When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves:  “What are the most difficult facts to face in people?”

They are: 

    The facts about how they are different from us.  The facts
    about their being like us.  The facts as to what we can do
    about it.

So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can be made to go together.

A man’s courage is his sense of identity.

A man’s courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts, chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God and of his right to share with God in the creating of His world.

His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations.  He sees the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances.  Then he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.

There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works where thousands of workmen day and night pass in and pass out.

Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he was.  He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and cooeperating all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the business a success.

He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it, with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his partners, or who did not want to be.

He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of the works.  Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow human beings, did not interest him.

He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent gorillas, any more than he did.

The Trades Unions passed a resolution that it was safer for the men in dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being gorillas.

Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it worked.

The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try.  Even if it worked very well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the Trades Unions thought.  They took the ground that it was safer to have all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not.