Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

THE SUCCESSFUL

A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not interest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could. Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see—it was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it there—on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo—until....

I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it inside.

The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the London Times, and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and steer heads inside.

This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a successful and permanent business. It is hard to believe how largely, for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the real key of the labour problem—this art of steering people's heads inside.

We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good deal of time in finding fault with labouring men for thinking too much about themselves and about their class, and for emphasizing their wages more than their work, and for not having more noble and disinterested characters. Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their thoughts to higher things.

A great many wise things have been said to Labour—masterpieces, miles of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their walls.

But in vain!

And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial.

It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more terrible than that—that he is starving inside, that his soul is starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting something to eat—if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very lightly.