“Perhaps what the dockers think will matter more a little later, too.”

In the meantime are not their scared and hateful opinions as good as my scared and hateful opinions?

The important and final opinions, the ones to be taken seriously, that can be acted on, will be the opinions of those who get over being scared and hateful first.

Then I stood up for myself.

I had a reason for being scared and hateful.  They and their prayer drove me to be scared and hateful.

I thought again.

Perhaps they had a reason, too.

Then it all came over me.  I became a human being all in a minute when I thought of it.

I became suddenly full of courage for the hateful dockers.

I thought how much more discouraging it would be if they had not been hateful at all.

* * * * *

I do not imagine God was sorry when He heard those fifty thousand dockers asking Him to strike Lord Devonport dead.

Not that He would have approved of it.

It was not the last word of wisdom or reasonableness.  It was lacking in beauty and distinction as a petition, as being just the right form of prayer for those fifty thousand faultless dockers up on Tower Hill that afternoon (the whole of London listening, in that shocked and proper way that London has).

But I have not lost all courage for the dockers who made it.

They still want something!  They still are men!  They still stand up when they speak to Heaven!  There is some stuff in them yet!  They make heaven and earth ring to get a word with God!

This all means something to God, probably.

Perhaps it might mean something to us.

We are superior persons, it is true.  We do not pray the way they pray.

We believe in being more self-controlled.  We take our breakfasts quietly, and with high collars and silk hats, and with gilt prayer-books we go into the presence of our Maker.  We believe in being calm and reasonable.

But if men who have not enough to eat are so half-dead and so worthless that they can feel calm and reasonable about it, and can always be precisely right and always say precisely the right thing—­if, with their wives fainting in their arms and their babies crying for food, all that those dockers had character enough to do, up on Tower Hill, was to make a polite, smooth, Anglican prayer to God—­a prayer like a kind of blessing before not having any meat, and not that awful, fateful, husky cry to Heaven, a roar or rending of their hearts up to the black and empty sky—­what would such men have been good for?  What hope or courage could any one have for them, for such men at such a time, if they would not, if they could not, come thundering and breaking into His presence, fifty thousand strong, to get what they want?

I may not know God, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not a precise stickler-god, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners, a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing their vast desires for Him out of darkness, and out of little foolish words, are trying to say to Him.