for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds.

As our whole labour problem to-day turns on our being able to touch the
imagination of Crowds, it may not be uninteresting in the next chapter
to consider what a man who can do this will probably be like and the
spirit in which he will do it.




CHAPTER V

THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE


When Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in New York the
other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still bigger event, as it
seems to some of us, was the way he felt about New York when he did it.
All New York could not make him show off. Hundreds of thousands of
people on roofs could look up at the sky over New York, for him to go
by, all that they liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying
anything, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious
business of the world.

Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in
the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are
reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and
wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads
everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and
funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap