Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, "The thing that hath been is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done and there is no new thing under the sun."

There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can be educated.

We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted.

We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted.

I speak for a thousand, thousand men.

In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men—for all of us. We are not cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can be born again.

Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and say that human nature will not change.

We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.

The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth—the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on him, on making him a Lincoln.