Part 39 (1/2)
There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an uprising of the labour cla.s.ses as long as the labour cla.s.ses are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of things--things like worlds into their hands. The me-man and the cla.s.s-man, under our modern conditions, are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places, the me-places and cla.s.s-places, by the men who want more things than they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others.
The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the cla.s.s-man who gets it for him.
The cla.s.s-man may see what he wants for his cla.s.s clearly and may say what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him.
It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that G.o.d has worked it out!
It is one of His usual paradoxes.
The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.
He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he can--in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.
The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get outside of himself into his cla.s.s, who, in being a good cla.s.s-man, can overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he wants.
I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial world, as at present const.i.tuted in our cooperative age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other people.
If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.
Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and desperate cla.s.s of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day after.
And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause--a prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of Labour--that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to represent Labour.
In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, ”No G.o.d and no Master”--it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, ”In G.o.d we trust” and ”One is our Master, even Christ”--thousands of men who had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, s.n.a.t.c.hing up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea that the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed to represent for one moment the manhood and the courage, the faithfulness and (even in the hour of their extremity) the quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty and self-forgetfulness, the moral dignity of the American workingman.
It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring man, whether in America or England, is a coward; that he has no desire, no courage, for any one except for himself and for his own cla.s.s. Mr. O'Connor of the Dockers' Organization in the East of Scotland, said at the time of the strike of the dockers in London: ”This kind of business of the bureaucratic labour men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work all over the country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of England. It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it.”
It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the World when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and that Labour alone can save the world. He knows that any scheme of social and industrial reform which leaves any cla.s.s out, rich or poor, which does not see that everybody is to blame, which does not see that everybody is responsible, which does not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and expectation for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial.
If we are going to have a society that is for all of us, it will take all of us, and all of us together, to make it. Mutual expectation alone can make a great society. Mutual expectation, or courage for others, persistently and patiently and flexibly applied--applied to details by small men, applied to wholes by bigger ones--is going to be the next big serious, unsentimental, practical industrial achievement. And I do not believe that for sheer sentiment's sake we are going to begin by rooting up millionaires and, with one glorious thoughtless sweep, saying, ”We will have a new world,” without asking at least some of the owners of it to help, or at least letting them in on good behaviour. Nor are we going to begin by rooting up trade unions and labour leaders.
The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are daily engaged, through compet.i.tion and experiment and observation, in educating one another and finding out what they really want and what they can really do; and it is equally true that the great organizations of labour, in the same way, are educating one another.
The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational fight. And the fight is being conducted, not between Labour and Capital, but between the labouring men who have courage for Capital and labouring men who have not, and between capitalists who have courage for Labour and those who have not. To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day is between those who have courage and those who have not.
It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage and men who have not, which will win.
Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world will be the most safe in the hands of the men who have the most courage.
There are four items of courage I would like to see duly discussed in the meetings of the trades unions in America and England.
First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when the leaders of trades unions come to know employers better than the other men do and begin to see the other side and to have some courage about employers and to become practicable and reasonable, the unions drop them?