I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann (the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people have taken up awhile—thousands of them—to see through to what they really want. I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him.
I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not agreeing with him to some purpose.
But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements for being fair to him. He came up on the platform (it was at Mr. Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it, is certainly a fine taking place to come out of—to blossom up out of, like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people! Had I not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek only a little while before in Albert Hall?
If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience, he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.
He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently before us in a blaze of light. Everybody clapped for five minutes.
Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak. I found I had come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless, whole-hearted, noisy, self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person. He was a mere huge pulse or muscle of a man. All we could do was to watch him up there on the platform (it was all so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in his big hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother gave him. He stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should think, making it—making the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to his music, to Tommy's own music, as if it were the music of the spheres.
Mr. Mann's gospel of hope for mankind seemed to be to have all the workers of the world all at once refuse to work. Have the workers starve and silence a planet, and take over and confiscate the properties and plants of capital, dismiss the employers of all nations and run the earth themselves.
I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into wild, happy appreciation.
It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It was as if, while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen being made, being hammered out before them, a new world.