It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that God has worked it out!
It is one of His usual paradoxes.
The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.
He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he can—in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.
The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get outside of himself into his class, who, in being a good class-man, can overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he wants.
I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial world, as at present constituted in our coöperative age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other people.
If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.
Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day after.
And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause—a prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of Labour—that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to represent Labour.
In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No God and no Master"—it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and "One is our Master, even Christ"—thousands of men who had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, snatching up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea that the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed to represent for one moment the manhood and the courage, the faithfulness and (even in the hour of their extremity) the quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty and self-forgetfulness, the moral dignity of the American workingman.