Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them.

What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that they did not want.

The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each other's heels, asking the government to please investigate them. The more they can get the people to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them.

All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern business will change. First the expression will change and then the face itself.

The moment it is found that the government is a specific government, all the trusts that know what they really want and know what they really are doing, will want to be investigated, because they will want everybody to know that they know. In case of the trusts that do not know what they want and that do not know what they are doing, the government will just step in, of course, and investigate them until they find out.

A specific government will not need to be specific many times.

It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly, empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they thought that they thought that they wanted....

"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative, successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their business says or seems to say they wanted.

"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.

"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really is that has been happening to them all their lives, viz.: for forty, fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and overlooked what they were like.