The third reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is that he is unpractical and full of scorn.  And scorn, from the point of view of the practical-minded man, is a sentimental and useless emotion.  We have learned that it almost always has to be used by a man who has his facts wrong, that is, who does not see what he himself is really like, and who has not noticed what other people are really like.  No man who sees himself as he is, feels at liberty to use scorn.  And no man who sees others as they are, sees any occasion for it.  Tom Mann uses hate also, and hate has been found to be, as directed toward classes of persons as a means of getting them to do things, archaic and inefficient.  It is not quite bright.  It need not be denied that hate and scorn both impress some people, but they never seem to impress the people that see things to do and who find ways to do them.  And the people who use scorn are all too narrow, too class-bound, and too self-regarding to do things in a huge world problem like the present one.

The fourth reason that Tom Mann as a labour leader is incompetent is that he is afraid; he is afraid of capital, so afraid that he has to fight it instead of grappling with it and cooeperating with it.  He is afraid to believe in labour—­so afraid that he takes orders from it instead of seeing for it, and seeing ahead for it.  He is afraid of his employers’ brains, of their having brains enough to understand and to to be convinced as to the position of the labourer.  He is afraid to believe in his own brains, in his own brains being good enough to convince them.

So he backs down and fights.

If any reader who is interested to do so will kindly turn back at this point a page or so, and read this chapter we have just gone through together, over again, and if he will kindly, wherever it occurs, insert for Tom Mann, labour leader, “D.A.  Thomas, leader of mine-owners,” he will save much time for both of us, and he will kindly make one chapter in this book which is already much too long, as good as two.  Tom Mann (unless he is changed) is about to be dropped as a typical modern leader of Labour because he is afraid, and what he expresses in the labouring class is its fear of Capital.

And what D.A.  Thomas expresses for Capital is its fear of Labour.

There are thousands of capitalists and hundreds of thousands of labour men who have something better they want expressed by their leaders, than their Fear.

Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MEN WHO LOOK

During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world, heroes abounded.

The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were.

Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood.  Mr. Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in the House of Commons, rose in his might—­and before the face of the nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class.