We will live together or we will die together.
What do you really want? What do you really like? Who are you?
We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dreadnoughts, our stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what are they? And what do they amount to and what can they do, as compared with truth, the real news about what people want in this world, and about where we are going?
I say—they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory to tear down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth, with the news about us, that shall come out at last (God hasten the day!) from the open—the pried-open hearts of men! And I have seen that men shall go forth with shouts in that day and with glad and solemn silence, to build a world!
I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo.
I speak for five million men.
We have got this book written between us (under the name of one of us), because we want our own way. We are not improving people. We are not even trying to improve ourselves. Many of us started in on it once and the first improvement we thought of was not to try any more.
It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people want us to—most people get in the way. And when people get in the way we lay about us a little—We hit them. We have written this book, because we want to hit a great many people at once. We find them everywhere about us, in monster cities, huge thoughtless anthills of them, and they will not let us live a larger and a richer life. We say to them, We resent your houses your shoes, your voices, your fears, your motives, your wills, the diseases you make us walk past every day, the rows of things you seem to think will do, and that you think we must get used to, and we do not propose, if we can help it, to get used to what you think will do for Churches; nor to what you think will do for a government or to the little lonely, scattered, toyschool-houses, that when you come into the world, fresh and strange and happy you all proceed solemnly to coop your souls in. Nor do we want to get used to your hem-and-haw parliaments and your funny little perfumed prophets—your prophets lying down or propped up with pillows or your poets wringing their hands. Nor will we be put off with all your gracefully feeble, watery, lovely little pastel religions for this grim and mighty modern world. We are American men. We do not propose to be driven out to sea, to stand face to face every day with what is true and full of beauty and magic, or to have skies and mountains and stars palmed off on us as companions instead of men!
This is what five million men are trying to express in writing this book. If people deny that I have the right to give the news about America for five million men; if they say that this is not true about American human nature, that this is not the news, then I will say, I am the news! I am this sort of an American! God helping me, I say it! "Look at me!" I am this sort of man of whom I am writing! If I am not this sort of man this afternoon, I will be in the morning! Though I go down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking to the end of my days—I am this sort of man! I say, "Look at me!"