the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any man who has
not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and alone before it and
cried to God, ever interpret the crowd or express the will of the crowd,
or hew out of earth and heaven what the crowd wants.

We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to
share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel--the great
crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those
who live and struggle with crowds.

We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main
emotions men are having to-day. And the main emotion men are having
to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the
nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other
important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from
this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the
thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged
to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret
anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd
principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central
place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and
bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish
and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of
his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

* * * * *

After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear.
Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow
the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the