Crowds Part 17

There is a picture of Albert Durer's which hangs near my desk, and once more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it. It is the familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old, bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.

If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the scientist's head.

There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing, at least, that could be put in a stained-gla.s.s window in Frederick Taylor's tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.

But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick Taylor did, by--being concrete. If He wanted to get men in general, men in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a certain particular place could afford to love one another.

He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit together. I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick Taylor did.

He would not say much about the Golden Rule. He would give each man a vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men's work and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself. This is all the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.

For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another.

The idea is a perfectly familiar one. When Christ said it two thousand years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth.

Everybody believes it now--that it is a true remark--but like a score of other remarks that have been made and some of the n.o.blest Christ made, is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being a remark, gone by? There is no one who has not heard about our loving one another. The remark we want now is how we can do it. This is the remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made. It is not very eloquent. It is a mere statement of fact. It has taken him nearly thirty-three years to make it.

The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and the pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, have been devoted to one another and to one another's interests and acting all day every day as if of course their interests were the same, and it has been found that employees when their employers cooperated with them could lift forty-seven tons instead of twelve and a half a day, and were getting 60 per cent. more wages.

Everybody listens. Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two thousand years.

The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St.

Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get. It was all that the Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting crowds know things.

To-day there is no reason why the Cross as a contrivance for attracting the attention of all people to goodness should be exclusively relied upon.

Possibly the Cross was intended, at the time, as the best possible way of starting a religion, when there was none, or possibly for keeping it up when there was very little of it.

But now that Christianity has been occupied two thousand years in putting in the groundwork, in laying down the principles of success, and in organizing them into the world, has been slowly making it possible with crowds that could not be long deceived for success to be decent.

The leaven has worked into human nature and Christianity has produced The Successful Temperament.

Success has become a spiritual inst.i.tution. In other words, the hour of the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the man who sees how, the man of The Successful Temperament is at hand.

Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this day--must reckon with him--with the Man Who Sees How.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT

I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success."

I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great Men with all their funny trappings on,--their hoods, and their ribbons, and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows of Prosperity from the street.

And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of The Little Great go by.

I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing faintly in my ears have gone my way.

But I keep coming back to the curb again.

I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes, the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented, gurgling, wallowing millionaires--I cannot help standing once more and looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking.

I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than they can help, and are trying to do better.

They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it again and again.

They are the great men.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes failure express it.

But this book is not about great men and goodness. It is about touching the imagination of crowds with goodness, about making goodness democratic and making goodness available for common people.

A stupendous success in goodness will advertise it as well as a stupendous failure.

Goodness has had its cross-redeemers to attract the attention of half a world.

Possibly it is having now its success-redeemers to attract the attention of the other half.

The people the success-redeemers reach would turn out to be, possibly, very much more than half.

The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure--in the power of steady daily pulling on men's minds, has done as much for goodness as success.

It is doubtful if, except as an ideal or conventional symbol the cross has ever been or ever could be what might be called a spiritually middle-cla.s.s inst.i.tution. It has been reserved for men of genius, pioneers and world-designers to have those colossal and glorious crosses that have been wors.h.i.+pped in all ages, and must be wors.h.i.+pped in all ages as the great memorials of the human race.

But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the natural form of success.

It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to challenge fatalism, to defy a cross. He would almost boast that n.o.body could make him die on it. This spirit in men too is a religious spirit.

It is the next hail of goodness. Goodness posts up its next huge notice on the world:

[SUCCESS]

It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and it is going to make them notice it in everyday things. It does not admit that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in failure.

It believes that goodness is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type of man in the world--the scientific and practical type as we see it in the western nations all about us to-day.

We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament.

And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for plat.i.tudes, to get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it.

And it is this new eagerness in the modern spirit, a kind of hurrying up of the souls of the world that is inspiring us to employ our western genius in inventing and defending and applying the means of goodness and in finding ways of making goodness work. We will not admit that men were intended to die on crosses from a sheer, beautiful, heavenly s.h.i.+ftlessness, vague-mindedness, mere unwillingness to take pains to express themselves or unwillingness to think things out and to make things plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It seems to us that it goes naturally with the scientific and technical temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the pragmatic temperament, of the inductive mind. The modern mind is interested in facts and cannot make a religion out of not knowing them.

There was a time once when people used to take their bodily diseases as acts of G.o.d. We have made up our minds not to have these same bodily diseases now. We have discovered by hard work and constant study that they are not necessary. The same is true of our moral diseases and of our great social maladies.