CHAPTER VII
AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN
I am aware that Tom Mann is not a world figure. But he is a world type. And as the editor of the Syndicalist, the leader of the most imposing and revealing labour rally the world has seen, he is of universal interest. Those of us who believe in crowds are deeply interested in finding, recognizing, creating, and in seeing set free out of the ranks of men the labour leaders who shall express the nobility and dignity of modern labour, who shall express the bigness of spirit, the brawny-heartedness, the composure, the common-sense, the patriotism, the faithfulness and courage of the People.
I indict Tom Mann before the bar of the world as not expressing the will and the spirit of the People.
I do this as a labouring man. I decline, because I spend my time daily tracing out little crooked lines on paper with a pen, because I have wrought day and night to make little patterns of ink and little stretches of words reach men together round a world, because I have sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought out at last my little faith for a world ... I decline not to be numbered with the labourers I see in the streets. I claim my right before all men this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled among the toilers of the earth.
I speak as a labouring man. I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true leader of Labour.
The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not observe facts. He merely observes facts that everybody can see, that everybody has seen for years. He does not observe the new and exceptional facts about capital that only a few can see, the seeing of which, and the seeing of which first, should alone ever constitute a man a true leader in dealing with capital. He merely believes facts that nearly everybody has caught up to believing—facts about human nature, about what works in business. The crowd is not content with this. It has become accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in business, and who make others follow them, whether masters or workmen, are men who do it by observing certain new and exceptional facts and acting upon them. If these men cannot observe them, we have seen them create them. It is the men who make new things true wherever they go that the crowd is coming to recognize and to take seriously and permanently as the real leaders of Labour and of Capital to-day. Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things that he proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked at on the outside, merely have or might be said to have a true look:
First, employers are all alike;
Second, none of them ever work;