under Morgan’s regime long enough, and it is now their turn.  Perhaps men’s spirits have always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and perhaps his imagination has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum imagination:  it is a kind of imagination that sees related and articulated the physical body of things, the grip on the material tools, on the gigantic limbs of a world.  The man who succeeds Mr. Morgan, and for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready, is the man who has his imagination in the upper part of his brain, and instead of doing things by not seeing, and by not being seen, he will swing a light.  He will be himself in his own personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight, and he will work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will with things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them and not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan’s way, both eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being all bent, all crowded into his vast machine of men, his huge will lifted ... and excavating blindly, furiously, as through some groping force he knew not, great sub-cellars for a new heaven and new earth.

The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time.  Heroes are the Crowd’s tools.  Some are dredges, some are telescopes.  The Crowd, by a kind of instinct—­an oversoul or undersoul of which it knows not until afterward, takes up each tool gropingly—­sometimes even against its will and against its conscience, uses it and drops it.

Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.

Then God hands it Another One.

CHAPTER V

THE CROWD AND TOM MANN

I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann (the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people have taken up awhile—­thousands of them—­to see through to what they really want.  I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him.

I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I can.  It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not agreeing with him to some purpose.

But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements for being fair to him.  He came up on the platform (it was at Mr. Hyndmann’s Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it, is certainly a fine taking place to come out of—­to blossom up out of, like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious audience).  It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people!  Had I not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek only a little while before in Albert Hall?

If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience, he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.