of human nature. It would be worth
while spending possibly one fortune on getting human nature to settle
decisively and once for all whether it has any reason to believe in
itself or not. Why have a world at all--one like this? Do we want it?
Who wants it? What do we want instead? We will advertise and find out.
We will spend millions of pounds and Dreadnoughts, even national
beer-bills on it, if necessary, on making everybody know that mentally
competent business men--mutual-interest employers, and mentally
competent workmen--mutual-interest workmen, can be produced by the
human race. When everybody knows that this is true, nine out of ten
Parliamentary questions would be settled, the Churches would again have
a chance to be noticed, and education and even religion could be taken
seriously. There would be some object in being a teacher perhaps once
more and in making teaching again a great profession. There would be
some object perhaps in even being an artist. The world would start off
on a decent, self-respecting theory or vision about itself. Things could
begin to be done in society once more, soundly, permanently, humanly and
from the bottom up.
We would go out on the streets again--rich and poor--and look in each
other's faces. We would take up our morning papers without a sinking at
the heart.
And the men who have stopped believing in men and who merely believe in
machines would be indicted before the bar of mankind. We would see them
slowly filing back, one by one, to where they belong--on the back seats
of the world.
The newspapers in England and America seem to think that in their
business of rolling the world along, what they find themselves
confronted with just now is an economic problem.
The problem that the newspapers are really confronted with, as a matter
of fact, is one with which newspaper men big and little are more
competent to deal than they would be with an expert problem in
economics. The real problem that newspapers are confronted with every
night, every morning, to-day, is a problem in human nature.
Some people believe that human nature can be believed in, and others do
not. The socialists, the syndicalists, the trades unionists, as a class,
and the capitalists as a class, are acting as if they did not. A great
many inventors, and a great many workmen, all the more bold and
inventive workmen, and many capitalists and great organizers of facts
and of men, are acting as if they believed in human nature.
Which are right? Can a mutual-interest employer, can a mutual-interest
worker, be produced by the human race? There are some of us who answer
that this is a matter of fact, that this type of man can be produced, is
already produced, and is about to be reproduced indefinitely.
The moment we can convince trades unions and convince employers that
this is true we will change the face of the earth.
Why not change the face of the earth now?
In this connection I respectfully submit three considerations:
1st. If all employers of the world to-morrow morning knew what Lord Grey
(as President of the Labour Copartnership Association) knows to-day
about copartnership--the hard facts about the way copartnership works in
calling out human nature--in nerving and organizing labour, every
employer in the world to-morrow would begin to take an attitude toward
labour which would result in making strikes and lockouts as
impracticable, as incredible, as moony, as visionary forever as ideals
of a world without strikes look now.
2nd. If all the workmen of the world to-morrow morning knew what
Frederick Taylor (the American engineer) knows about planning workmen's
work so that they receive, for the same expenditure of strength, a third
more wages every day, the whole attitude of labour in every nation and
of the trades unions of the world--the attitude of doing as little work
as possible, of labouring and studying and slaving away to discover ways
of not being of any use to employers--would face about in a day.
3rd. What Lord Grey knows about copartnership and the way it works is in
the form of ascertainable, communicable, and demonstrable facts. What
Frederick Taylor knows and what he has been doing with human beings and
with steel and pig iron and with bricks and other real things is in the
form of history that has been making for thirty years--and that can be
looked up and proved.
Why should not everybody who employs labour know what Lord Grey knows?
And why should not all workmen know what a few thousand workmen who have
been trained under Frederick Taylor to work under better conditions and
with more wages, know?
If I were an inspired millionaire the first thing I would do to-morrow
would be to supply the funds and find the men who should take up what
Lord Grey knows about employers, and what Frederick Taylor knows about
workmen, and put it where all who live shall see it and know it. I would
spend my fortune in proving to the world, in making everybody know and
believe that the mutual-interest business man and the mutual-interest
workman have been produced and can be produced and shall be produced by
the human race.
The problem of the fate of the world in its essential nature and in its
spiritual elements and gifts--has come to be in this age of the press a
huge advertising problem--a great adventure in human attention.
The most characteristic and human and natural way, and the only profound
and permanent way to handle the quarrel between Capital and Labour is by
placing certain facts--certain rights-of-all-men-to-know, into the hands
of some disinterested and powerful statesman of publicity--some great
organizer of the attention of a world. He would have to be a practical
passionate psychologist, a man gifted with a bird's-eye view of
publics--a discoverer of geniuses and crowds, a natural diviner or
reader of the hearts of men. He shall search out and employ twenty men
to write as many books addressed to as many classes and types of
employers and workers. He shall arrange pamphlets for every dooryard
that cannot help being read.
He shall reach trades unions by using the cinema, by having some master
of human appeal take the fate of labour, study it out in pictures--and
the truth shall be thrown night after night and day after day on a
hundred thousand screens around a world. He shall organize and employ
wide publicity or rely on secret and careful means on different aspects
of the issue according to the nature of the issue, human nature and
common sense, and organize his campaign to reach every type of person,
every temperament, and order of circumstance, each in its own way.
What Lord Grey knows and what Frederick Taylor's workmen know shall be
put where all who live shall see it where every employer, every workman,
every workman's wife and every growing boy and girl that is passing by,
as on some vast billboard above the world, shall see it--shall see and
know and believe that employers that are worth believing in--and that
workmen who can work and who are skilled and clever enough to love to
work--can still be produced by the human race.
If I were a newspaper man I would start what might be called Pull
Together Clubs in every community, men in all walks of life, little
groups of crowdmen or men in the community who could not bear not to see
a town do team work.
I would use these Pull Together Clubs in every community as means of
gathering and distributing news--as local committees on the national
campaign of touching the imagination of labour and touching the
imagination of capital.
"_Without Vision the People perish_."
I would begin with spending five million dollars on a vision for the
people.
What would I do with a five-million-dollar fund for touching the
imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital?
First: preliminary announcement in all papers and in all public ways,
asking names and addresses of workmen who have already proved and
established their belief in copartnership.
Names and addresses of employers in the same way.
Second: names and addresses of workmen who would believe in it if they
could; who believe in the principle theoretically and would be
interested in seeing how it could be practically and technically
proved.
Names and addresses of employers in the same way.
Third: selection of one firm in each industry, the best and most
strategically placed to carry it out in that industry, and placing the
facts before them.
Selection of the leading workmen out of all the workmen in the nation
employed in that industry, who would be willing to work with such a
firm.
Fourth: a selection of travelling secretaries to visit trades unions and
get provisional permission and toleration for these workmen so that they
can take copartnership places under such a firm with the consent of
their fellows and he set one side for experimental purposes, under the
protection of the trades union rules.
Fifth: I would find the most promising trades-union branch in each
industry and I would try to get this branch to take it up with the other
branches until all trades unions were brought to admit copartnership
members on special terms.
Sixth: after getting copartnership tolerated for certain workmen
employed in certain firms I would try to make copartnership a
trades-union movement.
I would then let the trades unions educate the employers.
Seventh: I would prepare a list of apparent exceptions to copartnership
as a working principle. I would investigate and try to see why they were
exceptions and why copartnership would not work, and I would find and
set inventors at work, and find in what way the spirit that is back of
copartnership could be applied.
CHAPTER XIV
NEWS-MACHINES
We want to be good and the one thing we need to do is to tell each
other. Then we will be good. Our conveniences for being good in crowds
are not finished yet.
We have invented machines for crowds to see one another with and to use
in getting about in the dark. One engine whirls round and round all
night so that half a million people can be going about anywhere after
sunset without running into each other.
Crowds have vast machines for being somewhere else--run in somewhat the
same way all from one unpretentious building they put up called a Power
House.
A great many of our machines for allowing crowds of people to move their
bodies around with have been attended to, but our Intelligence-Machine,
our machine for knowing what other people really think, and what they
are like in their hearts so that we can know enough to be good to them,
and have brains enough to get them to be good to us, is not finished and
set up yet.
The industrial problem instead of being primarily an economic problem is
a news problem.
If a President were to appoint a Secretary of Labour and were to give
him as one of his conveniences, a news engineer--an expert at attracting
and holding the attention of labour unions and driving through news to
them about themselves that they do not know yet, who would be
practically at the head of the department in two years? The Secretary or
the Secretary's news engineer? News is all there is to such a
department, finding out what it is and distributing it. Any one can
think of scores of labour-union fallacies, news they do not know about
themselves that they will want to know at once when their attention is
called to it.
If nine members of the President's Cabinet were national news agents,
experts in nationalizing news, one member could do with his subordinates
all the other things that Cabinet members do.
The real problem before each Cabinet member is a problem of news. If the
Secretary of Commerce, for instance, could get people to know certain
things, he would not need to do at all most of the things that he is
doing now. Neither would the Attorney General.
If everything in a Cabinet position turns on getting people to know
things, why not get them to know them? Why not take that job instead?
Why not take the job of throwing one's self out of a job? Every powerful
man has done it--thrown himself out of what he was doing, by making up
something bigger to do from the beginning of the world.
In every business it is the man who can recognize, focus, organize, and
apply news, and who can get news through to people, who soon becomes the
head of the business.
The man who can get news through to directors and to employees and make
them see themselves and see one another and the facts as they are, soon
gets to be Head of the factory.
The man who can get news through to the public, the salesman of news to
people about what they want to buy and about how they are to spend their
money--very personal, intimate news to every man--soon rises to be Head
of the Head of the factory and of the entire business.
It will probably be the same in a cabinet or in a government. If the
Secretary of the Department of Commerce has a news engineer as a
subordinate in his department and begins to study and observe how to do
his work best, how to solve his problem in the nation, we will soon see
the head of the department, if he really is the head of the department,
quietly taking over his news engineer's job and letting his news
engineer have his.
It is a news engineering job, being a Secretary of Commerce.
Every member of the Cabinet has a news engineering job.
And the fact seems to be that the moment the news is attended to in each
member's department--applied news, special and private news, turned on
and set to work where it is called for--most members of cabinets,
secretaries of making people do things, and for that matter, the
Presidents of making people do things will be thrown out of employment.
The Secretaries of What People Think, and the President of What People
Think--the engineers of the news in this nation--will be the men who
govern it.
CHAPTER XV
NEWS-CROWDS
I have tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of tentative
working vision or hope of what authors and of what newspaper men can do
in governing a country.
This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being.
Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find out what plain
human beings are like.
It does not matter very long what other things a government gets wrong,
if it gets the people right.
This suggests something that each of us can do.
I was calling on ----, Treasurer of ----, in his new bank, not long
ago--a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on
this wicked world--a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from
above. It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money.
"This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built it?"
---- mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of
him.
I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the bank. He said
he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set
against it.
And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they
were. They kept offering a good many rather vague objections, and for a
long time he could not really make them out.
Finally he got it. All the objections boiled down to one.
Non was too good to be true. If there was a man like Non in this world,
they said, they would have heard about it before.
* * * * *
When I was telling ex-Mayor ----, in ----, about Non, the first time, he
interrupted me and asked me if I would mind his ringing for his
stenographer. He was a trustee and responsible, either directly or
indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and he wanted the news in
writing.
Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said, but he
wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of its being
true would be very important to him, he was going to have it looked up.
Now ex-Mayor ---- is precisely the kind of man (as half the world knows)
who, if he had been a contractor, instead of what he had happened to be,
would have been precisely the kind of contractor Non is. He has the same
difficult, heroic blend of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and
getting what he wants.
But the moment ex-Mayor ---- found these same motives put up to be
believed in at one remove, and in somebody else, he thought they were
too good to be true.
I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few years of
observation with a very singular and interesting fact about business
men.
Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives, (in a rather
bluff simple way, without particularly thinking about it, one way or the
other) seem to feel a little superior to other people. They begin, as a
rule, apparently, by feeling a little superior to themselves, by trying
to keep from seeing how high their motives are, and when, in the stern
scuffle of life, they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how
high their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep
other people from suspecting it.
In ----'s factory in ----, the workers in brass, a few years ago, could
not be kept alive more than two years because they breathed brass
filings. When ---- installed, at great expense, suction machines to
place beside the men to keep them from breathing brass, some one said,
"Well surely you will admit this time, that this is philanthropy?"
"Not at all."
The saving in brass air alone, gathered up from in front of the men's
mouths, paid for the machines. What is more he said that after he had
gone to the expense of educating some fine workmen, if a mere little
sucking machine like that could make the best workmen he had, work for
him twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to let them
die.
Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point, until
they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone about
business. One can talk with them for hours, for days at a time, about
their business--some of them, without being able a single time to corner
them into being decent or into admitting that they care about anybody.
Now I will not yield an inch to ---- or to anybody else in my desire to
displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life. I believe that
altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of
view. I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in
religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding identities, for
putting people's interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting
people crowd in and help themselves.
And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly every business
man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding
the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with
goodness--either his own or other people's?
In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our governments
everywhere are groping to find out what business men are really like and
what they propose to be like, if a man is good (far more than if he is
bad) everybody has a right to know it. The President has a right to know
it. The party leaders have a right to know it.
It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness pay, but what
is the man's real, deep, happy, creative, achieving motive in making
goodness pay? What is it in the man that fills him with this fierce
desire, this almost business-fanaticism for making goodness pay?
It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of being in
a human world, his passion for human economy, for world efficiency and
world-self-respect. This is what it is in him that makes him force
goodness to pay.
The business men of the bigger type who let themselves talk in this tone
to-day, do not mean it, they are letting themselves be insensibly drawn
into the tone of the men around them.
We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying that we
have none, that we have believed it. We all know men finer than we are
who say they have none. So we have not, probably.
And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year of going about
the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and
finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over
everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs
of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse
than they are!
It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not deliberately lie
about human nature. They merely say pianola-minded things.
One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or
Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging
like a kind of street piano, through men's minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh,
SH-SH! Oh, do not let anybody know I'm being good!"
=II=
I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up
an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to
make me believe they have.
They have lied long enough.
I have lied long enough.
My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it.
And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got the necessary
brains to go with them) the better they have worked.
Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has been my fault.
Sometimes it is John Doe's fault.
I am going to speak to John Doe about it. I am going to tell him what I
am driving at. I have turned over a new leaf. In the crisis of a great
nation and as an act of last desperate patriotism, I am going to give up
looking modest.
For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and stand up
before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with it and say what I
think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister threats against our
having or getting a real national life in America.
I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always kept him
wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-looking coats and
trousers. Except for a few moments a year he never caught up. Nobody
ever saw that boy and his long shoes when he was not butting bravely
about, stubbing his toes on the world and turning up his sleeves.
It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he grew up.
I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least until our
present national crisis is over in business and in politics, like that
boy.
There are millions of other men in this country who want to be like
that boy. Nations may smile at us if they want to. We will smile
too--rather stiffly and soberly, but for better or worse we propose from
to-day on, to let people see what we are trying to be daily, grimly,
right along side of what we are!
I have come to the conclusion that the only way, for me, at least, to
keep modest and kind, is to have my ideals all on. When one is going
around in sight of everybody with one's moral sleeves rolled up, and
one's great wistful, broad trousers that do not look as if they would
ever get filled out, it is awkward to find fault with other people for
not filling out their moral clothes. It may be a severe measure to take
with one's self hut the surest way to be kind is to live an exposed
life.
I propose to live the next few years in a glass house. There are
millions of other men who want to. We want to see if we cannot at last
live confidentially with a world, live naïvely and simply with a world
like boys and like great men and like dogs!
What I have written, I have written. I propose to run the risk of being
good. When driven to it, I will run the risk of saying I am good.
My motives are fairly high. See! here is my scale of one hundred! I had
rather stand forty-five on my scale than ninety-eight on yours!
If there is any discrepancy between my vision and my action, I am not
going to be bullied out of my life and out of living my life the way I
want to, by the way I look. Though it mock me, I will not haul down my
flag. I will haul up my life!
Here it is right here in this paragraph, in black and white. I take it
up and look at it, I read it once more and lay it down.
What I have written, I have written.
=III=
People do not seem to agree in the present crisis of our American
industrial and national life, about the necessity of getting at the
facts and at the real news in this country about how good we are.
Last November in the national election, four and a half million men
(Republicans) said to Theodore Roosevelt, "Theodore! do not be good so
loud!"
Four and a half million other men, also Republicans, told him not to
mind what anybody said, but to keep right on being good as loud as he
liked, for as long as it seemed necessary.
They wanted to be sure our goodness in America such as we had, was being
loud enough to be heard, believed in, and acted on in public.
The other set of men, last November (who were really very good too, of
course), were more sedate and liked to see goodness modulated more. They
stood out for what might be called a kind of moral elegance.
The governing difference between the Roosevelt type and the Taft type in
America has not been a mere difference of temperament but a difference
in news-sense, in a sense of crisis in the nation.
Thousands of men of all parties, with the nicest, easiest stand-pat Taft
temperaments in the world, with soft, low voices and with the most
beautiful moral manners, have let themselves join in a national attempt
to shock this nation into seeing how good it is. A great temporary
crisis can only be met by a great temporary loudness.
This is what has been happening in America during the last six months.
At last, all men in all parties are engaged in trying to find out: Is it
true or not true that we want to be good?
We are trying to get the news through. It may not be very becoming to us
and we know as well as any one, that loudness, except when morally deaf
people drive us to it is in bad taste. We are looking forward, every one
of us, to being as elegant as any one is, and the very first minute we
get the morally deaf people out of office where we will not have to go
about shouting out at them we will tone down in our goodness. We will
modulate beautifully!
=IV=
There are three other bug-a-boos, besides the Modesty Bug-a-boo that
America will have to face and drive out of the way before it can be
truly said to have a national character or to have grown up and found
itself. There is the Goody-good Bug-a-boo, the Consistency Bug-a-boo,
and the Bug-a-boo that Thomas Jefferson if he were living now, would
never never ride in a carriage.
Each of these bug-a-boos in the general mistiness and muddle-headiness
of the time can be seen going about, saying, "Boo! Boo!" to this
democracy from day to day and year to year, keeping it scared into not
getting what it wants.
There is not one of them that will not evaporate in ten minutes the
first morning we get some real news through in this country about
ourselves and about what we are like.
What is the real news about us, for instance, as regards being
goody-good?
I can only begin with the news for one.
For years, I have held myself back from taking a plain or possibly loud
stand for goodness as a shrewd, worldly-wise program for American
business and public life, because I was afraid of people, and afraid
people would think I was trying to improve them.
What was worse, I was afraid of myself too. I was afraid I really would.
I am afraid now, or rather I would be, if I had not drilled through to
the news about myself and about other people and about human nature that
I am putting into this chapter.
* * * * *
I have written five hundred pages in this book on an awkward and
dangerous subject like the Golden Rule, and I appeal to the reader--I
ask him humbly, hopefully, gratefully if he can honestly say (except for
a minute here and there when I have been tired and slipped up), if he
has really felt improved or felt that I was trying to improve him in
this book.
On your honour, Gentle Reader--you who have been with me five hundred
pages!
You say "Yes"?
Then I appeal to your sense of fairness. If you truly feel I have been
trying to improve you in this book, turn this leaf down here and stop.
It is only fair to me. Close the book with your improved and being
improved feeling and never open it again until it passes over. You have
no right to go on page after page calling me names, as it were, right in
the middle of my own book in this way behind my back, you!--hundreds and
thousands of miles away from me, by your own lamp, by your own
window--you come to me here between these two helpless pasteboard covers
where I cannot get out at you, where I cannot answer back, and you say
that I am trying to improve you!
Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me! God forgive me! Believe me, I never
meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve you! If you insist
on it and keep saying that I have been improving you, all I can say is
that I was merely looking as if I were improving you. _You_ did it. I
did not. God help me if I am trying to improve you! I am trying to find
out in this book who I am. If, incidentally, while I am quietly working
away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are yourself,
and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling all by yourself, do
not mix me up in it. I deny that I have tried to improve you or anybody.
I have written this book to get my own way, to express my America. I
have written it to say "i," to say "I," to say (the first minute you let
me), "you and I," to say we, WE about America--to drive the news through
to a President of what America is like.
I am not improving you. I am telling you what may or may not be news
about you.
Take it or leave it.
=V=
I want to be good.
I do not feel superior to other men.
And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it, to be
compelled to feel superior.
I believe we all want to be good.
The one thing I want in this world is to prove it. I want my own way.
I am not going to slump into being a beautiful character. I have written
this book to get my own way.
I have said I will not be mixed up in the fate of people who do not know
where they are going, who have not decided what they are like, who do
not know who they are. What do the people want? Some people tell me they
want nothing. They tell me it would only make things worse and stir
things up for me to want to be good.
Or perhaps they think it is beautiful to lower the price of oil. They
want oil at seven cents a gallon.
Do they? Do you? Do I?
I say no. Let oil wait. I want to raise the price of men and to put a
market value on human life. I find as I look about me that there are two
classes of statesmen offering to be helpful in making life worth living
in America.
There are the statesmen who think we are going to be good and who
believe in a program which trusts and exalts the people and the leaders
of the people.
There are the statesmen who seem to believe that American human nature
does not amount to enough to be good. They are planning a program on the
principle that the best that can be done with human nature in America in
business and public life is to have it expurgated.
Which class of statesmen do we want?
In some of our state prisons men who are not considered fit to reproduce
themselves are sterilized. The question that is now up before this
country is, Do we or do we not want American business sterilized? Are we
or are we not going to put a national penalty on all initiative in all
business men because some men abuse it?
There is but one thing that can save us, namely, proving to one another
and to our public men, that we are good, that we are going to be good
and that we know how. We face the issue to-day. Two definite programs
are before the country.
Those who have put their faith in being afraid of one another as a
national policy have devised several By-laws for an Expurgated America.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to do wrong. Deny him the right
of moral experiment because some of his experiments do not work. We say
let him try. We can look out for ourselves or we will have bigger men
than he is, to look out for us.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to be an owner, because nobody
has the courage to believe that a man can express his best self in
property. We say that property may express a man's religion, and that
the way a man has of being rich or of being poor may be an art-form.
Most men can express themselves better in property than in anything
else.
They say, eliminate all monopoly indiscriminately and the occasional
logical efficiency of monopoly because it has not worked well for the
people the first few times and because we have not learned how to handle
it. We say learn how to handle it.
They say eliminate the middleman. They say that the one strategic man in
every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a
great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be
eliminated because nobody believes America can produce a middleman. We
say instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual and
morally-engineering institution like the middleman because the average
middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt the middleman raise him
to the n-th power, make him--well--do you remember, Gentle Reader, the
walking beams on the old sidewheel steamers? We say do not eliminate
him--lift him up--make him what he naturally is and is in position to
be--the walking beam of Business!
If the average middleman does not know how to be a real middleman we
will make one who does.
And all the other eliminations that we have watched people being scared
into, one by one, we will turn into exaltations--each in its own kind
and place. There is not one of our fears that is not the suggestion, the
mighty outline, the inspiration for the world's next new size and new
kind of American man. We say place the position before the man--with its
fears, with its songs, with its challenge. We say, tell him what we
expect of him and demand of him. Put him in a high place on a platform
before the world! There with the truth about him written on his forehead
in the sight of all the people, call him by name, glorify him or behead
him! We are men and we are Americans. We will stand up to each of our
dangers one by one. Each and every danger of them is a romance, a
sublime adventure, a nation-maker. Our threats, our very by-words and
despairs, we will take up, and, in the sight of the world, forge them
into shrewd faiths and into mighty men!
This is my news or vision. I say that this is where we are going in
America. I compel no man to follow my news but I will pursue him with my
news until he gives me his!
* * * * *
This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about you.
If it is not true news, say so. Say what is. We all have a right to
know. The one compulsion of modern life is our right to know, our right
to compel people who live on the same continent or who live in the same
country with us, to open up their hearts, to furnish us with their share
of the materials for a mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual
misunderstanding, on which to live.
It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty. All liberty is in
it. These people who have to live with us and that we have to live with,
these people who breathe the same moral air with us, drink the same
water with us, these people who have their moral dumps, who throw away
their moral garbage with us--these people who will not help provide some
daily, mutual understanding for these common decencies for our souls to
live together these people we defy and challenge! We will compel them to
reveal themselves. We will drive them away, or we will drive them into
driving us away, if they will not yield to us what is in their
hearts--Mars, hell, anywhere we go, it matters not to us where we go,
except that we cannot and we will not live with men about us who thrust
down their true feelings and their real desires into a kind of manhole
under them, and sit on the lid and smile. Some seem to have manholes and
some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others who have
convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide their feelings in.
But whatever their real feelings are, and wherever they keep them, they
belong to us.
We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to have, if we live
in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit system for getting our
minds through to one another. We demand a system for having the streets
of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air
or atmosphere--and all the common conveniences for having decent and
self-respecting souls in crowds--all the intelligence-machines, the
love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the
crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living
with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of
one another's lives!
We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need them, some of
us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the main common fund of
motives for living together, for growing up into a world together, the
desires, motives, and intentions in men's hearts, their desires toward
us and ours toward them, we are going to know and compel to be made
known. We will fight men to the death to know them.
Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each man of us,
all our years, all our days, to drive through to some sort of mutual
understanding with our own selves? Now we will fight through to some
mutual understanding with one another and with the world.
We will knock on every door, make a house to house canvass of the souls
of the world, pursue every man, sing under his windows. We will
undergird his consciousness and his dreams. We will make the birds sing
to him in the morning, "_Where are you going_?" We will put up a sign at
the foot of his bed for his eyes to fall on when he awakes, "_Where are
you going_?"
Whatever it is that works best, if we blow it out of you with dynamite
or love or fear or draw it out of you with some mighty singing going
past--ah, brother, we will have it out of you! You shall be our brother!
We will be your brother though we die!
We will live together or we will die together.
What do you really want? What do you really like? _Who are you_?
We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dreadnoughts, our
stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what are they? And what do
they amount to and what can they do, as compared with truth, the real
news about what people want in this world, and about where we are going?
I say--they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory to tear
down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth, with the news
about us, that shall come out at last (God hasten the day!) from the
open--the pried-open hearts of men! And I have seen that men shall go
forth with shouts in that day and with glad and solemn silence, to build
a world!
* * * * *
I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo.
I speak for five million men.
We have got this book written between us (under the name of one of us),
because we want our own way. We are not improving people. We are not
even trying to improve ourselves. Many of us started in on it once and
the first improvement we thought of was not to try any more.
It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people want us to--most
people get in the way. And when people get in the way we lay about us a
little--We hit them. We have written this book, because we want to hit a
great many people at once. We find them everywhere about us, in monster
cities, huge thoughtless anthills of them, and they will not let us live
a larger and a richer life. We say to them, We resent your houses your
shoes, your voices, your fears, your motives, your wills, the diseases
you make us walk past every day, the rows of things you seem to think
will do, and that you think we must get used to, and we do not propose,
if we can help it, to get used to what you think will do for Churches;
nor to what you think will do for a government or to the little lonely,
scattered, toyschool-houses, that when you come into the world, fresh
and strange and happy you all proceed solemnly to coop your souls in.
Nor do we want to get used to your hem-and-haw parliaments and your
funny little perfumed prophets--your prophets lying down or propped up
with pillows or your poets wringing their hands. Nor will we be put off
with all your gracefully feeble, watery, lovely little pastel religions
for this grim and mighty modern world. We are American men. We do not
propose to be driven out to sea, to stand face to face every day with
what is true and full of beauty and magic, or to have skies and
mountains and stars palmed off on us as companions instead of men!
This is what five million men are trying to express in writing this
book. If people deny that I have the right to give the news about
America for five million men; if they say that this is not true about
American human nature, that this is not the news, then I will say, _I am
the news_! I am this sort of an American! God helping me, I say it!
"Look at _me_!" I am this sort of man of whom I am writing! If I am not
this sort of man this afternoon, I will be in the morning! Though I go
down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking to the end
of my days--_I_ am this sort of man! I say, "Look at _me_!"
If you will not believe me--that this is an American, if you say that I
cannot prove that there are five million of men like this in America,
then I will still say, "Here is _one_! What will you do with ME?" Though
I die in laughter, all my desires and all my professions in a tumult
about my soul, I say it to this nation, "Your laws, your programs, your
philosophies, your I wills, and I won'ts, I say, shall reckon with _me_!
Your presidents and your legislatures shall reckon with Me!"
Here I am. The man is here. He is in this book!
I will break through to the five million men. I will make the five
million men look at me until they recognize themselves. If no one else
will attend to it for me, and if there shall be no other way, I will
have a brass band go through the streets of New York and of a thousand
cities, with banners and floats and great hymns to the people, and they
shall go up and down the streets of the people with signs saying, "Have
you read Crowds?" I will have the Boston Symphony Orchestra tour the
country singing--singing from kettledrums to violins to a thousand
silent audiences, "_Have yon read 'CROWDS'_?"
I live in a nation in which we are butting through into our sense of our
national character, working our way up into a huge mutual working
understanding. In our beautiful, vague, patriotic, muddleheadedness
about what we want and whether we really want to be good, and about what
being good is like and I say, for one, half-laughing, half-praying, God
helping me--_Look at_ =ME=!
=VI=
I was much interested some time ago when I had not been long landed in
England, and was still trying in the hopeful American way to understand
it--to see the various attitudes of Englishmen toward the discussions
which were going on at that time in the _Spectator_ and elsewhere, of
Mr. Cadbury's inconsistency; and while I had no reason, as an American,
fresh-landed from New York, to be interested in Mr. Cadbury himself, I
found that his inconsistency interested me very much. It insisted on
coming back into my mind, in spite of what I would have thought, as a
strangely important subject--not merely as regards Mr. Cadbury, which
might or might not be important, but as regards England and as regards
America, as regards the way a modern man struggling day by day with a
huge, heavy machine civilization like ours, can still manage to be a
live, useful, and possibly even a human, being in it.
There are two astonishing facts that stand face to face with all of us
to-day, who are labouring with civilization.
The first fact is that almost without exception all the men in it who
mean the most in it to us and to other people for good or for evil--who
stir us deeply and do things--all fall into the inconsistent class.
The second fact is that this is a very small, select distinguished, and
astonishingly capable class.
A man who is in a grim, serious business like being good, must expect to
give up many of his little self-indulgences in the way of looking good.
Looking inconsistent, possibly even inconsistency itself, may be
sometimes, temporarily, a man's most important public service to his
time.
One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's own personal
history. It is by being inconsistent that people grow, and without
meaning to, give other people materials for growing. For the particular
purpose of making the best things grow, of pointing up truths, of giving
definite edges to right and wrong, an inconsistent man--a man who is
trying to pry himself out a little at a time from an impossible
situation in an impossible world, is likely to do the world more good
than a very large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they
are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look in
this same world--whatever happens to it.
* * * * *
If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a scale of 100
as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist on 98. One does not
always insist on 98 for one's self. And when one does and does not get
it, one feels forgiving sometimes.
In dealing with public men and with other people that we know less than
we know ourselves--if they really do things, it is well to make
allowances, and let them off at 65.
In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no one else
volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well with letting
them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I have been in England,
that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and the Wise and the Good would
consider letting George Cadbury off at 51.
Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George Cadbury in his
journals than they might be by other people in what seem to seem to many
of us unfamiliar and dangerous ideas.
Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of revolution
England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George Cadbury 73--possibly
89.
If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can crowd in
and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen and women from being
educated by John Bottomley Bull or by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts
of other would-be friends of the people--by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and
Vernon Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave
national importance that George Cadbury--a professional non-better--in
educating these people should allow them to keep on in his paper, having
a betting column?
So long as he really helps stave off John Bottomley Bull and Mrs. John
Bottomley Bull, let him slump into being a millionaire, if he cannot
very well help it! We say, some of us, let him even make cocoa! or have
family prayers! or be a Liberal!
At least this is the way one American visiting England feels about it,
if he may be permitted.
Perhaps I would not, if I were an angel.
I do not want to be an angel.
I am more ambitious. I want my ideals to do things, and I want to stand
by people who are doing things with their ideals, whether their ideals
are my ideals or not.
* * * * *
Let us suppose. Suppose the reader were in Mr. Cadbury's place. What
would he do? Here are two things, let us suppose, he wishes very much.
He wishes a certain class of people would not bet, and he also wishes to
convince these same people of certain important social and political
ideas for which he stands. If he told them that he would have nothing to
do with them unless they stopped betting, there would be no object in
his publishing their paper at all. There would be nothing that they
would let him tell them. If, on the other hand, he begins merely as one
more humble, fellow-human being, and puts himself definitely on record
as not betting himself, and still more definitely as wishing other
people would not bet, and then admits honestly that these other people
have as good a right to decide to bet as he has to decide not to; and if
he then deliberately proceeds to do what every real gentleman who does
not smoke and wishes other people did not, does without
question--namely, offers them the facilities for doing it why should
people call him inconsistent?
Perhaps a man's consistency consists in his relation to his own smoking
and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking
and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to
mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off
and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot
agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr.
Cadbury would publish in a parallel column (if he could get a genius to
write it) an extremely tolerant, human, comrade-like series of
objections to betting, which people could read alongside, and which
would persuade people as much as possible not to read the best betting
tips in the world in the column next door, but certainly the act of
furnishing the tips in the meantime and of being sure that they are the
best tips in the world, is a very real, human, courageous act. It even
has a kind of rough and ready religion in it. It may be too much to
expect, but even in our goodness perhaps we ought to do as we would be
done by. We must be righteous, but on the whole, must we not be
righteous toward others as we would have them righteous toward us?
What many of us find ourselves wishing most of all, when we come upon
some specially attractive man is, that we could discover some way, or
that he could discover some way, in which the idealist in him, and the
realist in him could be got to act together.
There are some of us who have come to believe that in the dead earnest,
daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life, the real solid idealist
will have to care enough about his ideals to arrange to have two
complete sets, one set which he calls his personal ideals, which are of
such a nature that he can carry them out alone and rigidly and quite by
himself, and another which he calls his bending or coöperative ideals,
geared a little lower and adjusted to more gradual usage, which he uses
when he asks other men to act with him.
It may take a very single-hearted and strong man to keep before his own
mind and before other people's his two sets of ideals, his "I" faiths,
and his you-and-I faiths, keeping each in strict proportion, but it
would certainly be a great human adventure to do it. Saying "God and I,"
and saying "God and you and I" are two different arts. And it is
clear-headedness and not inconsistency in a man that keeps him so.
This is not a mere defence of Mr. Cadbury; it is a defence of a type of
man, of a temperament in our modern life, of men like Edward A. Filene,
of Boston, of a man like Hugh Mac Rae, one of the institutions of North
Carolina, of Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, of nine men out of ten of the
bigger and more creative sort who are helping cities to get their way
and nations to express themselves. I have believed that the principle at
stake, the great principle for real life in England and in America, of
letting a man be inconsistent if he knows how--must have a stand made
for it.
There is no one thing, whether in history, or literature, or science, or
politics that can be more crucial in the fate of a nation to-day than
the correct, just, and constructive judgment of Contemporary
Inconsistent People.
=VII=
If I could have managed it, I would have had this book printed and
written--every page of it--in three parallel columns.
The first column would be for the reader who believes it, who keeps
writing a book more or less like it as he goes along. I would put in one
sentence at the top for him and then let him have the rest of the space
to write in himself. In other words I would say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and
drop it.
The second column would be for the reader who would like to believe it
if he could, and I would branch out a little more--about half a column.
2 + 2 = 4
20 + 20 = 40
The third column would be for the reader who is not going to believe it
if it can be helped. It would be in fine type, bitterly detailed and
statistical and take nothing for granted.
2 + 2 = 4
20 + 20 = 40
200 + 200 = 400
2,000 + 2,000 = 4,000
20,000 + 20,000 = 40,000
etc.
This arrangement would make the book what might be called a Moving
Sidewalk of Truth. First sidewalk rather quick (six miles an hour).
Second, four miles an hour. Third, two miles an hour. People could move
over from one sidewalk to the other in the middle of an idea any time,
and go faster or slower as they liked to, needed to.
No one would accuse me--though I might like or need for my own personal
use at one time or another, a slower sidewalk or a faster one than
others--no one would accuse me of being inconsistent if I supplied extra
sidewalks for people of different temperaments to move over to suddenly
any time they wanted to. I have come to some of my truth by a bitterly
slow sidewalk--slower than other people need, and sometimes I have come
by a fast one (or what some would say was no sidewalk at all!) but it
cannot fairly be claimed that there is anything inconsistent in my
offering people every possible convenience I can think of--for believing
me.
Mr. Cadbury is not inconsistent if he tells truth at a different rate to
different people, or if he chooses to put truths before people in Indian
file.
A man is not inconsistent who does not tell all the news he knows to all
kinds of people, all at once, all the time.
There is nothing disingenuous about having an order for truth.
It is not considered compromising to have an order in moving railway
trains. Why not allow an order in moving trains of thought? And why
should a schedule for moving around people's bodies be considered any
more reasonable than a schedule or timetable or order for moving around
their souls?
Truth in action must always be in an order. Nine idealists out of ten
who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful
work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying
desperately to make the beautiful work themselves. It is more
comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the
beautiful--the way a Poet is--to dump all one's ideals down before
people and walk off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental,
lazy, and ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them--to give
everybody all of them all the time without considering what becomes of
the ideals or what becomes of the people.
CHAPTER XVI
CROWD-MEN
MARCH 4, 1913.
As I write these words, I look out upon the great meadow. I see the
poles and the wires in the sun, that long trail of poles and wires I am
used to, stalking across the meadow. I know what they are doing.
They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President,
the one they are making this minute, down in Washington, for these
United States. With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has
sworn before God and before his people to serve the destinies of a
nation. And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden
poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty
people goes by. And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what
he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us.
What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer,
of crying to God, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the
plains?
Does he really overhear it--that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant
prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoarse cities, out of the
slow, patient fields, to God?
Does he overhear it, I wonder? What does he make out that we are like?
I should think it would sound like music to him.
It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his God
(and will he not please be alone with his God sometimes?), like some
vast ocean of people singing, a kind of multitudinous, faraway singing,
like the wind--ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and
mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by!
I do not see how a President could help growing a little like a
poet--down in his heart--as he listens.
If he does, he may do as he will with us.
We will let him be an artist in a nation.
As Winslow Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the
fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it
colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the
crowd's imagination with itself--in making a nation self-conscious.
He shall be the artist, the composer, the portrait painter of the
people--their faith, their cry, their anger, and their love shall be in
him. In him shall be seen the panorama of the crowd, focused into a
single face. In him there shall be put in the foreground of this
nation's countenance the things that belong in the foreground. And the
things that belong in the background shall be put in the background, and
the little ideas and little men shall look little in it, and the big
ones shall look big.
They do not look so now. This is the one thing that is the matter with
America. The countenence of the nation is not a composed countenance.
All that we want is latent in us, everything is there in our Washington
face. The face merely lacks features and an expression.
This is what a President is for--to give at last the Face of the United
States an expression!
If he is a shrewd poet and believes in us, we shall accept him as the
official mind reader of the nation. He focuses our desires. In the
weariness of the day he looks away--he looks up--he leans his head upon
his hand--through the corridors of his brain, that little silent Main
street of America, the thoughts and the crowds and the jostling wills of
the people go.
If he is a shrewd poet about us, he becomes the organic function, the
organizer of the news about our people to ourselves. He is the public
made visible, the public made one. He is a moving picture of us. He
speaks and gestures the United States--if he is a poet about us--when he
beckons or points or when he puts his finger on his lips, or when he
says, "Hush!" or when he says, "Wait a moment!" he is the voice of the
people of the United States.
* * * * *
I am sitting and correcting, one by one, as they are brought to me,
these last page proofs in the factory. The low thunder on the floors of
the mighty presses, crashing down into paper words I can never cross
out--rises around me. In a minute more--minute by minute that I am
counting, that low thunder will overtake me, will roar down and fold
away these last guilty, hopeful, tucked-in words with you, Gentle
Reader, and you will get away! And the book will get away!
There is no time to try to hold up that low thunder now, and to say what
I have meant to say about false simplicity and democracy, and about our
all being bullied into being little old faded Thomas Jeffersons a
hundred years after he is dead.
But I will try to suggest what I hope that some one who has no
printing-presses rolling over him--will say:
One cannot help wishing that our socialists to-day would outgrow Karl
Marx, and that our individualists would outgrow Emerson. Democrats by
this time ought to grow a little, too, and outgrow Jefferson, and
Republicans ought to be able by this time to outgrow Hamilton.
Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on
a continent 3,000 miles wide? Why should we live Thomas Jefferson's and
Alexander Hamilton's lives? Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live
ours?
The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be
Jefferson over again. It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take
the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself. If
Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers,
statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself.
I like to imagine how it would strike him. I am not troubled about what
he would do. Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to
the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds,
rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines.
Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway! Jefferson in
his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or
chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty,
tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited
and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders!
He had not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that
bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility--that terrific,
devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without
leaders.
Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of
governing, as a means of getting the will of the people.
A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since
Jefferson. This is the main fact about the modern man, that he is
gloriously self-made. He is practising democracy, inventing his own
life, making his own soul before our eyes.
If we have a poet in the White House, this is the main fact he is going
to reckon with: He will not be seen taking sides with the Alexander
Hamilton model or with the Thomas Jefferson model or with Karl Marx or
Emerson. We will see him taking Karl Marx and Emerson and Hamilton and
Jefferson and melting them down, glowing them and fusing them together
into one man--the Crowd-Man--who shall be more aristocratic than
Hamilton ever dreamed, and be filled with a genius for democracy that
Jefferson never guessed. America to-day, on the face of the earth and
in the hearts of men, is a new democracy, as new as Radium, Copernicus,
the Wireless Telegraph, as new and just beginning to be noticed and
guessed at as Jesus Christ!
Copernicus, Marconi, Wilbur Wright, and Christianity have turned men's
hearts outward. Men live for the first time in a wide daily
consciousness of one another.
Alexander Hamilton, had really a rather timid and polite idea of what an
aristocrat was and Jefferson had merely sketched out a ground plan for a
democrat. If Hamilton had been aristocratic in the modern sense, he
would have devoted half his career to expressing a man like Jefferson;
and if Jefferson had been more of a democrat, he would have had room in
himself to tuck in several Alexander Hamiltons. Either one of them would
have been a Crowd-Man.
By a Crowd-Man I do not mean a pull-and-haul man, a balance of
equilibrium between these two men, I mean a fusion, a glowed together
interpenetration of them both. They did not either of them believe in
the people as much as a man made out of both of them would--a really
wrought-through aristocrat, a really wrought-through democrat or
Crowd-Man, or Hero or Saviour.
* * * * *
I am afraid that some of us do not like the word Saviour as people think
we ought to. There seems to be something about the way many people use
the word Saviour which makes it seem as if it had been dropped off over
the edge of the world--of a real world, of a man's world.
I do not believe that Christ spent five minutes in His whole life in
feeling like a Saviour. He would have felt hurt if He had found any one
saying He was a Saviour in the tone people often use. He wanted people
to feel as if they were like Him. And the way He served them was by
making them feel that they were.
I do not believe that Thomas Jefferson, if he were here to-day, would
object to a hero, or aristocrat, a special expert or a genius in
expressing crowds, if he lived and wrought in this spirit.
The final objection that people commonly make to heroes or to men of
marked and special vision or courage is that they are not good for
people, because people put them on pedestals and worship them. They look
up at them wistfully. And then they look down on themselves.
But I have never seen a hero on a pedestal.
It is only the Carlyle kind of hero who could ever be put on a pedestal,
or who would stay there if put there.
And Carlyle--with all honour be it said--never quite knew what a hero
was. A hero is either a gentleman, or a philosopher, or an inventor.
The gentleman--on a pedestal--feels hurt and slips down.
The philosopher laughs.
The inventor thinks up some way of having somebody else get up so that
it will not really be a pedestal at all.
I agree with all the socialists' objections to heroes, if they mean by a
hero the kind of man that Thomas Carlyle, with all his little glorious
hells, all his little cold, lonesome, select heavens, his thunderclub
view of life, and his Old Testament imagination, called a hero. There is
always something a little strained and competitive about Carlyle's
heroes as he conceives them except possibly one or two.
Being a hero with Carlyle consisted in conquering and displacing other
heroes. Even if you were a poet, being a hero consisted in a kind of
spiritual standing on some other poet's neck. According to Carlyle, one
must always be a hero against other men. Modern heroism consists in
being a hero with other men. The hero Against comes in the Twentieth
Century to be the hero With, and the modern hero is known, not by
cutting his enemies down, but by his absorbing and understanding them.
He drinks up what they wish they could do into what he does, or he
states what they believe better than they can state it. Combination or
coöperation is the tremendous heroism of our present life.
I admit that I would be afraid of Carlyle's heroes having pedestals.
They have already--many of them--done a good deal of harm because they
have had pedestals, and because they would not get down from them.
But mine would.
With a man who is being a hero by coöperation, getting down is part of
the heroism. And there is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal
for a real hero. He never has time to sit on it.
One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from
under him and using it to batter a world with. As the world does not
take to enjoying its heroes' pedestals in this way, a pedestal is quite
safe. Most people feel the same about a hero's halo. They prefer to have
him wear it like a kind of glare around his head, and if he uses it as a
searchlight upon them, if he makes his halo really practical and lights
up the world a little around him instead, he is not likely to be
spoiled, is almost always safe from any danger of having any more halo
crowded upon him than he wants, or than anybody wants him to have. One
might put it down as a motto for heroes, "Keep your halo busy and it
won't hurt you." Modern democracy will never have a chance of being what
it wants to be as long as it keeps on throwing away great natural forces
like halos and pedestals. There is no reason why we should not believe
in halos and pedestals, not to wear or stand on, but when used strictly
for butting and seeing purposes.
We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep
rediscovering him. One knows the real hero by the fact that in his
relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his
pedestal away and substituting his vision.
There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes
heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the
people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and
he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes
pressing up to take his place. And he is daily happy with a strange,
mighty, impersonal joy in all these other people who could do it, too.
He lives with a great hurrah for the world in his heart. The hero he
worships is the hero he sees in others. A man like this would feel
cramped if he were merely being himself, or if he were being imprisoned
by the people in his own glory, or were being cooped up into a hero.
It is in this sense that I have finally come again to believe that hero
worship is safe, that in some form as one of the great elemental
energies in human nature it must be saved, that it must be regulated and
used, that it has an incalculable power which was meant to be turned on
to run a nation with.
And I believe that Thomas Jefferson, confronted in this desperate,
sublime 1913, with the new socialized spirit of our time, placed face to
face at last with a Christian aristocrat or Crowd-Man, would want him
saved and emphasized too.
It is because in democracies saviours are being kept by crowds and by
millionaires and by machines very largely in the position of hired men,
or of ordered about men, that ninety-nine one-hundredths of the saving
or of the man-inventing and man-freeing in crowds, is not being attended
to.
I have wanted to suggest in this book that the moment the Saviours in
any nation will organize quietly and save themselves first, the less
difficult thing (with men to attend to it) like saving the rest of us,
will be a mere matter of detail.
The only thing that stands in the way is the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.
People seem to have a kind of left-over fear that the moment these
saviours or experts or inventors or heroes, call them what you will, get
the chance that they have been working to get to save us, they will not
want to use it.
It does not seem to me that anything will be allowed to interfere with
it--with their saving us, or making detailed arrangements for our saving
ourselves.
Being a great man (if as democracies seem to think being a great man is
a disease) is at least a self-limiting disease. Inventors when they get
their first chance are going to save us, because they could not endure
living with us unless we were saved.
Inventors could not enjoy inventing--inventing their greater, more noble
inventions, until they had attended to a little rudimentary thing in the
world like having people half alive on it to live with and to invent
for.
It does not interest a really inspired man--inventing flying machines
for people who have not time to notice the sky, wireless telegraph for
people who have nothing to say, symphonies for tone-deaf crowds, or
ambrosia for people who prefer potatoes.
This is the whole issue in a nutshell. When people say that our
inventors, or Crowd-Men or saviours, when they have fulfilled or saved
themselves, cannot be trusted to save us, the reply that will have to be
made is that only people who do not know how inventors feel or how they
are made or what it is in them that drives them to do things, or how
they do them, will be afraid to let men who give us worlds and who
express worlds for us and who make us express ourselves in worlds the
freedom to help shape them and run them.
Men who have the automatic courage, the helpless bigness and
disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power,
can be trusted by crowds.
The prejudice against the hero is due to the fact that heroes in days
gone by have been by a very large majority fighters, expressing
themselves against the world, or expressing one part of the world
against another.
The moment the hero becomes the artist and begins expressing himself and
expressing the crowd together, the crowd will no longer be touched with
fear and driven back upon itself by the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.
EPILOGUE
France is threatened by her childless women, Germany by her machines,
Russia is beginning the Nineteenth Century. It is to England and
America, struggling still sublimely with their sins, the nations
look--for the time being--for the next big free lift upon the world.
Looked at in the large, in their historic import and their effect on the
time, the English temperament and the American temperament are
essentially the same. As between ourselves, England and America are apt
to seem different, but as between us and the world, we blend together.
One could go through in what I have been saying about Oxford Street and
the House of Commons in this book, strike out all after Oxford Street
and read Broadway, and all after the House of Commons and read Congress,
and it would be essentially true with the necessary English or American
modulation. In the same way it would be possible to go through and
strike out all after the President and read Prime Minister or the
Government.
England and America have the individualistic temperament, and if we
cannot make a self-expressive individualism noble, and if we are not men
enough to sing up our individualism into the social and the universal,
we perish.
It is our native way. We are to be crowdmen or nobodies.
The English temperament or the American temperament, whichever we may
call it, is the same tune, but played with a different and almost
contrasting expression.
England is being played gravely and massively like a violoncello, and
America--played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the
ecstasy, the overriding glory of the violins.
But it is the same tune, and God helping us, we will not and we shall
not be overwhelmed under the great dome of the world, by Germany with
all her faithful pianolas, or by France with her cold sweet flutes, or
by Russia with her shrieks and her pauses, pounding her splendid
kettledrums in that awful silence!
Our song is ours--England and America, the 'cello, and the bright
violins!
And no one shall sing it for us.
And no one shall keep us from singing it.
The skyscrapers are singing, "I will, I will!" to God, and Manchester
and London and Port Sunlight are singing, "I will, I will!" to God. I
have heard even Westminister Abbey and York--those beautiful old
fellows--altering, "I will, I will!" to God!
And I have seen, as I was going by, Trinity Church at the head of Wall
Street repenting her sins and holding noonday prayer meetings for
millionaires.
Our genius is a moral genius, the genius of each man for fulfilling
himself. Our religion is the finding of a way to do it beautifully.
Let Russian men be an army if they like--death and obedience. Let German
men keep on with their faithful, plodding, moral machines if they want
to, and let all French men be artists, go tra-la-laing up and down the
Time to the beautiful--furnishing nudes, clothes, and academies to a
world.
But we--England and America--will stand up on this planet in the way we
like to stand on a planet and sing, "I will, I will!" to God.
If we cannot do better, we will sing, "I won't, I won't!" to God. Our
wills and our won'ts are our genius among the sons of men. They are what
we are for. With England and America I will and I won't are an art form,
our means of expressing ourselves, our way of invention and creation,
of begetting an age, of begetting a nation upon a world.
We do not know (like great men and children) who we are at first. We
begin saying vaguely--will--will!
Then i will!
Then I will!
Then WE WILL!
THE BEGINNING.
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.