Being good every day in business stands in no need of being stood up for, or apologized for, or even helped. All of these things may be expedient and human and natural, because one cannot help being interested in particular people and in a particular generation; but they are not really necessary to goodness. It is only when we are tired, or when we only half believe in it, that we feel to-day that goodness needs to be stood up for. In a day when men make vast crowds of things, so that the things are seen everywhere, and when the things are made to stand the test of crowds—crowds of days, or crowds of years—and when they make them for crowds of people, goodness does not need scared and helpful people defending it. I have seen that goodness is a thing to be sung about like a sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and grounded in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the huge daily passionate moral experiment of the human heart—that all men are at work on it, that goodness is an implacable crowd process, and that nothing can stop it.
CHAPTER VII
THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE
But Fate has so arranged our lives that we all have to live cooped up in one particular generation. Living in all of them, especially the ages just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon them how goodness wins, may be well enough when one is tired or discouraged and is driven to it, but in the meantime all the while we are living in this one. The faces of the people we know flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd haunts us—the crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and drop into the Darkness—a whole generation of it, without seeing how things are coming out; and there is something about the streets, about the look of women as they go by, something about the faces of the little children, that makes one wish goodness would hurry. One cannot think with any real pleasure of goodness as a huge, slow, implacable moral glacier, a kind of human force of gravity, grinding out truths and grinding under people, generation after generation, down toward some vast, beautiful, happy valley with flowers and children in it and majestic old men thousands of years away. One wishes goodness would hurry. We are not content, some of us, with having the good people climb over the so-called evil ones and gain the supremacy of the world, and all because the evil people do not see what they really want to do or would have wished they had done afterward. We want the evil ones, so called, to see what they really want now. We cannot help believing that there is some way of attracting their attention to what they really want now.
I have seen, or seemed to see, in my time that there is almost no limit to what people can do if they can get their own attention, or if some person or some event will happen by that can get their attention for them.
Paralytics jumped from their beds at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and ran for blocks. The whole earth had to shake them in order to get their attention; but it did it, and they saw what it was they wanted, and they ran for it at once, whether they were paralytics or not. In the fire that followed the earthquake, people that had been sick in bed for weeks were seen, scores of them, dragging their trunks through the streets.
I have seen, too, in my time scores of people doing great feats of goodness in this way, things that they knew they could not do, dragging huge moral trunks after them, or swinging them up on their shoulders. I have seen men who thought they were old in their hearts, and who thought they were wicked, running like boys, with shouts and cheers, to do right. It was all a matter of attention. The question with most of us would seem to be: How can one get one's attention to what one would wish one had done in twenty years, and how can one get other people's—all the people with whom we are living and working—to do with us what they would wish they had done, in twenty minutes, twenty days, or twenty years?
Letting the Crowd be Good, all turns in the long run upon touching the imagination of Crowds.
In the last analysis, the coming of the kingdom of heaven, as it has been called, is going to be the coming slowly, and from unsuspected quarters, of a new piety and of new kinds of saints into the forefront of modern life—saints who can attract attention, saints who can make crowds think what they really want.