want something.

Possibly if we could get them started wanting something, even some
little narrow and rather mean thing, like having enough to eat--possibly
they will go on to art galleries, to peace societies, and cathedrals
next, and to making very beautiful prayers (alas, Gentle Reader, how can
I say it?) like you--Heaven help us!--and like me!

I would have but one objection to letting the dockers have their full
way, and to letting the control of the situation be put into their
hands.

They do not hunger enough.

They are merely hungering for themselves.

This may be a reason for not letting the world get entirely into their
hands, but in the meantime we have every reason to be appreciative of
the good the dockers are doing (so far as it goes) in hungering for
themselves.

It would be strange indeed if one could not tolerate in dockers a little
thing like this. Babies do it. It is the first decency in all of us. It
is the first condition of our knowing enough, or amounting to enough, to
ever hunger for any one else. Everybody has to make a beginning
somewhere. Even a Saint Francis, the man who hungers and thirsts for
righteousness, who rises to the heights of social-mindedness, who
hungers and thirsts for everybody, begins all alone, at the breast.

Which is there of us who, if we had not begun our own hungering and
thirsting for righteousness, our tugging on God, in this old, lonely,
preoccupied, selfish-looking way, would ever have grown up, would ever
have wanted enough things to belong to a Church of England, for
instance, or to a Congregational Home Missionary Society?

It is true that the dockers are, for the moment (alas, fifty or sixty
years or so!), merely wanting things for themselves, or wanting things
for their own class. And so would we if we had been born, brought up,
and embedded in a society which allowed us so little for ourselves that
not growing up morally--keeping on over and over again, year after year,
just wanting things for ourselves, and not really being weaned yet--was
all that was left to us.

There is really considerable spiritual truth in having enough to eat.

Sometimes I have thought it would be not unhelpful, would make a little
ring of gentle-heartedness around us, some of us--those of us who live
protected lives and pray such rich, versatile prayers, if we would stop
and think what a docker would have to do, what arrangements a docker
would have to make before he could