Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down where they belong in one's mind, the way they would in real time.
So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked forward, I know the way I am going.
I am going to hope.
It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see through ones' self; the only way to see through other people and to see past them, and to see with them and for them—is to hope.
So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put it to myself.
There are four questions with which day by day we stand face to face:
1. Does human nature change?
2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision?
3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and
new sizes of men?
4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical
and make a new world?
Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this moment, on how he decides these questions. If he says Yes, he will live one kind of life, he will live up to his world. If he says No, he will have a mean world, smaller-minded than he is himself, and he will live down to it.
This is what the common run of men about us—the men of less creative type in literature, in business, and in politics—are doing. They do not believe human nature is changing. They are living down to a world that is going by. They are living down to a world that is smaller than they are themselves. They are trying to make others do it. They answer the question "Does human nature change?" by "No!" Wilbur Wright, when he flew around over the heads of the people in New York a few years ago, a black speck above a whole city with its heads up, answered "Yes!"
But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped short with a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air instead of the ground.
The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright's flying was that he changed the minds of the whole human race in a few minutes about one thing. There was one particular thing that for forty thousand years they knew they could not do. And now they knew they could.
It naturally follows—and it lies in the mind of every man who lives—that there must be other particular things. And as nine men out of ten are in business, most of these particular things are going to be done in business.
The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching.
It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world.
One sees everywhere business men going about the street expecting new things of themselves. They expect things of the very ground, and of the air, and of one another they had not dared expect before.
The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had been the president of an Electric Light Company for twenty years, who had invented a public service corporation that worked. Since he took office and dictated the policy of the Company, every single overture for more expensive equipment in the electric lighting of the city has come from the Company, and every single overture for reducing the rate to consumers has come from the company.
The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest per capita in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country; and, incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let them have electricity without metres, and the people so trust the Company that they save its electricity as they would their own.
Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if he could, is brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains from leaving his lights burning all night when he goes to bed he is not merely saving the Company's electricity but his own. He knows that he is reducing his own and everybody's price for electricity, and not merely increasing the profits of the Company.
It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day, every night, turning on and turning off their lights.
The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly, influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that city—the motives and assumptions with which they bargain with one another—that might be envied by twenty churches.
All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful personality—the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other ages—had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in business. He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in poetry or more easy and conventional ways.
If he could not have made the electric light business say the things about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he would have had to make some other business say them.
One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that could be effected by being believed in.
He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.
He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his own way for three years—in believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed in as much as he liked.
The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in his face.
He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.
By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation—a Public Service Corporation—that had a soul, and consequently worked.
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip—drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
CHAPTER I