I rubbed my eyes.
It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the trouble for nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starvation, and panic for nothing.
There was one single possible difference in it.
We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us—with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness.
And now we were having instead, Tom Mann, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us, with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness.
Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very useful as crowd spy-glasses for us all to see what we want through.
But is this what we want?
Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all classes of us, to have our world turned upside down so that we can be bullied on it by one set of men instead of being bullied on it by another?
This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after the other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next.
Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we are nearly all of us seeing to-day. We have stood by now these many years through strikes and rumours of strikes, and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the Lawrence Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have seen, in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by one side and now by the other. It has almost looked, some days, as if both sides in the quarrel—Capital and Labour, really thought that the Public ought not to expect to be allowed to be out in the streets at all. Both sides in the contest are so sure they are right, and feel so noble and Christian, that we know they will take care of themselves; but the poor old Lady!—some of us wonder, in the turmoil of Civilization and the scuffle of Christianity, what is to become of Her.