Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
And what D.A. Thomas expresses for Capital is its fear of Labour.
There are thousands of capitalists and hundreds of thousands of labour
men who have something better they want expressed by their leaders, than
their Fear.
Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEN WHO LOOK
During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world,
heroes abounded.
The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not
having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were.
Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and
went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills
about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over
England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. Mr.
Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in
the House of Commons, rose in his might--and before the face of the
nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class.
Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height
of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose
in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the
mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the
mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the
men.
He was called a traitor to his class.
At the last moment in the coal strike, when the Government had done its
best, and when the labour leaders still proposed to hold up England and
defy the Government until they got their way, Stephen Walsh, one of the
leaders of the miners, stood up in the face of a million miners and said
he would not go on with the others against the Government. "It is now
time for the trades union men to return to work. We have done what we
could. Our citizenship should be higher than our trades unionship, and
with me, as long as I am a trades union man, it will be."
He was called a traitor to his class.
I am an unwilling and unfit person, as a sojourner and an American, to
take any position on the merits of the question as to the
disestablishment of the Church in Wales. But when I saw Bishop Gore
standing up and looking unblinkingly at facts or what he thought were
facts which he would rather not have seen and which were not on his
side, and when I saw him voting deliberately for the disestablishment of
his own Church, I greeted with joy, as if I had seen a cathedral,
another traitor to his class. I almost believe that a Church that could
produce and supply a man like this for a great nation looking through
every city and county year by year for men to go with it ... a Church
that could produce and keep producing Bishop Gores, would be entitled,
from a great nation to anything it liked.
* * * * *
Men seem to be capable of three stages of courage. Courage is graded to
the man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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