them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance.




CHAPTER II

THE CROWD SCARE


Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely
fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for
him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until
he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and
there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and
earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked
forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, "What shall I
be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?" And the sky and
the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days
beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all
said, "Come!"

On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very
long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a
shovel--a tool for living a little longer.

The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding
room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern
life that the geography of the world has been changed to conform to it.
We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.