Crowds

CHAPTER V

THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE

When Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in New York the other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still bigger event, as it seems to some of us, was the way he felt about New York when he did it.

All New York could not make him show off. Hundreds of thousands of people on roofs could look up at the sky over New York, for him to go by, all that they liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying anything, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious business of the world.

Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his little turn for it.

But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two million people an encore, or even come back to bow. As one looked over from Mount Tom one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole great city under the sky, with its heads up!

A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a long time. It takes a scientist to do these things. I wish there were some poet who would do as well. Even a prophet up above New York--or seer of men and of years--glinting his wings in the light, the New York _Sun_ and the _World_ and the _Times_ down below, all their opera-gla.s.ses trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst"s church to look up.... It would be something.

Probably there are very few capitals in the world--Paris, Berlin, or London--that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether anybody was looking--who would be capable of slipping off quietly and leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to business.

There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little.

We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on his soft wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It is this Wilbur Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these pages. It seems to me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit which alone could make our civilization great, and the spirit which alone could make crowds great.

It was the crowd that spoiled the way the Pole was discovered--all the millions of people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a show of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading about it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the Pole; and when Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his att.i.tude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary"s failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience, that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who understand just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every reason to expect that the crowd is to produce great leaders, and is to become a great crowd, great and humble in spirit before G.o.d, before the stars, and the atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the meantime, however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand the way Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from New York and left the entire city with its heads up. Most newspaper men--men who are in the habit of writing for a crowd and regarding a crowd quite respectfully--will have wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have let such a crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the politicians of all countries are still wondering a little--if they ever thought of it--how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists, understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood.

Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi, making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the Hudson--understood.

And G.o.d, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross--He understood.

Wilbur Wright"s secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever believed before.

Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly who he was--and the people all about him--who were they? and what would they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its coc.o.o.n at last--its little, old, faded, tied-down coc.o.o.n, and sailing upon the air--sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible--out to the Sun....

Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do.

He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip off of s.p.a.ce three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes. For three miles more--three miles farther up above the ground--there was a s.p.a.ce where human beings would have to stop saying, "I can"t," and "You can"t," and "We can"t." If people want to say "I can"t," and "You can"t," they will have to say it farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect.

n.o.body would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he had finished it. But the man had been invented--he invented himself.

He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he did it himself--if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it.

n.o.body would have believed a few years ago that a railway president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees 10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per cent.

n.o.body would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions. But such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.

Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months old bear chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-five years to make a tree furnish its first chestnut before. About the same time that Luther Burbank had succeeded in doing this with chestnuts a similar type of man, who was not particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to do something with human nature, who believed that human nature could really be made to work, found a certain staple article that everybody needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market. The producers were not making anything on it. The wholesalers dealt in it without a profit, and the retailers sold it without a profit, and merely because the other things they sold were worthless without it.

----, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best position to act, pointed out that, if the business was organized and everybody in it would combine with everybody else and make it a monopoly, the price could be made lower, and everybody would make money.

Of course this was a plat.i.tude.

It was also a plat.i.tude that human nature was not good enough, and could not be trusted to work properly in a monopoly.

---- then proceeded to invent a monopoly--a kind of monopoly in which human nature could be trusted.

He used a very simple device.

He began by being trusted himself.

Having personally and directly proved that human nature in a monopoly could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he had to do was to capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use the enormous market value of the trust people had in him to gather people about him in the business who had a good practical business genius for being trusted too and for keeping trusted: everybody else was shut out.

The letter with which the monopoly was started (after dealing duly with the technical details of the business) ended like this:

"... the soundest lines of business--_viz._, fair prices, fair profits, fair division of profits, fair recognition of service, do as you would be done by, money back where it is practicable, one"s profit so small as to make compet.i.tion not worth while, open dealing, and open books."

He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and which the people trusted. He was a Luther Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts. He raised the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way for human nature to work.

CHAPTER VI

THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS

The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic forms:

1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible--the spiritual--as especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.

2. Imagination about the future--a new and extraordinary sense of what is going to happen next in the world.

3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to n.o.bler and wider motives.

Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree the mastery of the spirit over matter.

Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years an organic part of every man"s life to-day.

The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.

CHAPTER VII

IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before that, power had always been dug up, or sc.r.a.ped off the ground. The more power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.

Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into s.p.a.ce, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing--the big, final, and important thing--and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power.

Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea.

Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense, the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers in, out of s.p.a.ce, out of hope, out of faith, the lives of men. The mere fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women.... Then miners, mariners, explorers, inventors--the impossible steamship, the railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac tunnels and Atlantic cables. The impossible became one of the habits of modern life.