ence, uses it and drops it.

Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.

Then God hands it Another One.

CHAPTER V

THE CROWD AND TOM MANN

I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann
(the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people
have taken up awhile--thousands of them--to see through to what they
really want. I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the
crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him.

I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I
can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not
agreeing with him to some purpose.

But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements
for being fair to him. He came up on the platform (it was at Mr.
Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having
just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it,
is certainly a fine taking place to come out of--to blossom up out of,
like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious
audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people! Had I
not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek
only a little while before in Albert Hall?

If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his
disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience,
he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little
gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.

He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently before us in a
blaze of light. Everybody clapped for five minutes.

Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak. I found I had
come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless, whole-hearted, noisy,
self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person. He was a mere huge pulse or
muscle of a man. All we could do was to watch him up there on the
platform (it was all so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in
his big hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding
before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother gave him. He
stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should think, making it--making
the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to his music, to Tommy's own music, as if
it were the music of the spheres.

Mr. Mann's gospel of hope for mankind seemed to be to have all the
workers of the world all at once refuse