But it is better than nothing, thank God!

They want something.

It gives me something to hope for, and to have courage for, about them—­that they want something.

Possibly if we could get them started wanting something, even some little narrow and rather mean thing, like having enough to eat—­possibly they will go on to art galleries, to peace societies, and cathedrals next, and to making very beautiful prayers (alas, Gentle Reader, how can I say it?) like you—­Heaven help us!—­and like me!

I would have but one objection to letting the dockers have their full way, and to letting the control of the situation be put into their hands.

They do not hunger enough.

They are merely hungering for themselves.

This may be a reason for not letting the world get entirely into their hands, but in the meantime we have every reason to be appreciative of the good the dockers are doing (so far as it goes) in hungering for themselves.

It would be strange indeed if one could not tolerate in dockers a little thing like this.  Babies do it.  It is the first decency in all of us.  It is the first condition of our knowing enough, or amounting to enough, to ever hunger for any one else.  Everybody has to make a beginning somewhere.  Even a Saint Francis, the man who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who rises to the heights of social-mindedness, who hungers and thirsts for everybody, begins all alone, at the breast.

Which is there of us who, if we had not begun our own hungering and thirsting for righteousness, our tugging on God, in this old, lonely, preoccupied, selfish-looking way, would ever have grown up, would ever have wanted enough things to belong to a Church of England, for instance, or to a Congregational Home Missionary Society?

It is true that the dockers are, for the moment (alas, fifty or sixty years or so!), merely wanting things for themselves, or wanting things for their own class.  And so would we if we had been born, brought up, and embedded in a society which allowed us so little for ourselves that not growing up morally—­keeping on over and over again, year after year, just wanting things for ourselves, and not really being weaned yet—­was all that was left to us.

There is really considerable spiritual truth in having enough to eat.

Sometimes I have thought it would be not unhelpful, would make a little ring of gentle-heartedness around us, some of us—­those of us who live protected lives and pray such rich, versatile prayers, if we would stop and think what a docker would have to do, what arrangements a docker would have to make before he could enjoy praying with us—­falling back into our beautiful, soft, luxurious wanting things for others.

Possibly these arrangements, such as they are, are the ones the dockers are trying to make with Lord Devonport now.

The docker is trying to get through hungering for something to eat, to arrange gradually to have his hungers move on.