CHAPTER XIII

MEN WHO GET THINGS

All the virtues are hungers.  A vice is the failure of desire.  A vice is a man’s failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within reach, to control his little ones.

A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored.  He has let himself drop into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do.  He forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly that he wants anything.  Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely Hunger—­a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man’s wife, or a million dollars, runs away with him.

When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him.  Self-control lies in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and centrifugals of desire.  The worst thing that could happen to the world would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes of people, or hungering for themselves.

We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the world—­not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority on worlds.  People can take him seriously as an authority on his own hunger.  But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be taken seriously.  What he thinks about how the world should be run, about what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken seriously.

I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers.

I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of religion, would dare to do what they have done.

But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with sympathizing in general.  I want to sympathize to the point.

And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts: 

First, the dockers are desperate.  I take their desperation as conclusive and imperative.  It must be obeyed.

Second, I do not care what they think.

What they think must not be obeyed.  Men who are in the act of being scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies, are not practical.  What a man who despairs of everybody except himself thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work.  The fact that the dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the employers’ fault.  It is largely the fault of society, of the churches, the schools, the daily press.  But the fact remains, and whichever side in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be the side that will get the most control.