im, welcome him, and cooeperate with him, the crowd
has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary
importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of the illusions of
labour. When the illusion goes he goes.

Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness.
Labour has lately been developing in a large degree a class
consciousness.

The most striking aspect of the present moment is that at last, in the
history of the world, the Public is developing a class consciousness.

The Crowd thinks.

And as from day to day the Crowd thinks--holds up its little class
heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and sees its world through
them--it comes more and more to see implacably what it wants.

It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type of Labour
leader, for some time.

There are certain general principles with regard to labour leaders that
the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes and looking through
them, at what it wants. The first great principle is that no man needs
to be taken very seriously, as a competent leader of a great labour
movement who is merely thinking of the interest of his own class.

The second general principle the Crowd has come to see, and to insist
upon--when it is appealed to (as it always is, in the long run) is that
no labour leader needs to be taken very seriously or regarded as very
dangerous or very useful--who believes in force.

A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up is the only way
he can express it--the Crowd suspects. The only labour leaders that the
Crowd, or people as a whole, take seriously are those that get things
by thinking and by making other people think.

The Crowd wants to think.

The Crowd wants to decide.

And It has decided to decide by being made to think and not by being
knocked down.

It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be knocked down,
and has not shown itself to be over and over again, when it thought its
being knocked down might possibly help in a just cause.

But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers of the
World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing.

It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by capital that
the Crowd fears.

It is the not-thinking.

The Crowd has noticed that the knocking-down disposition and the
not-thinking disposition go together.

The Crowd has watched Force and Force-people, and has seen what alwa