Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

Now ex-Mayor —— is precisely the kind of man (as half the world knows) who, if he had been a contractor, instead of what he had happened to be, would have been precisely the kind of contractor Non is. He has the same difficult, heroic blend of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and getting what he wants.

But the moment ex-Mayor —— found these same motives put up to be believed in at one remove, and in somebody else, he thought they were too good to be true.

I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few years of observation with a very singular and interesting fact about business men.

Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives, (in a rather bluff simple way, without particularly thinking about it, one way or the other) seem to feel a little superior to other people. They begin, as a rule, apparently, by feeling a little superior to themselves, by trying to keep from seeing how high their motives are, and when, in the stern scuffle of life, they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how high their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep other people from suspecting it.

In ——'s factory in ——, the workers in brass, a few years ago, could not be kept alive more than two years because they breathed brass filings. When —— installed, at great expense, suction machines to place beside the men to keep them from breathing brass, some one said, "Well surely you will admit this time, that this is philanthropy?"

"Not at all."

The saving in brass air alone, gathered up from in front of the men's mouths, paid for the machines. What is more he said that after he had gone to the expense of educating some fine workmen, if a mere little sucking machine like that could make the best workmen he had, work for him twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to let them die.

Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point, until they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone about business. One can talk with them for hours, for days at a time, about their business—some of them, without being able a single time to corner them into being decent or into admitting that they care about anybody.

Now I will not yield an inch to —— or to anybody else in my desire to displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life. I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of view. I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding identities, for putting people's interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and help themselves.

And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with goodness—either his own or other people's?