People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program--a program for anybody--and not a spirit.
The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression.
Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work--that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people.
The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality.
This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare inst.i.tution.
The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves.
In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not--for the time being--alike and are going to be treated as they are.
Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination--as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get.
It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups--the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return.
This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others.
I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative--possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him c.u.mbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions.
People who do not listen--extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day"s work.
It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way.
If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen--to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others--people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous.
People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with.
Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings.
On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people--to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited.
The people who give the most return on the investment--the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response--in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first.
I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited.
I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want.
Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms.
Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people--who do not want to think.
I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on.
Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is--or they want it to stay just as it is--upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness--merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work.
This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled.
The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other.
The majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down--subst.i.tute their inefficiency for the other man"s.
Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them--of all people, have any.
The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a Louis XVI.
It takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation.
Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash.
The mills of the G.o.ds grind slowly because they grind fine. The main difference between men and the G.o.ds is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops--pa.s.s over details and particular persons, and the G.o.ds when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever.
In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those cla.s.ses of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the a.s.sumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away.
-- 7. _The Town Fireplace._
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people--that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.
Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Ten differing men can get together and agree.
Ten differing crowds of men--of the same men, will get together and fight.
Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.
If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others--if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely--listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning.
As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone--holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.
Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets.
Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together.
It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead.
Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent--by capital and labor?
The moment there are conveniences for crowds--for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too--the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders--the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too.
The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together.