Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets itself be swallowed up with meek good-nature. Our amazing good-nature! Political philosophers have deplored the fact. They have urged us to be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the editor. I agree that only in that way can we be rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of ticket-speculators, of taxi-cab extortioners, of insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent congestion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with the social philosophers. But then I am not typical of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects itself into the small of my back, I twist around and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the innocent mechanical result of a whole series of elbows and backs extending the length of the car, to where the first cause operates in the form of a station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cattle into their stalls. In the faces about me there is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, instead of raising barricades in the Subway and hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to the lurching of the train, and young voices call out cheerfully, 'Plenty of room ahead.'
Horribly good-natured! We have taken a phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously predestined to subjection, one might understand. But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I have called them, that they should submit is a puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself--that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy; admiration rather, provided he has not shouldered and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good-nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I see signs of the approaching change. People do not call out, 'Plenty of room ahead,' so frequently as they used to.