Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee

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THE CROWD SCARE

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      Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, "What shall I be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?" And the sky and the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all said, "Come!"

      On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a shovel—a tool for living a little longer.

      The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world has been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds. Civilization is a list of cities. Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured to-day by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for—the centre of mass.

      The crowd principle is the first principle of production. The producer who can get the most men together and the most dollars together controls the market; and when he once controls the market, instead of merely getting the most men and the most dollars, he can get all the men and all the dollars. Hence the corporation in production.

      The crowd principle is the first principle of distribution. The man who can get the most men to buy a particular thing from him can buy the most of it, and therefore buy it the cheapest, and therefore get more men to buy from him; and having bought this particular thing cheaper than all men could buy it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then, having all the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell them for a little more than nothing to everybody. Hence the department store—the syndicate of department stores—the crowd principle in commerce.

      The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps passing by it in twenty-four hours. The value of a railroad is the number of people near it who cannot keep still. If there are a great many of these people, the railroad runs its trains for them. If there are only a few, though they be heroes and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons, trains shall not be run for them. The railroad is the characteristic property and symbol of property in this modern age, and the entire value of a railroad depends upon its getting control of a crowd—either a crowd that wants to be where some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants a great many tons of something that some other crowd has.

      When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the same principle running through them both. The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity. A man's destiny is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul—if he has a soul—is an atom acted upon by a majority of other atoms.

      When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find the same emphasis upon them all—the emphasis of mass, of majority. Not that the church exists for the masses—no one claims this—but that, such as it is, it is a mass church. While the promise of Scripture, as a last resort, is often heard in the church about two or three gathered together in God's name, the Church is run on the working conviction that unless the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred in God's name, He will not pay any particular attention to them, or, if He does, He will not pay the bills. The church of our forefathers, founded on personality, is exchanged for the church of democracy, founded on crowds; and the church of the moment is the institutional church, in which the standing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the congregation. The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman, is seen on every hand amongst us—the agent of an audience, who, instead of telling an audience what they ought to do, runs errands for them morning and noon and night. With coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he carefully picks his way. He does his people as much good as they will let him, tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at last, and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered by majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a new world without the help of majorities at all.

      Theology reveals the same tendency. The measuring by numbers is found in all belief, the same cringing before masses of little facts instead of conceiving the few immeasurable ones. Helpless individuals mastered by crowds are bound to believe in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He stands in the midst of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His worlds: to those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens, who, in a kind of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would say), seems to want everybody to be good and hopes they will, but does not quite know what to do about it if they are not.

      Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea of hell (in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which), and every civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civilization with sovereign men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd civilization, reflecting its mood on the heavens, is inclined to a pleasant, large-minded God, eternally considering everybody and considering everything, but inefficient withal, a kind of legislature of Deity, typical of representative institutions at their best and at their worst.

      If we pass from our theology to our social science we come to the most characteristic result of the crowd principle that the times afford. We are brought face to face with Socialism, the millennium machine, the Corliss engine of progress. It were idle to deny to the Socialist that he is right—and more right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that there is a great wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly trying to create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet, that shall be large enough to swallow the wrong we have. The term "Socialism" stands for many things, in its present state; but so far as the average Socialist is concerned, he may be defined as an idealist who turns to materialism, that is, to mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men by all other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the Socialist expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying the other.

      The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be produced by setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals is Socialism, as the average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences for heroes, to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless to do right because it would be impossible to do wrong. It is a philosophy of helplessness, which, even if it succeeds in helplessly carrying its helplessness out—in doing away with suffering, for instance—can only do it by bringing to pass a man not alive enough to be capable of suffering, and putting him in a world where suffering and joy alike would be a bore to him.

      But the main importance of Socialism in this connection lies in the fact that it does not confine itself to sociology. It has become a complete philosophy of life, and can be seen penetrating with its subtle satire on human nature almost everything about us. We have the cash register to educate our clerks into pure and honest character, and the souls of conductors can be seen being nurtured, mile after mile, by fare-recorders. Corporations buy consciences by the gross. They are hung over the door of every street car. Consciences are worked by pulling a strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth, and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to vote the way they think. And when, in the course of human events, we came to the essentially