to work. Have the workers starve
and silence a planet, and take over and confiscate the properties and
plants of capital, dismiss the employers of all nations and run the
earth themselves.

* * * * *

I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into wild, happy
appreciation.

It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It was as if,
while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen being made, being
hammered out before them, a new world.

I rubbed my eyes.

It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the trouble for
nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starvation, and panic for
nothing.

There was one single possible difference in it.

We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks, riding
astride the planet, riding it out with us--with all the rest of us
helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the
Blackness.

And now we were having instead, Tom Mann, the Pierpont Morgan of the
Trades Unions, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us, with
all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out
into the Blackness.

Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very useful as crowd
spy-glasses for us all to see what we want through.

But is this what we want?

Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all classes of us, to have our
world turned upside down so that we can be bullied on it by one set of
men instead of being bullied on it by another?

This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after the
other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next.

Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we are nearly all of us
seeing to-day. We have stood by now these many years through strikes and
rumours of strikes, and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the
Lawrence Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have seen,
in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into
the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights
of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something
could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the
huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person
doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by
one side and now by the other. It has almost looked, some days, as if
both sides in the quarrel--Capital and La