Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

AND THE MACHINE STARTS

One of the things that makes one thoughtful in going about from city to city and dropping into the churches is the way the people do not sing in them and will not pray in them. In every new strange city where one stops on a Sunday morning, one looks hopefully—while one hears the chimes of bells—at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right, faintly sing-song congregations.

One wonders about the churches.

What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel like singing?

The one thing that the churches are for is news—news that would be suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing and pray after one had heard it.

There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news.

Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the latest and biggest news in them.

News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they have dared to get from God.

It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them, instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of, is being at last revealed to people—where news is being created.

Perhaps it would not be precisely true—what I have said, about Christ's not saying anything. He probably would. But he would not say these same merely rudimentary things. He would go on to the truths and applications we have never heard or guessed. The rest of his time he would put in in proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years ago, could be done now. And He would do what He could toward having them dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally automatic and of-course machinery of the world.

The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion, somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals.

All good manners are good in proportion as they become automatic. In saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more creative and newer levels. We are asserting that the literal belief in honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery. People ought to be honest automatically and by assumption, by dismissing it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted.

This is what is going to happen.

Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars, each copy.

With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about six hundred dollars.

The second costs—twenty-nine cents.

Let the plates be cast. Everything follows. The fire in the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies.

Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets around a world.

Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.

They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for making everybody know that they knew it—the moral and spiritual machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been set up.

Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead bodies or three dead bodies—but the principle holds good—let the moral plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to more original things.

The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in seeing how to make goodness in a city work.

Let the plates be once cast—say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa, and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national automatically.

Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission government in three years.

The failure for the time being apparently of the more noble and aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it.

We will butt our way through to the man who sees where to butt and how to butt. Then all together!

Very few of the wrongs that are done to society by individuals would be done if civilization were supplied with the slightest adequate machinery or conveniences for bringing home to people vividly who the people are they are wronging, how they are wronging them, and how the people feel about it. This machinery for moral and social insight, this intelligence-engine or apparatus of sympathy for a planet to-day, before our eyes is being invented and set up.

Sometimes I almost think that history as a study or particularly as a habit of mind ought to be partitioned off and not allowed to people in general to-day. Only men of genius have imagination enough for handling history so that it is not a nuisance, a provincialism and an impertinence in the serene presence to-day of what is happening before our eyes. History makes common people stop thinking or makes them think wrong, about nine tenths of the area of human nature, particularly about the next important things that are going to happen to it.

Our modern life is not an historian's problem. It is an inventor's problem. The historian can stand by and can be consulted. But things that seem to an historian quite reasonably impossible in human nature are true and we must all of us act every day as if they were true. We but change the temperature of human nature and in one moment new levels and possibilities open up on every side.

The theory of raised temperatures alone, in human nature, will make possible to us ranges of goodness, of social passion and vision, that only a few men have been capable of before.

All the new inventions have new sins, even new manners that go with them, new virtues and new faculties. The telephone, the motor-car, the wireless telegraph, the airship and the motor-boat all make men act with different insights, longer distances, and higher speeds.

Men who, like our modern men, have a going consciousness, see things deeper by going faster.

They see how more clearly by going faster.

They see farther by going faster.

If a man is driving a motor-car three miles an hour all he needs to attend to with his imagination is a few feet of the road ahead.

If he is driving his car thirty miles an hour and trying to get on by anticipating his road a few feet ahead, he dies.

The faster a man goes—if he has the brains for it—the more people and the more things in the way, his mind covers in a minute—the more magnificently he sees how.

On a railway train any ordinary man any day in the year (if he goes fast enough) can see through a board fence. It may be made of vertical slats five inches across and half an inch apart. He sees through the slits between the slats the whole country for miles. If he goes fast enough a man can see through a solid freight train.

All our modern industrial social problems are problems of gearing people up. Ordinary men are living on trains now—on moral trains.

The increased vibration in human nature and in the human brain and heart that go with the motor-car habit, the increased speed of the human motor, the gearing up of the central power house in society everywhere is going to make men capable of unheard-of social technique. The social consciousness is becoming the common man's daily habit. Laws of social technique and laws of human nature which were theories once are habits now.

There is a certain sense in which it may be said that the modern man enjoys daily his moral imagination. He is angered and delighted with his social consciousness. He boils with rage or sings when he hears of all the new machines of good and machines of evil that people are setting up in our modern world.

There is a sense in which he glories in the Golden Rule. The moral-machinist's joy is in him. He is not content to watch it go round and round like some smooth-running Corliss engine which is not connected up yet—that nobody really uses except as a kind of model under glass or a miniature for theological schools. He cannot bear the Golden Rule under glass. He wants to see it going round and round, look up at it, immense, silent, masterful, running a world. He delights in the Golden Rule as a part of his love of nature. It is as the falling of apples to him. He delights in it as he delights in frost and fire and in the glorious, modest, implacable, hushed way they work!

We are in an age in which a Golden Rule can sing. The men around us are in a new temper. They have the passion, almost, the religion of precision that goes with machines.

While I have been sitting at my desk and writing these last words, the two half-past-eight trains, at full speed, have met in the meadow.

Then they softly crash together and pass on—two or three quiet whiffs at each other—as if nothing had happened.

I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty strips or ribbons of iron—a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a wheel—I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through Infinity—it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of stern singing.

I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him and death but a few telegraph ticks—the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a whistle, the way Calvin believed in God.

LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL

TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI

WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES

CHAPTER I

MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP

As I was wandering through space the other day—just aeroplaning past on my way over from Mars—I came suddenly upon a neat, snug little property, with a huge sign stuck in the middle of it:

THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan & Co.

I was just about to pass it by, inferring naturally that it must be a mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it occurred to me it might do no harm to stop over on it, and see. I thought I might at least drop in and inquire what kind of a firm it was that was handling it, and what was their idea, and what, if anything, they thought their little planet was for, and what they proposed to do with it.

I found, on meeting Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan, to my astonishment, that they did not propose to do anything with it at all. They had merely got it; that was as far as they had thought the thing out apparently—to get it. They seemed to be depending, so far as I could judge, in a vague, pained way, on somebody's happening along who would think perhaps of something that could be done with it.

When I asked him if there was anything else he had been able to think of to do for the world—

"No," he said, "nothing really; nothing except chucking down libraries on it—safes for old books."

"And Mr. Morgan?" I said.

"Oh! He is chucking down old china on it, old pictures, and things."

"And Mr. Rockefeller?"

"Mussing with colleges, some," he said, "just now. But he doesn't, as a matter of fact, see anything—not of his own—that can really be done with them, except to make them more systematized and businesslike, make them over into sort of Standard Oil Spiritual Refineries, fill them with millions more of little Rockefellers—and they won't let him do that. Of course, as you might see, what they want to do practically is to take the Rockefeller money and leave the Rockefeller out. Nobody will really let him do anything. Everything goes this way when we seriously try to do things. The fact is, it is a pretty small, helpless business, owning a world," sighed Mr. Carnegie.

"This is why we are selling out, if anybody happens along. Anybody, that is, who really sees what this piece of property is for and how to develop it, can have it," said Mr. Carnegie, "and have it cheap."

MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ

I found, as I was studying the general view of New York as seen from the top through Mr. Carnegie's glass, that there appeared to be a great many dots—long rows of dots for the most part—possibly very high buildings, but there was one building, wide and white and low, and more spread-out and important-looking than any of the others, which especially attracted my attention. It looked as if it might be a kind of monument or mausoleum to somebody. On looking again I found that it was filled with books, and was the Carnegie Public Library. There were forty more Libraries for New York Mr. Carnegie was having put up, I was told, and he had dotted them—thousands of them almost everywhere one could look, apparently, on his own particular part of the planet.

I found among his books some beautiful and quite refined interpretations of tigers and serpents, a really noble interpretation or conception of what the beasts were for all the glorious gentlemanly beasts—and of what machines were for—all the young, fresh, mighty, worshipful engines—and what soldiers were for. But when I looked at what he thought men were for, at what the planet was for, there was practically almost nothing. The nearest I came to it was a remark, apparently in a magazine interview which I cannot quote correctly now, but which amounted to something like this: "We will never have a great world until we have some one great artist or poet in it, who sees it as a whole, focuses it, composes it, makes a picture of it, and gives the men who are in it a vision to live for."

MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE

Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in Stockholm, invented and published a book four years ago, called the "New Word," which was so idealistic and distinguished a book, and so full of new ideas and of new combinations of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in England who did not instinctively recognize it, who did not see that it would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange and original and too important a book for him to publish, and after a long delay the book was finally printed in Geneva.

A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees.

But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a comparatively obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had written a book to build a world with, or at least a great preliminary design, or sketch, toward a world. The Nobel Prize Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations until their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when they saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five dollars a word, they came over quietly to where he was and put softly down on him forty thousand dollars more.

I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling himself would rather have had Allen Upward have it.

I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely trying to think things out and understand. But it certainly is a question that cannot but keep recurring to one's mind—the unfortunate, and perhaps rather unlooked-for, way in which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been wondering what there is that might be done, the world being the kind of world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees to so administer the Will that its practical weight on the side of Idealism, and especially upon the crisis of idealism in young authors, would be where Mr. Nobel meant to have it.

But in a way, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the problem of the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the problem of all of us. We are interested as well as they in trying to find out how to recognize and reward men of genius. What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel Prize Trustees? Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to achieve for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an idealistic tendency?

I would like to put forward at this point two inquiries. First, why did the Trustees not award the prize to Allen Upward? And second, what would have happened if they had?

First, the Trustees could not be sure that Mr. Upward in his work of genius was telling the truth.

Second, they could not be sure that the world would approve of his having forty thousand dollars for telling the truth. Perhaps the world would have rather had him paid forty thousand dollars for not telling it.

Third, Mr. Kipling was safe. No creative work had to be done on Kipling; all they had to do was to send him the cheque. Great crowds had swept in from all over the world, and nominated Mr. Kipling; the Committee merely had to confirm the nomination.

Fourth, Mr. Upward, like all idealists, like all men who have the power of throwing this world into the melting-pot and bringing it out new again partly unrecognizable (which, of course, is the regular historical, almost conventional, thing for an idealist to do with a world), bewildered the Nobel Prize Committee. They could not be sure but that Mr. Upward's next book would be thought in the wrong, and make their having given him forty thousand dollars to write it ridiculous.

What would have happened if the Trustees had given the prize to Mr. Upward?

Only now and then would a man go over and take down his old Kiplings from the shelf and read them, because he had heard that Mr. Kipling had forty thousand dollars more than he had had before.

Secondly, Mr. Upward's new book would have the stimulus of his knowing while he was writing it that every word would be read by everybody. All the draught on the fire of his genius of the whole listening world would result in a work that even Mr. Upward himself perhaps would hardly believe he had written. As events turned out, and Mr. Upward did not get the prize there might be many reasons to believe that his next book might be out of focus, might be a mere petulant, scolding book, his exultation spent or dwindled, because his last tremendous wager—that the world wanted the truth—was lost.

Scolding in a book means, as a rule, either juvenility or it means relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul—the focussing and fusing power in a man. I have sometimes wondered if even Christ, if He had not died in His thirty-third year, made His great dare for the world on the cross early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently in other people at about forty or forty-five or so, and would not have spent the rest of His days in railing at them, and in being very bitter and helpless and eloquent about Rome and Jerusalem. I have caught myself once or twice being glad Abraham Lincoln died suddenly just when he did, his great faith and love all warm in him, and his great oath for the world—that it was good—still fresh upon his lips!

I do not say that this is true, or that it would be true of Allen Upward.

But I have read his book. I should think it might be true.

I wondered if they could have thought of this when they voted on Allen Upward's book that day three years ago—those twenty grave, quiet gentlemen in frockcoats in Stockholm!

I have picked out Mr. Upward's book because it is the most difficult, the most hazardous, and the least fortunate one I know, to make my point with; and because a great many people will get the reaction of disagreeing with me, and feeling about it probably, the way the Nobel Prizes Trustees did. I have wanted to take a book which has the traits in it for which men of genius are persecuted or crucified or ignored—our more modern timid or anonymous form of the cross. If Mr. Upward had been given the Prize by the Nobel Prize Trustees, it will have to be admitted a howl would have gone up round the world that would not have quieted down yet; and it is this howl that Mr. Nobel intended his Prize for, and that he thought a man would need about forty thousand dollars to meet.

This is the precise feeling, it seems to me, that the Nobel Prize was intended to champion and to stand by and temporarily defend in a new author—the feeling he gives us of being in the presence of unseen forces, of incalculableness. It was this way Allen Upward has of taking his reader apart or up into a high place (like the Devil), and dizzying him, taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind. He wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on providing for the world one more book which would give the ordinary man the personal feeling of being with a genius, cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill wind of All Space Outside blowing through—a book which is a sort of God's Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their ordinary plain senses round them move about dazed a little and as trees walking—a great, gaunt, naked book.

I may not be right in anticipating the eventual opinion of Allen Upward's book; but even if I am wrong, it will have helped perhaps to call attention to the essential failure of the Nobel Prize Trustees to side with the darers and experimenters in literature, to take a serious part in those great creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men in which new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us. For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible, the Nobel Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. Nobel intended, but certainly in Literature it will have to be classed as one more of our humdrum regular millionaire arrangements for patting successful people expensively on the back. It acts twenty years too late, falls into line with our usual worldly ornamental D.D., LL.D. habit, and has become, so far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, doddering Old Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm. It adds itself as one more futile effort of men of wealth—or world owners to be creative and lively with money, very much on the premises with money, after they are dead.

PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS

I have sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post the following sign up on his Libraries, on the outside where people are passing, and on the inside in the room where people sit and think:

A MILLION DOLLARS REWARD.

WANTED, A GREAT LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOR FOR MY LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES. AT PRESENT OUR GREAT AUTHOR IN AMERICA APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN LOST OR MISLAID; ANY ONE FINDING HIM, OR ANY ONE THAT MIGHT DO FOR HIM TEMPORARILY, PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME.

ANDREW CARNEGIE.

Mr. Carnegie's Libraries must be a source of constant regret to the author of "Triumphant Democracy." They are generally made up of books written in the Old World. It would be interesting to know what are the real reasons great Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in America, and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can do about it. They are certainly going to be written in America some time, and certainly, unless the best and greatest part of the Carnegie Library of the future is to be the American part of it, the best our Carnegie Libraries will do for America will be to remind us of what we are not. Unless we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie's Libraries loom in the world as big as Mr. Carnegie's chimneys, America—which is the last newest experiment station of the world—is a failure.

If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this temperament in others—men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them—and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them—he would soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men, of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing. Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be—well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings, would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that boy!

This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them—with all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting about for himself? He could only be hunted out by people all wrought through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy—by some special kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about thickly, among the books in his libraries—those huge anatomies and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great literary steel-works—men would soon begin to be discovered, to be created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now....

It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work can be done. It must be delicate and wonderful workmanship, like the magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope—sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon the earth: but it would pay.

The same people too, specialists in detecting and developing inventors, could be supplied also to all other possible callings. They would constitute a universal profession, penetrating all the others. They would go hunting among foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts. They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors. They would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets.

Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his libraries. If Society were fitted up all through with electric connections, men with a genius for discovering continents in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses; and if there were established everywhere a current between every boy and the great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie could make a great beginning with the little mite of his fortune. If we were to have even one city fitted up in this way, it would be hard to say how much it would mean—one city with enough people in it who were free to do beautiful things, free to be curious about the others, free to follow clues of greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still, faint little springs and beginnings of things. It would soon be a memorable city. A world would watch it, and other cities would grope toward it. Instead of this we have these big, hollow, unmanned libraries of Mr. Carnegie's everywhere, with no people practically to go with them, no great hive of happy living men and women in and out all day cross-fertilizing boys and books.

THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE

Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along the middle of his life. The change seemed to be associated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his money. He reminded one of the patent-medicine advertisements, "Before and After Taking."

I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire reminds people—as Mr. Zangwill says he does—of a patent-medicine advertisement, "Before and After Taking."

I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together a small collection of pictures of millionaires—two pictures of each, one before and the other after taking—and having them mounted in the most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought—he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist—really thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they looked.

But would they?

One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is that the people—the ordinary people one meets in the streets—are beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men, indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves; and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary people who pass in the streets would be deceived by these simple little pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of pictures of millionaires—two pictures of each, one Before and the other After Taking—to a millionaire—of course some really reformed or cured one—and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the Times, and of the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily Chronicle, and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be right in his estimate of our common people to-day.

Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich.

We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us—these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the girders of the world—the faith of men in men, and the credit of God, which alone can hold a world together.

It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places. And it is not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things. He quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost never changes himself. He is not one man when he is putting money into his pocket and another when he is taking it out.

We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost never does.

The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it. If enough millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires coöperating with the public and with artists of all classes, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has been since, to start all over again on a new basis. The blunders in creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to be made first. They nearly always have to be made first. There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they think. If our people were generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire's life "before and after," and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the new men that would begin to function in them.

Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied that millionaires and artists get together in time; but the particular point that seems to be interesting to consider is how the millionaires and artists can be got together before the artists are dead, and before the millionaires stop growing and stop being creative and understanding creative men.

It might be well to consider the present situation in the concrete—the theatre, for instance—and see how the situation lies, and where one would have to begin, and how one would have to go to work to change it.

The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic.

If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way the best things that are offered can succeed with them is by having these best things held before them long and steadily enough for them slowly to compare them with other things, and see that they are better than the other things, and that they are what they want.

Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what they want. If things are tried long enough with them they do. When they have been tried long enough with them they support them themselves.

The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with sufficient capital.

The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be obtained is by having millionaires who appreciate fine things, and believe in them, and believe the public in time will believe in them.

The only way in which a millionaire can be an artist is to work every day in the spirit in which the artist works.

This means the artist in business.

(1) The artist in business is the man who makes things people already want enough to make money, and who makes things he is going to make people want enough to make new values and to be of some use.

(2) The artist in business is the employer who makes new things and men together. He lets the men who make new things with him become new men; and when the things are made, they go forth in their turn and make new men and make new publics. New publics have had to be made for everything: for the first umbrellas, for the first telephones, the first typewriters. New publics have had to be made for Wagner, for Sunlight Soap, for Bernard Shaw; and it is the men who make new publics—be it for big or little things—who are artists. They are in spirit, prophets, kings, and world-builders.

(3) Incidentally, the artist in business—the employer who creates new values and is creative himself—will like creative men in his factory, and will treat them so that they will put their creativeness into his business; he not only will be an artist himself, but he will have, comparatively speaking, a factory full of artists working with him. And when the factories pour out the men at night, and the smoke and the murmur cease, and the windows are dark, they will go to creative and live men's plays.

So it has come to pass that the modern business man of the artist sort holds the arts of modern times in the hollow of his hand. He is a past-master of creating new publics.