Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
It is the same with Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It is when I fall to thinking
of her as if she were, or were in danger of being, a whole world of Ella
Wheeler Wilcoxes that I grow intolerant of her. Ella Wheeler Wilcox as a
Tincture, which is what she really is, of course, is well enough. I do
not mind.
The real truth about a man like Upton Sinclair, when one has worked down
through to it, is that while from my point of view a class-war
socialist--a man who proposes to put society together by keeping men
apart--is wrong and is sure to do a great deal of harm to some people,
there are other people to whom he does a great deal of good.
There really are people who need Upton Sinclair. It may be a hard fact
to face perhaps, but when one faces it one is glad there is one. Some of
the millionaires need Sinclair. There are others whose attention would
be attracted better in more subtle ways.
The class-war socialist, though I may be at this moment in the very act
of trying to make him impossible, to put him out of date, has been and
is, in his own place and his own time, I gratefully acknowledge, of
incalculable value.
Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make rich, tired,
mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechanical-minded people wake
up enough to feel hateful has performed a public service. The
hatefulness is the beginning of their being covetous for other things
than the things they have. If a man has a habit of hunger he gets better
and better hungers as a matter of course; bread and milk, ribbons,
geraniums, millinery, bathtubs, Bibles, copartnership associations. And
in the meantime the one precious thing to be looked out for in a man,
and to be held sacred, is his hunger.
The one important religious value in the world is hunger and to all the
men to-day who are contributing to the process of moving on hungers;
whether the hungers happen to be our hungers or not or our stages of
hunger or not, we say Godspeed.
There are times when the sudden sense one comes to have that the world
is a struggle, a great prayer toward the sun, a tumult and groping of
desire, the sense that every kind and type of desire has its time and
its place in it and every kind and type of man, gives a whole new
meaning to life. This sense of a now possible toleration which we come
to have, some of us, opens up to us always when it comes a new world of
courage about people. It makes all these dear, clumsy people about us
suddenly mean something. It makes them all suddenly belong somewhere.
They become, as by a kind of miracle, bathed in a new light,
wrong-headed, intolerable though they be, one still sees them flowing
out into the great endless stream of becoming--all these dots of the
vast desire, all these queer, funny, struggling little sons of God!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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