Crowds

People who are never Outside, who only see a little way out over the edge of the little crowd in which they are penned up, are naturally afraid.

A world that is run by little shut-in crowds is necessarily a world that is run by People Who Are Afraid.

And so now we have come to the fulness of the time. The cities and the nations, the prairies, and the seas and the mines, the very skies about us can be seen by all to-day to be full of a dull groping and of a great asking, "_Who Are The Men Who Are not Afraid?_"

The moment these men appear who are not afraid, and it is seen by all that they are not afraid, the world (and all the little blind, helpless crowds in it) will be placed in their hands.

CHAPTER VII

AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN

I am aware that Tom Mann is not a world figure. But he is a world type.

And as the editor of the _Syndicalist_, the leader of the most imposing and revealing labour rally the world has seen, he is of universal interest. Those of us who believe in crowds are deeply interested in finding, recognizing, creating, and in seeing set free out of the ranks of men the labour leaders who shall express the n.o.bility and dignity of modern labour, who shall express the bigness of spirit, the brawny-heartedness, the composure, the common-sense, the patriotism, the faithfulness and courage of the People.

I indict Tom Mann before the bar of the world as not expressing the will and the spirit of the People.

I do this as a labouring man. I decline, because I spend my time daily tracing out little crooked lines on paper with a pen, because I have wrought day and night to make little patterns of ink and little stretches of words reach men together round a world, because I have sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought out at last my little faith for a world ... I decline not to be numbered with the labourers I see in the streets. I claim my right before all men this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled among the toilers of the earth.

I speak as a labouring man. I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true leader of Labour.

The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not observe facts. He merely observes facts that everybody can see, that everybody has seen for years. He does not observe the new and exceptional facts about capital that only a few can see, the seeing of which, and the seeing of which first, should alone ever const.i.tute a man a true leader in dealing with capital. He merely believes facts that nearly everybody has caught up to believing--facts about human nature, about what works in business. The crowd is not content with this. It has become accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in business, and who make others follow them, whether masters or workmen, are men who do it by observing certain new and exceptional facts and acting upon them. If these men cannot observe them, we have seen them create them. It is the men who make new things true wherever they go that the crowd is coming to recognize and to take seriously and permanently as the real leaders of Labour and of Capital to-day. Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things that he proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked at on the outside, merely have or might be said to have a true look:

First, employers are all alike;

Second, none of them ever work;

Third, they are all the enemies of Labour.

Tom Mann is incompetent to grapple with Capital in behalf of Labour as any great labour leader would have to do, because he has his facts wrong about Capital, is simple-minded and rudimentary and undiscriminating about the men with whom he deals, and sees them all alike.

This is a poor beginning even for fighting with them.

The second reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is, not that he has his facts wrong and does not think, but that he carries not-thinking about the employing cla.s.s still further, has come to make a kind of religion out of not-thinking about them. And instead of thinking how to make labouring men think better than their employers think, and making them think so well that they can crowd their way into their employers"

places, he proposes to have labour get into their places without thinking, and run a world without thinking. All that is necessary in order to have workmen run the world, is to get workmen to stop working, to stop thinking, and then as rapidly as possible to get everybody else to stop thinking. Then the world will fall into their hands.

The third reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is that he is unpractical and full of scorn. And scorn, from the point of view of the practical-minded man, is a sentimental and useless emotion. We have learned that it almost always has to be used by a man who has his facts wrong, that is, who does not see what he himself is really like, and who has not noticed what other people are really like. No man who sees himself as he is, feels at liberty to use scorn. And no man who sees others as they are, sees any occasion for it. Tom Mann uses hate also, and hate has been found to be, as directed toward cla.s.ses of persons as a means of getting them to do things, archaic and inefficient. It is not quite bright. It need not be denied that hate and scorn both impress some people, but they never seem to impress the people that see things to do and who find ways to do them. And the people who use scorn are all too narrow, too cla.s.s-bound, and too self-regarding to do things in a huge world problem like the present one.

The fourth reason that Tom Mann as a labour leader is incompetent is that he is afraid; he is afraid of capital, so afraid that he has to fight it instead of grappling with it and cooperating with it. He is afraid to believe in labour--so afraid that he takes orders from it instead of seeing for it, and seeing ahead for it. He is afraid of his employers" brains, of their having brains enough to understand and to to be convinced as to the position of the labourer. He is afraid to believe in his own brains, in his own brains being good enough to convince them.

So he backs down and fights.

If any reader who is interested to do so will kindly turn back at this point a page or so, and read this chapter we have just gone through together, over again, and if he will kindly, wherever it occurs, insert for Tom Mann, labour leader, "D.A. Thomas, leader of mine-owners," he will save much time for both of us, and he will kindly make one chapter in this book which is already much too long, as good as two. Tom Mann (unless he is changed) is about to be dropped as a typical modern leader of Labour because he is afraid, and what he expresses in the labouring cla.s.s is its fear of Capital.

And what D.A. Thomas expresses for Capital is its fear of Labour.

There are thousands of capitalists and hundreds of thousands of labour men who have something better they want expressed by their leaders, than their Fear.

Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MEN WHO LOOK

During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world, heroes abounded.

The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were.

Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. Mr.

Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in the House of Commons, rose in his might--and before the face of the nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his cla.s.s.

Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the men.

He was called a traitor to his cla.s.s.

At the last moment in the coal strike, when the Government had done its best, and when the labour leaders still proposed to hold up England and defy the Government until they got their way, Stephen Walsh, one of the leaders of the miners, stood up in the face of a million miners and said he would not go on with the others against the Government. "It is now time for the trades union men to return to work. We have done what we could. Our citizenship should be higher than our trades unionship, and with me, as long as I am a trades union man, it will be."

He was called a traitor to his cla.s.s.

I am an unwilling and unfit person, as a sojourner and an American, to take any position on the merits of the question as to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. But when I saw Bishop Gore standing up and looking unblinkingly at facts or what he thought were facts which he would rather not have seen and which were not on his side, and when I saw him voting deliberately for the disestablishment of his own Church, I greeted with joy, as if I had seen a cathedral, another traitor to his cla.s.s. I almost believe that a Church that could produce and supply a man like this for a great nation looking through every city and county year by year for men to go with it ... a Church that could produce and keep producing Bishop Gores, would be ent.i.tled, from a great nation to anything it liked.

Men seem to be capable of three stages of courage. Courage is graded to the man.

There is the man who is so tired, or mechanical-minded, that he can only think of himself.

There is the man who is so tired that he can only think of his cla.s.s.

And there is the man that one has watched being moved over slowly from a Me-man into a Cla.s.s-man, who has begun to show the first faint beginnings of being a Crowd-man.

One man has courage for himself because he knows what he wants for himself. Another has courage for his cla.s.s because he knows what he wants for his cla.s.s. Another has courage for G.o.d and for the world because there are things he sees that he wants for G.o.d and for the world, and he sees them so clearly that he sees ways to get them.

Lack of courage is a lack of vision or clear-headedness about what one wants. I do not know, but I can only say that it has seemed to me that Bishop Gore has a vision or clear-headedness about what he wants for democracy, and that he uses his vision of what he wants for democracy to true his vision for his cla.s.s. Perhaps also he has a vision for his cla.s.s for the church people that it is for the interest church people to be the cla.s.s that is, out of all the world, supremely considerate, big, leisurely, unfretful in its dealings with others. Perhaps also he has a vision for himself and is clear-headed for himself, and has seen that though the steeples fall about him, and though the altars go up in smoke, he will keep the spirit of G.o.d still within his reach. The gentleness, the grim hope for the world and the patience that built the cathedrals, shall be in his heart day and night.

I hold no brief for Bishop Gore.

I know there must be others like him who voted on the other side.

I know there are hundreds of thousands of employers who in their hearts are like him. I know there are hundreds of thousands of men in the trades unions who are like him.