If the conservatives believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Portland Cement. If the radicals believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Explosives.
In our machine civilization to these two great standard cla.s.ses of scared people, there has been added what seems to be a third cla.s.s--the people who have responded to a kind of motor spirit in the time, who have modulated a little their unbelief in human nature. They have subst.i.tuted for their reinforced concrete Unbelief, a kind of Whirling Unbelief, called machinery.
They admit that in our modern life men are not made of reinforced concrete. We may move, but we move as wheels move, they tell us. We arc whirlingly imbedded. We are cogs and wheels in an Economic Machine.
I would like to consider for a moment this Whirling Unbelief.
There was a time once when I took the Economic Machine very seriously.
I looked up when I went by, at the Economic Machine as the last and the most terrific of the inventions among the machines. The machine that mocked all the other machines, that made all our machines look pathetic and ridiculous, was the Economic Machine. There were days when I heard it or seemed to hear it--this Economic Machine closing in around my life, around all our lives like the last hoa.r.s.e mocking laugh of civilization.
I said I will love every machine that runs except the Economic Machine--the machine for making people into machines.
But one day when I had waited or dared to wait, I know not why, a little longer than usual before the Whirling Unbelief, I heard the hoa.r.s.e mocking laugh die away. I became very quiet. I began to think, I reflected on my experiences. I began to notice things.
I noted that every time I had found myself being discouraged about people, I had caught myself thinking of people as Cogs and Wheels.
Were they really Cogs and Wheels?
Possibly it was merely the easiest, most mechanical-minded thing to do to think of people (with all this machinery around one) as cogs and wheels in an economic machine.
Then it began to occur to me that it was because I had looked upon the economic machine a little lazily, a little innocently that I had been awed and terrific--and had been swept away with it into the Whirling Unbelief.
Then I stood quietly and calmly for days, for weeks, for years before it. I watched it Go Round.
I then discovered under close observation that what had looked to me like an economic machine was not an economic machine at all.
The modern economic world has innumerable mechanical elements in it, but it is not an economic machine.
It is a biological engine.
It is the biology in it that conceives, desires, and determines the machinery in it.
The most important parts of the machine are not the very mechanical parts. They are the very biological parts.
The economic machine is full of made-people, but it does not make very much difference about the made-people. I find that as a plain, practical matter of fact I do not need to watch the made-people so very much to understand the world, or to get ready for what is happening to it.
In prospecting for a world, I watch the born people.
I watch especially the people who have been born twice.
As one watches the way the world is going round one finds that what is really making it go round, is not its being an economic machine, but its being a biological engine.
Industrial reform is a branch of biology.
The main fact of biology as regards a man is that he can be born.
The main fact of biology as regards society--that is, the main fact of social biology--is that a man can be born twice.
As long as a man is born to go with a father and a mother it is well enough to have been born once, but the moment a man deals with other people or with the world, he has to be born again.
This is the main fact about the biological engine we call the world.
The main fact about the Engine is the biology in it.
Every other fact for a man has to be worked out from this--that is: out of being born once if one wants to belong merely to a father and mother, and out of being born twice if one wants to belong to a world.
A man does not need to enter again into his mother"s womb and come out a child. He enters into the World"s Womb and comes out a man.
The world is being placed to-day before our eyes in the hands of the men who are born twice.
Not all men are cogs and wheels.
The first day I discovered this and believed this I went out into the streets and looked into the faces of the men and the women and I looked up at the factories and the churches and I was not afraid.
I do not deny that cogs and wheels are very common.
But I do not believe that an economic system or industrial scheme based on the general principle of arranging a world for cogs and wheels would work. I believe in arranging the world on the principle that there are now and are going to be always enough men in it who are born, and enough who are born twice to keep cogs and wheels doing the things men who have been born twice, who have visions for worlds, want done, and to keep people who prefer being cogs and wheels where they will work best and where they will help the running gear of the planet most--by going round and round, in the way they like--going round and round and round and round.
But why is it, one cannot help wondering, that the moment a man rises up suddenly in this modern world and bases or seeks to base an industrial or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on conversion--why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies, politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him with mere history, argue him with statistics, and thunder him with sermons out of the world--if he puts up a faint little chirrup of hope that men can be converted?
It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be converted. There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a few particular men"s being born again. It is worse than that. What seems to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new generation"s being born again. It is going to be just like this one, they tell us, the new generation--the same old things the same old foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not worked--Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around and around again. They must be planned for. All these young men of wealth about us who read the papers and who are ashamed of their fathers are going to be just like their fathers. The atheists, the socialists, and the single taxers, missionaries and evangelists have given up their last loophole of hope in the new business generation and they trust only to machines to save us, or to professors, or to paper-treatises on eugenics!
And yet, after all, if we were going to start an absolute, decisive, and practical scheme of eugenics to-morrow with whom would we begin, with which particular people would we begin? We would have to go back, Bernard Shaw and the bishops and all of us, to the New Testament--to the old idea of being born again.
I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, "The thing that hath been is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done and there is no new thing under the sun."
There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can be educated.
We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted.
We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted.
I speak for a thousand, thousand men.
In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men--for all of us. _We are not cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can be born again._
Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and say that human nature will not change.
We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.
The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth--the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on him, on making him a Lincoln.
Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful, believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons"