Crowds Part 6

Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way.

But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously. And so our Time has been fulfilled. We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions, towers and skysc.r.a.pers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging to the man in the chair in front of me. I moved the satchel away, and the smoke came up through the carpet. I spoke to the Pullman conductor who was pa.s.sing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white silence in the fields. We got off the car--some of us--to see what had happened, and to see if there was a hot box on the wheels. We found that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what had happened? Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the car were set--twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind. As I came in I looked again at the train--the long dull train that had been pulled along by the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky--the long, dull, heavy Train! And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it!

In Count Zeppelin's new airs.h.i.+p the new social spirit has a symbol, and in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm foundation. The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius over other men's wills. They are allied to the X-ray and the airs.h.i.+p, and gain their pre-eminence by their power of forecast and invention--their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of men and the spirit of the time. Even the painters have caught this spirit. The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and theosophy and Christian Science. The playwrights are touched by it; and the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the spirit of the audience. The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE

I remember looking over with H.G. Wells one night some time ago a set of pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought home with him. They were largely skysc.r.a.pers, big bridges, Niagaras, and things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how much more Mr. Wells had of the future of America in his own mind than he could possibly buy in his photographs. What funny little films they were after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those pictures of the future of my country were! H.G. Wells himself, standing in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of America, than the pictures were.

The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen is in people's faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of the men who pa.s.s, and you feel hundreds of years--the next hundred years--like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like suns.h.i.+ne around me.

This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America. The solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily sense in the streets of the future. And it has seemed to me that this fact--whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in England and in other nations--is what one might call, for lack of a better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and our philosophy about the world have now to reckon. Nothing can be seen as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is left out of it.

All power is rapidly coming to be based on news--news about human nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless, but it is in cipher--hence prophets, or men who have great sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future, platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet. But to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on to-morrow. The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed farther along. A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary now; he is a recognized force. Being a prophet is getting to be almost smug and respectable.

We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made President of a railroad. He swings the country as if it were his hat. We see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the skirts of Count Zeppelin. We only crucify a prophet now if he is a hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead. Even then, we would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except the first twenty-five years of him.

The theory is no longer tenable that prophets must be necessarily crucified. As a matter of history, most prophets have been crucified by people; but it was not so much because of their prophecy as because their prophecy did not have any first twenty-five years in it. They were crucified because of a blank place or hiatus, not necessarily in their own minds, but at least in other people's. People would have been very glad to have their first twenty-five years' worth if they could have got it. It is this first twenty-five years, or joining-on part, which is most important in prophecy, and which has become our specialty in the Western World. One might say, in a general way, that the idea of having a first twenty-five years' section in truth for a prophet is a modern, an almost American, invention. We are temperamentally a country of the future, and think instinctively in futures; and perhaps it is not too much to say (considering all the faults that go with it for which we are criticized) that we have led the way in futures as a specialty, as a national habit of mind; and though with terrific blunders perhaps have been really the first people _en ma.s.se_ to put being a prophet on a practical basis--that is, to supply the first twenty-five years'

section, or the next-thing-to-do section to Truth, to put in a kind of coupling between this world and the next. This is what America is for, perhaps--to put in the coupling between this world and the next.

In the former days, the strength of a man, or of an estate, or a business, was its stability. In the new world, instead of stability, we have the idea of persistence, and power lies not so much in solid brittle foundation quality as in conductivity. Socially, men can be divided into conductors--men who connect powers--and non-conductors--men who do not; and power lies in persistence, in dogged flexibility, adaptableness, and impressionableness. The set conservative cla.s.s of people, in three hundred years, are going to be the dreamers, inventors--those who demonstrate their capacity to dream true, and who hit shrewdly upon probabilities and trends and futures; and the power of a man is coming to be the power of observing atmospheres, of being sensitive to the intangible and the unknown. People are more likely to be crucified two thousand years from now for wanting to stay as they are. There used to be the inertia of rest; and now in its place, working reciprocally in a new astonis.h.i.+ng equilibrium, we step up calmly on our vast moving sidewalk of civilization and swing into the inertia of motion.

The inertia of men, instead of being that of foundations, conventions, customs, facts, sogginess, and heaviness, is getting to be an inertia now toward the future, or the next-thing-to-do. Most of us can prove this by simply looking inward and taking a glimpse of our own consciousness. Let a man draw up before his own mind the contents of his own consciousness (if he has a motor consciousness), and we find that the future in his life looms up, both in its motives and its character, and takes about three quarters of the room of his consciousness; and when it is not looming up, it is woven into everything he does. Even if all the future were for was to help one understand the present and act this immediate moment as one should, nine tenths of the power of seeing a thing as it is, turns out to be one's power of seeing it as it is going to be. In any normal man's life, it is really the future and his sense of the future that make his present what it is.

History is losing its monopoly. It is only absorbed in men's minds--in the minds of those who are making more of it--in parts or rather in elements of all its parts.

The trouble with history seems to have been, thus far, that people have been under the illusion that history should be taken as a solid. They seem to think it should be taken in bulk. They take it, some of them, a solid hundred years of it or so, and gulp it down. The advantage of prophecy is that it cannot be taken as a solid by people who would take everything so if they could. Prophecy is protected. People have to breathe it, a.s.similate it, and get it into their circulation and make a solid out of it personally, and do it all themselves. It is this process which is making our modern men spiritual, interpretative, and powerful toward the present and toward the past, and which is giving a body and soul to knowledge, and is making knowledge lively and human, the kind of knowledge (when men get it) that makes things happen.

CHAPTER IX

THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE

I would like to propose, as a basis for the judgment of men and events, and as a basis for forecasting the next men and next events, and arriving at a vision of action, a Theory of the World.

Every man has one.

Every man one knows can be seen doing his work in this world on a great background, a kind of panorama or stage setting in his mind, made up of history and books, newspapers, people, and experiences, which might be called his Theory of the World.

It is his theory of the world which makes him what he is--his personal judgment or personal interpretation of what the world is like, and what works in it, and what does not work.

A man's theory as to why people do or do not do wrong is not a theory he might in some brief disinterested moment, possibly at luncheon, take time to discuss. His theory of what is wrong and of what is right, and of how they work, touches the efficiency with which he works intimately and permanently at every point every minute of his business day.

If he does not know, in the middle of his business day, what his theory of the world--of human nature--is, let him stop and find out.

A man's theory of the world is the skylight or manhole over his work. It becomes his h.e.l.l or heaven--his day and night. He breathes his theory of the world and breathes his idea of the people in it; and everything he does may be made or may be marred by what, for instance, he thinks in the long-run about what I am saying now on this next page. Whether he is writing for people, or doing business with them over a counter, or launching books at them, everything he does will be steeped in what he believes about what I am saying now--it shall be the colour of the world to him, the sound or timbre of his voice--what he thinks or can make up his mind to think, of what I am saying--on this next page.

CHAPTER X

A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE

If the men who were crucifying Jesus could have been suddenly stopped at the last moment, and if they could have been kept perfectly still for ten minutes and could have thought about it, some of them would have refused to go on with the crucifixion when the ten minutes were over. If they could have been stopped for twenty minutes, there would have been still more of them who would have refused to have gone on with it. They would have stolen away and wondered about The Man in their hearts. There were others who were there who would have needed twenty days of being still and of thinking. There were some who would have had to have twenty years to see what they really wanted, in all the circ.u.mstances, to do.

People crucified Christ because they were in a hurry.

They did what they wanted to do at the moment. So far as we know, there were only two men who did what they would have wished they had done in twenty years: there was the thief on the other cross, who showed The Man he knew who He was; and there was the disciple John, who kept as close as he could. John perhaps was thinking of the past--of all the things that Christ had said to him; and the man on the other cross was thinking what was going to happen next. The other people who had to do with the crucifixion were all thinking about the thing they were doing at the moment and the way they felt about it. But the Man was Thinking, not of His suffering, but of the men in front of Him, and of what they could be thinking about, and what they would be thinking about afterward--in ten minutes, in twenty minutes, in twenty days, or in twenty years; and suddenly His heart was flooded with pity at what they would be thinking about afterward, and in the midst of the pain in His arms and the pain in His feet He made that great cry to Heaven: "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!"

It is because Christians have never quite believed that The Man really meant this when He said it that they have persecuted the Jews for two thousand years. It is because they do not believe it now that they blame Mr. Rockefeller for doing what most of them twenty years ago would have done themselves. It was one of the hardest things to do and say that any one ever said in the world, and it was said at the hardest possible time to say it. It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began. It has seemed to me the most literal, and perhaps the most practical, truth that has been said since the world began.

It goes straight to the point about people. It gives one one's definition of goodness both for one's self and for others. It gives one a program for action.

Except in our more joyous and free moments, we a.s.sume that when people do us a wrong, they know what they are about. They look at the right thing to do and they look at the wrong one, and they choose the wrong one because they like it better. Nine people out of ten one meets in the streets coming out of church on Sunday morning, if one asked them the question plainly, "Do you ever do wrong when you know it is wrong?"

would say that they did. If you ask them what a sin is, they will tell you that it is something you do when you know you ought not to do it.

But The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin that has ever been committed, seemed to think that when men committed a sin, it was because they did not really see what it was that they were doing. They did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did not do what they would have wished they had done in twenty years.

I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in twenty years--twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe.

It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting too rich, to point out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great permanently successful business. His sin has consisted in his not taking pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his mind and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem to be better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man. There are things that he has not thought of that every one else has.

We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the most colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced. To point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one thing that the world could accept gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in time how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller leads in this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly being the world's most lonely man.

Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation--eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under gla.s.s, studying you as the man who has performed the most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he really looked in all the world--this has been Mr. Rockefeller's experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty years.

Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as boning down to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to do. Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable times for getting his own attention will be good. Any one else from outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of expression or--of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will make him good.

CHAPTER XI

DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS