The trades unions and employers’ associations, extreme socialists and extreme Tories have so far been very bad psychologists.  If the Single Tax people were as good at being intuitionalists or idea-salesmen as they are at being philosophers in ideas they would long before this have turned everything their way.  They would have begun with people’s hungers and worked out from them.  They would have listened to people to find out what their hungers were.  The people who will stop being theoretical and logical about each other and who will look hard into each other’s eyes will be the people whose ideas will first come to pass.  Everything we try to do or say or bring to pass in England or America is going to begin after this, not in talking, but in listening.  If social reformers and industrial leaders had been good listeners, the social deadlock—­England with its House of Lords and railroads both on strike and America with its great industries quarrelling—­would have been arranged for and got out of the way over twenty years ago.

We have overlooked the first step of industrial reform, the rather extreme step of listening.  The most hard-headed and conclusive man to settle any given industrial difficulty is the man who has the gift of divining what is going on in other people’s minds, a gift for being human, a gift for treating everybody who disagrees with him as if they might possibly be human too, though they are very poor, even though they are very rich.  Practical psychology has come to be not only the only solution but also the only method of our modern industrial questions.  Being so human that one can guess what any possible human being would think is the one hard-headed and practical way to meet the modern labour problem.

The first symptom of being human in a man is his range and power of shrewd, happy toleration, or courage for people who know as little now as he knew once.

A man’s sense of toleration is based primarily upon the range and power of his knowledge of himself, upon his power of remembering and anticipating himself, upon his laughing with God at himself, upon his habit in darkness, weariness or despair, or in silent victory and joy, of falling on his knees.

Toleration is reverence.  It is the first source of courage for other people.

CHAPTER XV

CONVERSION

Some people think of the world as if it were made all through, people and all, of reinforced concrete, as if everything in it—­men, women, children, churches, colleges, and parties, were solidly, inextricably imbedded in it.

Every age in history has had to get on as well as it could with two sets of totally impracticable people, our two great orders of Philistines in this world, the people who put their trust in Portland Cement and the people who put their trust in Explosives.

There has not been a single great movement in history yet that every thoughtful man has not had to watch being held up by these people—­by millions of worthy, simple, rudimentary creatures who consent to be mere conservatives or mere radicals.