The dockers were cowards. I was not going to try to sympathize with them, or try to be reasonable about them. It was nothing that they were desperate and had prayed. Was I not desperate too? Would not the very thought that fifty thousand men could pray a prayer like that make any man desperate? It was as if I had stood and heard fifty thousand beasts roaring to their god.

"They are desperate," I said to myself: "I will not take what they think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think."

Then I waited a minute. "But I am desperate, too," I said; "I must not take what I think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think."

I thought about this a little, and drove it in.

"What I think will matter more a little later, perhaps, when I get over being desperate."

"Perhaps what the dockers think will matter more a little later, too."

In the meantime are not their scared and hateful opinions as good as my scared and hateful opinions?

The important and final opinions, the ones to be taken seriously, that can be acted on, will be the opinions of those who get over being scared and hateful first.

Then I stood up for myself.

I had a reason for being scared and hateful. They and their prayer drove me to be scared and hateful.