Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee

we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people.

      I believe that the time has come when the world is to make its last stand for idealism, great men, and crowds.

      I believe that great men can be really great, that they can represent crowds. I believe that crowds can be really great, that they can know great men.

      The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first will probably be a kind of everyday great man or business statesman, the man who represents all classes, and who proves it in the way he conducts his business.

      I have called this man the Crowdman.

      I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired millionaire I have in mind, but I have known scores of men who have reminded me of him and of what he is going to be, and I am prepared to say that in spirit, or latent at least, he is all about me in the world to-day. If it is proved to me that no such man exists, I am here to say there will be one. If it is proved to me that there cannot be one, I will make one. If it is proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of young men and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young mothers, and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the schools, I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one! I say this with all reverence for other men's desires and with all respect for natural prejudgments. As I have conceived it, the one business of the world to-day is to find out what we are for and to find out what men in the world—on the whole—really want. When men know what they want they get it. Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life is due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get it, due to the passions and the dreams of men; and the one single way in which these wrong things will ever be overcome is with more passions and with more and mightier dreams of men.

      Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are so largely allowed to run it.

      In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire.

      The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd, dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones.

      It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself. What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful place—all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires, flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim, silent wills of men. "What do we want?" "Where are we going?"

      In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the literature of Desire.

      This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have.

      There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by. In the present desperate crisis of a world plunging on in the dark to a catastrophe or a glory that we cannot guess, it is a time for men to pray a prayer, a standing-up prayer, to one another.

      I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of public desire, this imperious challenge of what men want, this standing-up prayer of men to one another, which alone shall make men go forth with faith and singing once more into the battle of life. Sometimes it has seemed to me I have already heard it—this song of men's desires about me—faintly. But I have seen that the time is at hand when it shall come as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men's voices, filling the dome of the world—a chorus in the glory and the shame of which no millionaire who merely wants to make money, no artist who is not expressing the souls and freeing the bodies of men, no statesman who is not gathering up the desires of crowds, and going daily through the world hewing out the will of the people, shall dare to live.

      But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any one suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings.

      It is rather of a great daily adventure one has with the world.

      There have been times when it seemed as if it had to begin all over again every morning.

      Day by day I walk down Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill.

      I look once more every morning at that great picture of any religion; I look at the quiet, soaring, hopeful dome—that little touch of singing or praying that men have lifted up against heaven. "Will the Dome bring the Man to me?"

      I look up at the machines, strange and eager, hurrying across the bridge. "Will the Machines bring the Man to me?"

      I look in the faces of the crowd hurrying past. "Will the Crowd bring the Man to me?"

      With the picture of my religion—or perhaps three religions or three stories of religion—I walk on and on through the crowd, past the railway, past the Cathedral, past the Mansion House, and over the Tower Bridge. I walk fast and eagerly and blindly, as though a man would walk away from the world.

      Suddenly I find myself, throngs of voices all about me, standing half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey watching that smooth asphalt playground where one sees the very dead (for once) crowded by the living—pushed over to the edges—their gravestones tilted calmly up against the walls. I stand and look through the pickets and watch the children run and shout—the little funny, mockingly dressed, frowzily frumpily happy children, the stored-up sunshine of a thousand years all shining faintly out through the dirt, out through the generations in their little faces—"Will the Man come to me out of these?"

      The tombstones lean against the wall and the children run and shout. As I watch them with my hopes and fears and the tombstones tilted against the walls—as I peer through the railings at the children, I face my three religions. What will the three religions do with the children? What will the children do with the three religions?

      And now I will tell the truth. I will not cheat nor run away as sometimes I seem to have tried to do for years. I will no longer let myself be tricked by the mere glamour and bigness of our modern life nor swooned into good-will by the roll and liturgy of revolution, "of the people," "for the people," "by the people," nor will I be longer awed by those huge phrase-idols, constitutions, routines, that have roared around me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—those imperious, thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. Do the People see truth? Can the People see truth? Can all the crowd, and can all the machines, and all the cathedrals piled up together produce the Man, the Crowd-man or great man who sees truth?

      And so with my three religions, I have three fears, one for each of them. There is the Machine fear, lest the crowd should be overswept by its machines and become like them; and the Crowd fear, lest the crowd should overlook its mighty innumerable and personal need of great men; and there is also the daily fear for the Church, lest the Church should not understand crowds and machines and grapple with crowds and machines, interpret them and glory in them and appropriate them for her own use and for God's—lest the Church should turn away from the crowds and the machines and graciously and idly bow down to Herself.

      And now I am going to try to express these three fears that go with the three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn on them and face them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance.

CHAPTER II