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Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Gerald Stanley Lee
page 26 of 630 (04%)
especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better
in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are
so largely allowed to run it.

In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be
reckoned with is Desire.

The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd,
dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong
passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones.

It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of
principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a
portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself.
What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of
the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the
nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful
place--all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the
vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires,
flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim,
silent wills of men. _"What do we want?" "Where are we going?"_

In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the
literature of Desire.

This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe
that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not
prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the
story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the
faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over
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