CHAPTER XVII

INVENTION

If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them.

The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would be far less desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but it is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all cla.s.ses who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds.

I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at Hendon--those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one--that imperturbable happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast countenance of the future--watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of times I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid.

One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all the new people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt a vast light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence of the picked people who had come to see this first vast initiative of man toward s.p.a.ce, toward the stars, the people who had waited for four thousand years to see it; to see at last Little Man (as it would seem to G.o.d) in this his first clumsy, beautiful childlike tottering up the sky.

One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got it.

The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the street.

Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies in the box.

The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the _Times_ saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was missing.

He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people--to anybody Who Happened Along the Strand--to a Foundling Hospital.

The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human nature. He thought he ought to encourage me.

I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion.

I think it would have been better to have had just a few of those pennies in the Strand say seven or eight missing.

On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would have been missing--I hope.

And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand.

There are two ways to get relief from this story.

First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear little foundlings got them--the letter in the _Times_ said. They were presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand.

Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the _Times_ and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in the _Times_ to come out at the other.

Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off.

But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon.

If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it.

It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like.

The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United States.

At all events the last thing that I would be willing to believe is that either America or England would be capable of producing a chance crowd in the street that out of sheer laziness or moral thoughtlessness would not be able to work up at least one boy in it who would have a sudden flash of imagination about a penny rolling around a man's leg--if he picked it up and--did not put it in the box.

The crowd in the Strand, of course, like any other real crowd, was a stew of development, a huge laboratory of people. All stages of experience were in it.

Some of the people in the crowd that day had a new refreshing thought, when they saw those pennies rolling around everybody. They thought they would try and see what stealing a penny was like. Then they did it.

Others in the crowd thought of stealing a penny too, and then they had still another thought. They thought of not stealing it. And this second thought interested them more.

Others did not think of stealing a penny at all because they had thought of it so often before had got used to it and had got used to dismissing it.

Others thought of stealing a penny and then they thought how ashamed they were of having thought of it. Others looked thoughtfully at the pennies and thought they would wait for guineas.

But whatever it was or may have been that was taking place in that crowd that day--they all thought.

And after all what is really important to a nation is that the people in it--any chance crowd in a street in it should think. I confess I care very little one way or the other about the pennies being saved, or about the brewer's little touch of moral poetry, his idea that this particular crowd was solid Sunday-school from one end to the other, all through.

Whether it was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them think, made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the individuality or invention in them, the personal self-control, the social responsibility in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. And I am glad, for one, that the box of pennies was dumped in the street.

I would like to see shillings tried next time.

Then guineas might be used.

A box of guineas dumped in the street would do more good than a box of pennies because there are many people who would think more with the guineas rolling around out of sight around a man's legs than they would with a penny's doing it.

In this way a box of guineas would do more good.

Thousands of men and women that we have sent to India from this Western World have been trying with Bibles, and good deeds, and kind faces, and Sunday-schools to get the Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin to kill the rats and stop the bubonic plague.

Nothing came of it.

In due time General Booth-Tucker appeared on the scene.

He came too, of course, with a Bible and with his kind face like the others, and of course, too, he went to Sunday-school regularly.

And while he was watching the bubonic plague sweeping up cities, he tried too, like the others, to tell the people about a G.o.d who would not be displeased if they killed the rats and stopped the plague.

But he could not convince anybody, or at best a few here and there.

The next thing that was known about General Booth-Tucker's work in India was, that he had (still with his Bible, of course, and with his kind look) slipped away and established in the south of France a factory for the manufacture of gloves.

He then returned to his poor superst.i.tious people in India who would not believe him, and told them that he knew and knew absolutely that they would not be punished for killing the rats, that the rats were not sacred, and that he could prove it.

He offered the people so much apiece for the skins of the rats.

The poorest and most desperate of the natives then began killing the rats secretly and bringing in the skins.

They waited for the wrath of Heaven to fall upon them. Nothing happened, then they told others. The others are telling everybody.