Is it not about time that somebody appeared very soon now who will make a stand once and for all in behalf of this Dear Old Lady-Like Person?
Is it really true that no one has noticed Her and is really going to stand up for Her—for the old gentle-hearted Planet as a Whole?
We have our Tom Mann for the workers, and we have the Daily Newspaper—the Tom Mann of Capital, but where is our Tom Mann for Everybody? Where is the man who shall come boldly out to Her, into the great crowded highway, where the bullies of wealth have tripped up her feet, and the bullies of poverty have thrown mud in her face, where all the little mean herds or classes one after the other hold Her up—the scorners, and haters, and cowards, and fearers for themselves, fighting as cowards always have to fight, in herds ... where is the man who is going to climb up alone before the bullies of wealth and the bullies of poverty, take his stand against them all—against both sides, and dare them to touch the dear helpless old Lady again?
When this man arises—this Tom Mann for Everybody—whether he slips up into immortality out of the crowd at his feet, and stands up against them in overalls or in a silk hat, he will take his stand in history as a man beside whom Napoleon and Alexander the Great will look as toys in the childhood of the world.
We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded students of affairs, but the crowd itself, the very passers-by in the streets, have come to see that the very essence of the labour problem is the problem of getting the classes to work together. And when the crowd watches the labour leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot think correctly of the other classes, of the consumers and the employers, it drops him. Unless a leader has a class consciousness that is capable of thinking of the other classes—the consumers and employers, so shrewdly and so close to the facts that the other classes, the consumers and the employers, will be compelled to take him seriously, tolerate him, welcome him, and coöperate with him, the crowd has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of the illusions of labour. When the illusion goes he goes.
Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness. Labour has lately been developing in a large degree a class consciousness.
The most striking aspect of the present moment is that at last, in the history of the world, the Public is developing a class consciousness.
The Crowd thinks.
And as from day to day the Crowd thinks—holds up its little class heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and sees its world through them—it comes more and more to see implacably what it wants.