It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type of Labour leader, for some time.
There are certain general principles with regard to labour leaders that the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes and looking through them, at what it wants. The first great principle is that no man needs to be taken very seriously, as a competent leader of a great labour movement who is merely thinking of the interest of his own class.
The second general principle the Crowd has come to see, and to insist upon—when it is appealed to (as it always is, in the long run) is that no labour leader needs to be taken very seriously or regarded as very dangerous or very useful—who believes in force.
A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up is the only way he can express it—the Crowd suspects. The only labour leaders that the Crowd, or people as a whole, take seriously are those that get things by thinking and by making other people think.
The Crowd wants to think.
The Crowd wants to decide.
And It has decided to decide by being made to think and not by being knocked down.
It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be knocked down, and has not shown itself to be over and over again, when it thought its being knocked down might possibly help in a just cause.
But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers of the World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing.
It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by capital that the Crowd fears.