The result of the crowd principle is the inevitable result. 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 counting-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 corporation of forces, machines of souls, glittering down the Night—does any one 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 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 surveyor'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 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 anything 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, thousands 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. 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.