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 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.