Part 32 (1/2)

I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not agreeing with him to some purpose.

But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements for being fair to him. He came up on the platform (it was at Mr.

Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it, is certainly a fine taking place to come out of--to blossom up out of, like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people! Had I not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek only a little while before in Albert Hall?

If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience, he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.

He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently before us in a blaze of light. Everybody clapped for five minutes.

Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak. I found I had come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless, whole-hearted, noisy, self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person. He was a mere huge pulse or muscle of a man. All we could do was to watch him up there on the platform (it was all so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in his big hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother gave him. He stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should think, making it--making the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to his music, to Tommy's own music, as if it were the music of the spheres.

Mr. Mann's gospel of hope for mankind seemed to be to have all the workers of the world all at once refuse to work. Have the workers starve and silence a planet, and take over and confiscate the properties and plants of capital, dismiss the employers of all nations and run the earth themselves.

I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into wild, happy appreciation.

It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It was as if, while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen being made, being hammered out before them, a new world.

I rubbed my eyes.

It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the trouble for nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starvation, and panic for nothing.

There was one single possible difference in it.

We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us--with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness.

And now we were having instead, Tom Mann, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us, with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness.

Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very useful as crowd spy-gla.s.ses for us all to see what we want through.

But is this what we want?

Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all cla.s.ses of us, to have our world turned upside down so that we can be bullied on it by one set of men instead of being bullied on it by another?

This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after the other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next.

Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we are nearly all of us seeing to-day. We have stood by now these many years through strikes and rumours of strikes, and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the Lawrence Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have seen, in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by one side and now by the other. It has almost looked, some days, as if both sides in the quarrel--Capital and Labour, really thought that the Public ought not to expect to be allowed to be out in the streets at all. Both sides in the contest are so sure they are right, and feel so n.o.ble and Christian, that we know they will take care of themselves; but the poor old Lady!--some of us wonder, in the turmoil of Civilization and the scuffle of Christianity, what is to become of Her.

Is it not about time that somebody appeared very soon now who will make a stand once and for all in behalf of this Dear Old Lady-Like Person?

Is it really true that no one has noticed Her and is really going to stand up for Her--for the old gentle-hearted Planet as a Whole?

We have our Tom Mann for the workers, and we have the Daily Newspaper--the Tom Mann of Capital, but where is our Tom Mann for Everybody? Where is the man who shall come boldly out to Her, into the great crowded highway, where the bullies of wealth have tripped up her feet, and the bullies of poverty have thrown mud in her face, where all the little mean herds or cla.s.ses one after the other hold Her up--the scorners, and haters, and cowards, and fearers for themselves, fighting as cowards always have to fight, in herds ... where is the man who is going to climb up alone before the bullies of wealth and the bullies of poverty, take his stand against them all--against both sides, and dare them to touch the dear helpless old Lady again?

When this man arises--this Tom Mann for Everybody--whether he slips up into immortality out of the crowd at his feet, and stands up against them in overalls or in a silk hat, he will take his stand in history as a man beside whom Napoleon and Alexander the Great will look as toys in the childhood of the world.

We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded students of affairs, but the crowd itself, the very pa.s.sers-by in the streets, have come to see that the very essence of the labour problem is the problem of getting the cla.s.ses to work together. And when the crowd watches the labour leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot think correctly of the other cla.s.ses, of the consumers and the employers, it drops him. Unless a leader has a cla.s.s consciousness that is capable of thinking of the other cla.s.ses--the consumers and employers, so shrewdly and so close to the facts that the other cla.s.ses, the consumers and the employers, will be compelled to take him seriously, tolerate him, welcome him, and cooperate with him, the crowd has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of the illusions of labour. When the illusion goes he goes.

Capital has been for some time developing its cla.s.s consciousness.