enjoy praying with us--falling back
into our beautiful, soft, luxurious wanting things for others.

Possibly these arrangements, such as they are, are the ones the dockers
are trying to make with Lord Devonport now.

The docker is trying to get through hungering for something to eat, to
arrange gradually to have his hungers move on.

CHAPTER XIII

MEN WHO GET THINGS

All the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire. A vice is
a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within
reach, to control his little ones.

A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop
into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He
forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly
that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely
Hunger--a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or
a million dollars, runs away with him.

When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-control lies
in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and
centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world
would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of
hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes
of people, or hungering for themselves.

We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the
world--not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is
merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority
on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own
hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be
taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about
what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken
seriously.

I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers.

I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same
sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of
religion, would dare to do what they have done.

But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with
sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point.

And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers,
or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:

First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive
and imperative. It must