BOOK ONE

      CROWDS AND MACHINES


      CHAPTER II

      THE CROWD SCARE

      TIME was when a man was born upon this planet in a
      somewhat lonely fashion. A few human beings out of all in-
      finity stood by to care for him. He was brought up with hills
      and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man's estate.

      He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim
      of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth
      that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked
      forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul,
      "What shall I be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in
      it?" And the sky and the earth and the rivers and the seas
      and the nights and the days beckoned to him, and the voices
      of life rose around him, and they all said, "Come!"

      On a corner in New York, around a Street Department
      wagon, not so very long ago, five thousand men were fighting
      for shovels, fifty men to a shovel—a tool for living a little
      longer.

      The problem of living in this modern world is the problem
      of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally
      at work through modern life that the geography of the world
      has been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We
      get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds. Civiliza-
      tion is a list of cities. Cities are the huge central dynamos of
      all being. The power of a man can be measured to-day by
      the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that
      is, between him and what the city stands for—the centre
      of mass.

      The crowd principle is the first principle of production.
      The producer who can get the most men together and the [20]
      most dollars together controls the market; and when he once
      controls the market, instead of merely getting the most men
      and the most dollars, he can get all the men and all the dollars.
      Hence the corporation in production.

      The crowd principle is the first principle of distribution.

      The man who can get the most men to buy a particular thing
      from him can buy the most of it, and therefore buy it the cheap-
      est, and therefore get more men to buy from him; and having
      bought this particular thing cheaper than all men could buy
      it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then, having all
      the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is
      able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell
      them for a little more than nothing to everybody. Hence
      the department store—the syndicate of department stores—
      the crowd principle in commerce.

      The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps
      passing by it in twenty-four hours. The value of a railroad
      is the number of people near it who cannot keep still. If
      there are a great many of these people, the railroad runs its
      trains for them. If there are only a few, though they be heroes
      and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons,
      trains shall not be run for them. The railroad is the char-
      acteristic property and symbol of property in this modern
      age, and the entire value of a railroad depends upon its getting
      control of a crowd—either a crowd that wants to be where
      some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants a great many tons
      of something that some other crowd has.

      When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the
      same principle running through them both. The main thing
      in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of
      environment and heredity. A man's destiny is the way the
      crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul—if he
      has a soul—is an atom acted upon by a majority of other
      atoms.

      When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find [21]
      the same emphasis upon them all—the emphasis of mass, of
      majority. Not that the church exists for the masses—no
      one claims this—but that, such as it is, it is a mass church.
      While the promise of Scripture, as a last resort, is often heard
      in the church about two or three gathered together in God's
      name, the Church is run on the working conviction that unless
      the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred
      in God's name, He will not pay any particular attention to
      them, or, if He does, He will not pay the bills. The church of
      our forefathers, founded on personality, is exchanged for the
      church of democracy, founded on crowds; and the church
      of the moment is the institutional church, in which the stand-
      ing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the
      congregation. The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman,
      is seen on every hand amongst us—the agent of an audience,
      who, instead of telling an audience what they ought to do,
      runs errands for them morning and noon and night. With
      coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he carefully picks
      his way. He does his people as much good as they will let him,
      tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at last,
      and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered
      majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered
      by majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a
      new world without the help of majorities at all.

      Theology reveals the same tendency. The measuring by
      numbers is found in all belief, the same cringing before masses
      of little facts instead of conceiving the few immeasurable ones.
      Helpless individuals mastered by crowds are bound to believe
      in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He stands in the midst
      of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His worlds: to
      those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those
      who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens,
      who, in a kind of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would
      say), seems to want everybody to be good and hopes
      they will, but does not quite know what to do about it if they [22]
      are not.

      Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea
      of hell (in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which),
      and every civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civiliza-
      tion with sovereign men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd
      civilization, reflecting its mood on the heavens, is inclined to a
      pleasant, large-minded God, eternally considering everybody
      and considering everything, but inefficient withal, a kind of
      legislature of Deity, typical of representative institutions at
      their best and at their worst.

      If we pass from our theology to our social science we come
      to the most characteristic result of the crowd principle that
      the times afford. We are brought face to face with Socialism,
      the millennium machine, the Corliss engine of progress. It
      were idle to deny to the Socialist that he is right—and more
      right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that there is a great
      wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this
      point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly
      trying to create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet,
      that shall be large enough to swallow the wrong we have. The
      term "Socialism" stands for many things, in its present state;
      but so far as the average Socialist is concerned, he may be
      defined as an idealist who turns to materialism, that is, to
      mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered
      two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men
      by all other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the
      Socialist expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying
      the other.

      The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be pro-
      duced by setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals
      is Socialism, as the average Socialist practises it. The average
      Socialist is the type of the eager but effeminate reformer of all
      ages, because he seeks to gain by machinery things nine tenths
      of the value of which to men is in gaining them for themselves.

      Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences for heroes, [23]
      to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do
      away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless
      to do right because it would be impossible to do wrong. It is
      a philosophy of helplessness, which, even if it succeeds in
      helplessly carrying its helplessness out—in doing away with
      suffering, for instance—can only do it by bringing to pass a
      man not alive enough to be capable of suffering, and putting
      him in a world where suffering and joy alike would be a bore
      to him.

      But the main importance of Socialism in this connection
      lies in the fact that it does not confine itself to sociology.
      It has become a complete philosophy of life, and can be seen
      penetrating with its subtle satire on human nature almost
      everything about us. We have the cash register to educate
      our clerks into pure and honest character, and the souls of
      conductors can be seen being nurtured, mile after mile, by fare-
      recorders. Corporations buy consciences by the gross. They
      are hung over the door of every street car. Consciences are
      worked by pulling a strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to
      help customers to tell the truth, and the Australian ballot is
      invented to help men to be manly enough to vote the way
      they think. And when, in the course of human events, we
      came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman's
      right to dress in good taste—that is, appropriately for what
      she is doing, what did we proceed to do to bring it about?
      Conventions were held year after year, and over and over,
      to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress reform associa-
      tions were founded, syndicates of courage were established
      all over the land—all in vain; and finally,—Heaven help us!
      —how was this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished?

      By an invention of two wheels, one in front of the other. It
      was brought about by the Pope Manufacturing Company of
      Hartford, Connecticut in two short years.

      Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies.
      It is the socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, [24]
      there is some machine that can surely be invented that will
      take the place of men: not only of hands and feet, but of all
      the old-fashioned and lumbering virtues, courage, patience,
      vision, common sense, and religion itself, out of which they
      are made.

      But we depend upon machinery not only for the things
      that we want, but for the brains with which we decide what
      we want. If a man wants to know what he thinks, he starts
      a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he calls a convention.
      From the National Undertakers' Association and the Laun-
      derers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and
      the World's Congress—the Midway Pleasance of Piety—
      the Convention strides the world with vociferousness. The
      silence that descends from the hills is filled with its ceaseless
      din. The smallest hamlet in the land has learned to listen
      reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It, as the Voice
      of the Spirit of the Times.

      Every idea we have is run into a constitution. We cannot
      think without a chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our
      fads have by-laws. Literature is a club. Philosophy is a
      society. Our reforms are mass meetings. Our culture is a
      summer school. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without
      Carnegie Hall and forty vice-presidents. We remember our
      poets with trustees, and the immortality of a genius is watched
      by a standing committee. Charity is an Association. The-
      ology is a set of resolutions. Religion is an endeavour to be
      numerous and communicative. We awe the impenitent with
      crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost
      with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so
      great a work without being on a committee is beyond our ken.

      What Socrates and Solomon would have come to if they had
      only had the advantage of conventions it would be hard to
      say; but in these days, when the excursion train is applied to
      wisdom; when, having little enough, we try to make it more by
      pulling it about; when secretaries urge us, treasurers dun us, [25]
      programs unfold out of every mail—where is the man who,
      guileless-eyed, can look in his brother's face; can declare
      upon his honour that he has never been a delegate, never
      belonged to anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed
      on, in his life?

      Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns. Nothing
      stays adjourned. We have reports that think for us, com-
      mittees that do right for us, and platforms that spread their
      wooden lengths over all the things we love, until there is
      hardly an inch of the dear old earth to stand on, where, fresh
      and sweet and from day to day, we can live our lives ourselves,
      pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God, garner our
      grain, and die. Every new and fresh human being that comes
      upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into
      a machine as soon as we get at him. We have already come to
      the point where we do not expect to interest anybody in any-
      thing without a constitution. And the Eugenic Society is busy
      now on by-laws for falling in love.

      What this means with regard to the typical modern man
      is, not that he does not think, but that It takes ten thousand
      men to make him think. He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed.

      Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to
      another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude,
      applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have
      been warmed. enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and
      thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the
      world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be stirred to some-
      it thing. To the bigotry of the man who knows because he speaks
      for himself has been added a new bigotry on the earth—the
      bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who, with a
      more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a
      mass meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a
      crowd can give, backs his opinions with forty states, and walks
      the streets of his native town in the uniform of all humanity.

      This is a kind of fool that has never been possible until these [26]
      latter days. Only a very great many people, all of them
      working on him at once, and all of them watching every one
      else working at once, can produce this kind.

      Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has
      so mastered the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle
      reader, have found ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps,
      in a certain sheepish feeling at being caught in a small audience.
      Being caught in a small audience at a lecture is no insignificant
      experience. You will see people looking furtively about, count-
      ing one another. You will make comparisons. You will recall
      the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you had
      the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing
      confidently to itself before the lecture began. The hush of
      disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the
      mutual shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through
      the room, every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired
      to warm through—all these are signs of the times. People
      look at the empty chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair
      there were some great personality saying to each and all of us:
      "Why are you here? Did you not make a mistake? Are you
      not ashamed to be a party to—to—as small a crowd as this?"

      Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty Chairs
      —we who are to be lectured to—until the poor lecturer who
      is to lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs
      begins.

      When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same
      self-satisfied, inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We
      see little but the massing of machinery, the crowding together
      of numbers of teachers and numbers of courses and numbers
      of students, and the practical total submergence of personality,
      except by accident, in all educated life.

      The infinite value of the individual, the innumerable con-
      sequences of one single great teaching man, penetrating every
      pupil who knows him, becoming a part of the universe, a part
      of the fibre of thought and existence to every pupil who knows [27]
      him—this is a thing that belongs to the past and to the
      inevitable future. With all our great institutions, the crowds
      of men who teach in them, the crowds of men who learn in
      them, we are still unable to produce out of all the men they
      graduate enough college presidents to go around. The fact
      that at almost any given time there may be seen, in this Ameri-
      can land of ours, half a score of colleges standing and waiting,
      wondering if they will ever find a president again, is the climax
      of what the universities have failed to do. The university
      will be justified only when a man with a university in him, a
      whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it,
      and the soul that has room for more than one chair in it comes
      out of it to teach in it.

      When we turn from education to journalism, the pressure
      of the crowd is still more in evidence. To have the largest
      circulation is to have the most advertising, and to have the
      most advertising means to have the most money, and to have
      the most money means to be able to buy the most ability,
      and to have the most ability means to keep all that one gains
      and get more. The degradation of many of our great journals
      in the last twenty years is but the inevitable carrying out of
      the syndicate method in letters—a mass of contributors,
      a mass of subscribers, and a mass of advertisers. So long as it
      gives itself over to the circulation idea, the worse a newspaper
      is, the more logical it is. There may be a certain point where
      it is bound to stop some time, because there will not be enough
      bad people who are bad enough to go around; but we have not
      come to it yet, and in the meantime about everything that can
      be thought of is being printed to make bad people. If it be
      asserted that there are not enough bad people to go around
      even now, it may be added that there are plenty of good people
      to take their places as fast as they fail to be bad enough, and
      that the good people who take the bad papers to find fault
      with them are the ones who make such papers possible.

      The result of the crowd principle is the inevitable result. [28]
      Our journals have fallen off as a matter of course, not only in
      moral ideals (which everybody realizes), but in brain force,
      power of expression, imagination, and foresight—the things
      that give distinction and results to utterance and that make a
      journal worth while. The editorial page has been practically
      abandoned by most journals, because most journals have been
      abandoned by their editors: they have become printed count-
      ing-rooms. With all their greatness, their crowds of writers,
      and masses of readers, and piles of cablegrams, they are not
      able to produce the kind of man who is able to say a thing
      the kind of way that will make everybody stop and listen to
      him, cablegrams and all. Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles
      and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the
      march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every
      day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass
      machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week
      and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither
      and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best
      guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative,
      triumphant, masterful, imperious Personality—is it not at an
      end? It were a dazzling sight, perhaps, to gaze at night upon a
      huge building, thinking with telegraph under the wide sky
      around the world, the hurrying of its hundred pens upon
      the desks, and the trembling of its floors with the mighty
      coming of a Day out of the grip of the press; but even this
      huge bewildering pile of power, this aggregation, this corpora-
      tion of forces, machines of souls, glittering down the Night—
      does anyone suppose It stands by Itself, that It is its own
      master, that It can do its own will in the world? In all its
      splendour It stands, weaving the thoughts of the world in the
      dark; but that very night, that very moment, It lies in the
      power of a little ticking-thing behind its doors. It belongs
      to that legislature of information and telegraph, that owner of
      what happens in a day, called the Associated Press.

      If the One who called Himself a man and a God had not [29]
      been born in a crowd, if He had not loved and grappled with
      it, and been crucified and worshipped by it, He might have
      been a Redeemer for the silent, stately, ancient world that was
      before He came, but He would have failed to be a Redeemer
      for this modern world—a world where the main inspiration
      and the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great
      problem and every great hope is one that deals with crowds.

      It is a world where, from the first day a man looks forth to
      move, he finds his feet and hands held by crowds. The sun
      rises over crowds for him, and sets over crowds; and having
      presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last, in a
      crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God. Ten
      human lives deep they have them—the graves in Paris; and
      whether men live their lives piled upon other men's lives, in
      blocks in cities or in the apparent loneliness of town or country
      what they shall do or shall not do, or shall have or shall not
      have—is it not determined by crowds, by the movement of
      crowds? The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as he
      rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat;
      but the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the
      voice of the crowd to him, thousands of miles away, shouting
      in the Stock Exchange: "You shall not sell your wheat! Let
      it lie! Let it rot in your barns!"

      And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a sur-
      veyor's chain, there would seem to be plenty of room for all
      who are born upon it. The fact that there are enough square
      miles of the planet for every human being on it to have several
      square miles to himself does not prove that a man can avoid
      the crowd—that it is not a crowded world. If what a man
      could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed
      be a gentle and graceful earth to live on. But an acre of
      Nowhere satisfies no one; and how many square miles does a
      man want to be a nobody in? He can do it better in a crowd,
      where every one else is doing it.

      In the ancient World, when a human being found something [30]
      in the wrong place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he
      found himself face to face with a few men. He found he had
      to deal with these few men. To-day, if he wants anything put
      where it belongs, he finds himself face to face with a crowd.

      He finds that he has to deal with a crowd. The world has
      telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a
      man proposes to do a certain thing in it, the telephones tell
      the few, and the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd
      gets on to the railroad; and before he rises from his sleep,
      behold the crowd in his front yard; and if he can get as far as
      his own front gate in the thing he is going for, he must be—
      either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius? None of
      these. Let him be a corporation—of ideas or of dollars; let
      him be some complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do any-
      thing for himself, or for anybody else, or for everybody else,
      in a world too crowded to tell the truth without breaking
      something, or to find room for it, when it is told, without
      breaking something.

      This is the Crowd's World.

      . . . . . . .

      What I have written I have written.

      I have been sitting and reading it. It is a mood. But
      there is an. implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be
      gotten out and used.

      As I have been reading I have looked up. I see the quiet
      little mountain through my window standing out there in
      the sun. It looks around the world as if nothing had happened;
      and the bobolinks out in the great meadow are all flying and
      singing in the same breath and rowing through the air, thou-
      sands of them, miles of them. They do not stop a minute.

      A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside
      on the piazza, four years old, going by my window back and
      forth, listening to the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the
      music of the spheres. Why should not I do as well? I thought. [31]

      The Child is merely seeing her shoes as they are with as many
      senses and as many thoughts and desires at once as she can
      muster, and with all her might.

      What if I were to see the world like the Child?

      Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small
      city boys, with their splendid shining rubber boots and their
      beautiful bamboo poles. They were on their way home. They
      had only the one trout between them, and that had been
      fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about until
      it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys—looked as if it
      had been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it rev-
      erently back, when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled
      a little as I walked on and thought how they felt about it.

      Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I
      turned and looked back; saw those three boys—a little retinue
      to that solitary fish—trudging down the road in the yellow
      sun. And I stood there and wanted to be in it! Then I saw
      them going round the bend in the road thirty years away.

      I still want to be one of those boys.

      And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I
      will yet grow up to them!

      I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish—
      the way they folded it around with something, the way they
      made the most of it, is the way to feel about the world.

      I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as
      regards technical and comparatively unimportant details or as
      regards perspective on the fish the boys may not have been
      right. It is possible that they had not taken a point of view,
      measured in inches or volts or foot-pounds, that was right
      and could last forever; but I know that the spirit of their
      point of view was right—the spirit that hovered around the
      three boys and around the fish that day was right and could
      last forever.

      It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit
      in which new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by [32]
      Boys and Girls and—God, are being made.

      It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about
      worlds. And it is only boys and girls who are right.

      I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the
      rain singing, " I believe! I believe!"

      . . . . . . .

      At the same time, I am glad that I have known and faced,
      and that I shall have to know and face, the Crowd Fear.

      I know in some dogged, submerged, and speechless way
      that it is not a true fear. And yet I want to move along the
      sheer edge of it all my life. I want it. I want all men to have
      it, and to keep having it, and to keep conquering it. I have
      seen that no man who has not felt it, who does not know this
      huge numbing, numberless fear before the crowd, and who may
      not know it again almost any moment, will ever be able to
      lead the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any
      man who has not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and
      alone before it and cried to God, ever interpret the crowd or
      express the will of the crowd, or hew out of earth and heaven
      what the crowd wants.

      We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization,
      we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in
      crowds feel—the great crowd sensations, excitements, the
      inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle
      with crowds.

      We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main
      facts, the main emotions men are having to-day. And the
      main emotion men are having to-day about our modern world
      is that it is a crowded world, that in the nature of the case
      its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other important
      thing for this present age to know must be worked out from
      this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to
      deal, the thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts
      will be obliged to express. Any man who makes the attempt [33]
      to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without
      a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working
      to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that
      goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment
      of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and
      superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing
      out of his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

      . . . . . . .

      After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine
      fear. Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds.
      As the crowds grow the machines grow; grasping at the little
      strip of sky over us, at the little patch of ground beneath our
      feet, they swing out before us and beckon daily to us new hells
      and new heavens in our eyes.