This is the hardest kind of courage to have—­courage for other people.

CHAPTER XII

THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS

During the coal strike I took up my morning paper and read from a speech by Vernon Hartshorn, the miners’ leader:  “In a week’s time, by tying up the railways and other means of transportation, we could so paralyze the country that the government would come to us on their knees and beg us to go to work on terms they are now flouting as impossible.”

During the dockers’ strike I took up my morning paper and read Ben Tillett’s speech, at the meeting the day before, to fifty thousand strikers on Tower Hill. “‘I am going to ask you to join me in a prayer,’ Tillett said.  ’Lord Devonport has contributed to the murder, by starvation, of your children, your women, and your men.  I am not going to ask you to do it, but I am going to call on God to strike Lord Devonport dead,’ He asked those who were prepared to repeat the ‘prayer’ to hold up their hands.  Countless hands were held up, and cries:  ’Strike him doubly stone dead!’ The men then repeated the following ‘prayer’, word for word, after Tillett: 

    “‘O God, strike Lord Devonport dead.’

“Afterward the strikers chanted the words:  ’He shall die!  He shall die!’”

There are times when it is very hard to have courage for other people.

It is when one watches people doing cowardly things that one finds it hardest to have courage for them.

I felt the same way both mornings at first when I held my paper in my hand and thought about what I had read, about the government’s going down on its knees, and about God’s striking Lord Devonport dead.

The first feeling was one of profound resentment, shame—­a huge, helpless, muddle-headed anger.

I had not the slightest trace of courage for the miners; I did not see how the government could have any courage for them.  And I had no courage for the dockers, or for what could be expected of the dockers.  I did not see how Lord Devonport could have any courage for them.

I repeated their prayer to myself.

The dockers were cowards.  I was not going to try to sympathize with them, or try to be reasonable about them.  It was nothing that they were desperate and had prayed.  Was I not desperate too?  Would not the very thought that fifty thousand men could pray a prayer like that make any man desperate?  It was as if I had stood and heard fifty thousand beasts roaring to their god.

“They are desperate,” I said to myself:  “I will not take what they think seriously.  It does not matter what desperate people think.”

Then I waited a minute.  “But I am desperate, too,” I said; “I must not take what I think seriously.  It does not matter what desperate people think.”

I thought about this a little, and drove it in.

“What I think will matter more a little later, perhaps, when I get over being desperate.”