But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's ideal of the beautiful in conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical, hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the crowd, what the crowd wants.
I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street keeping step. It was a band that held them together. A band is a practical thing.
Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of music? What economics needs now is a march.
We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the worship in them, and make them want to do something. The hero is the man who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.
It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of human nature which we have called hero-worship.
CHAPTER II
THE CROWD AND THE HERO
But it is not only socially destructive. It is dumb and helpless for crowds to try to get on without heroes. Big events and big men are crowd expressions. Heroes, World Fairs, and Titanic disasters are crowd words, the crowd's way of seeing and saying things.
Crowds think in great men, or they think in simple, big, broadly drawn events, or words of one syllable, like coal strikes.