Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

IRON MACHINES

CHAPTER I

STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS

I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others, into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat I saw—there must have been thousands of them—crowds of camels running.

And crowds of elephants went swinging past.

I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand years and looking off at a world.

It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and watch civilizations swinging past.

I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives—those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on Space, and on Time while we slept?

My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts—the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants—all being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, "Why don't their elephants turn around on them and chase them?"

I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.

Our elephants chase us—most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing them—chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around people—who pay them for it—in any city of our modern world.

There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any civilization that would be called great.

First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second: And if—as in our Western civilization—the men have made their own elephants, why should they be chased by them?

There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best—the music that machines like.

Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of brass horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins. He made violins sing him.

Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization.

Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever been dreamed in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by its elephants. The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds to-day turns on our producing Machine-Trainers.

Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired, men possessed by churches or religion-machines cannot be prophets, men possessed by school-machines cannot be educators.

The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive.

A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the locomotive, and stop running along out of breath beside it, and climb up into the cab.

This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization—climbing up into the cab.

First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines. Then the other poets.

In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and dells and love and above, the better.

Poetry must make a few iron-handed, gentle-hearted, mighty men next. It is because we demand and expect the beautiful that we say that poetry must make men next.

The elephants have been running around in the garden long enough.

BELLS AND WHEELS

We are living in a day of the great rebellion of the machines. Out of a thousand thousand roundhouses and factories, vast cities and nations of machines on the land and on the sea have risen before the soul of man and said, "We have served you; now, you serve us."

A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, "We have served you, now, you serve us!"

It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.

But why should we serve them?

I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.

And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be serious.

And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky, beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself, tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of gentlemanly disappointment.

And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.

At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford gentleman.

A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him.

The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit.

I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is. I go alone, and sadly if I must, and for a little time—without the deep bells and without the stained-glass windows, without all that dear, familiar beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles—I take my stand beside the Great Western Railway! I claim the Great Western Railway for the spirit of man and for the will of God!

I declare that that same glory I have known before, and that I will always know, and will never give up, in the old quiet quadrangles of Oxford and in the deep bells and in the still waters, as in some strange, new, and mighty Child, is in the Great Western Railway too.

When I am in the train it sings. Strangely and hoarsely It sings! I lie down to rest. It whistles on ahead my ideals down the slope of the world. It roars softly, while I sleep, my religion in my ears.

DEW AND ENGINES

When I was small, and wanted suddenly to play tag or duck-on-the-rock I had a little square half-mile of boys near by to play with.

My daughter plays tag or plays dolls, any minute she likes, with a whole city. She is not surprised at the telephone; she takes it for granted like sunshine and milk. It is a part of the gray matter in her brain—a whole city, six or seven square miles of it. A little mouthpiece on a desk, a number, and two hundred little girls are hers in a minute, to play dolls with. She thinks in miles when she plays, where I thought in door-yards. The whole city is a part of the daily, hourly furniture of her mind. The little gray molecules in the structure of her brain are different from those in mine.

I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and free than he has had before.

And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that it has nothing to do with art. They can but watch the machines, the earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations and rolling under the souls of men.

I cannot see it so. I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and green fields to the stones of London. I see the desires of the earth hastening. The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of cities on the seas and on the sky. With the machines I have taken a whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands. I gesture with the earth. I hand up oceans to my God.

DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!

There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot make for beauty, because machines are dead.

I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.

I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of Man like nails, like vast antennæ—a kind of enormous, more unconscious sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea a live thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it. I have known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month by month are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought.

Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him, and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul, the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast, cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and re-moulding the world. He is making these things intimate, sensitive, and colossal expressions of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal, semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred, and as full of light or of darkness.

So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again, on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for knowledge—like a great Fish—along the bottom of the sea. We beat up our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our hearts all still and happy, in the face of God!

AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON

The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal, spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own souls—the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as matter belonging to matter—matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the Lord?

And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or afraid of becoming like it?

Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent, godlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows, starlight, they say what we make them say. They are alive with the life that is in us.

The first element of power in a man, in getting control of his life in our modern era, is to have spirit enough to know what matter is like.

The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like. He is the man who conceives of iron-and-wood machines, in his daily habit of thought, as alive. He has discovered ways in which he can produce an impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will. He goes about making iron-and-wood machines do live things.

It is never the machines that are dead.

It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead.

THE MACHINES' MACHINES

The fate of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are morbidly like machines on the one hand, or by people who are morbidly unmechanical, on the other.

People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic and mechanical-minded part of the time and in some things, people who try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead.

People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead already.

It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives ourselves—real, true, hand-made individual lives—to have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one's own flesh and blood. Does not one see them—see them everywhere—one's own flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts, lawn-mowers?

Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.

There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and unmechanical at will.

Who are these men?

How do they do it?

They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron machines run softly together.

THE MEN'S MACHINES

There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods stores could be human. They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls of the people who owned them.

When machinery was invented and when organization was invented—machines of people—drygoods stores became vast selling machines.

We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store with fifteen.

This problem has been essentially and in principle solved. At least we know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit—most of us—that it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature. What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores work—the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks—thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears itself.

But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground?

But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark hole in the ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of other holes men work, each with his helper, all alone. The utmost the helper can do is to grow like the man he works with, or like his own pick, or like the coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost the man who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his helper.

In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through the steel machine he works with—through its being a new, good, fair machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a foreman pacing down the aisles.

The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air, water and fire and silence to express myself to my workmen in. I have long monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron, strips of wood, bells, whistles, clocks—to express myself, to express my human spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as expressive of the human as a department store?"

This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to answer.

All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it.

Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines."

We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first chance. What is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men, evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of men? How can he touch and wake the solar plexus of labour?

If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit, and how is he going to do it?

Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of against them, they would do it.

What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in him and understand him?

The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him—now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human as a department store?"

They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron.

They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human nature.

There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and general principles concerning the natural working relation between men and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a basis for a possible solution.

What are our machines after all? How are the machines like us? And on what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a world like this to run softly together? These are the questions men are going to answer next. In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in our civilization—because they are machines—is likely to be able to do much to save the men in it.

THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD

Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small of a man's back.

About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.

It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him. It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday hard work of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the cupola of his being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private personal brain—a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair. He holds on to his own particular identity with it. The great lower brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of eternity—while he goes by.

It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the use of as long as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements.

A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone can do—the things which, at least in their present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself personally, by the handiwork of his own thought.

The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with.

The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard, civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius.

Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.

The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.

So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty have been free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful and improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of us have.

And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator's footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to Him like His worlds, saying, "Look, O God, look at THIS!"—the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation, have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches of thought and vast new orbits of desire, like gods.

All the great men of the world have always had machinery.

Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.

THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS

I would not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house that is not hand-made. I have come to believe that machinery is going to make it possible for everybody to have hand-made things in their homes, things that have been made by people who love to make them, and by people who, thinks to the machines, are soon bound to have time to make them. Some will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made ideas. Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to enjoy hand-made ideas, to enjoy hand-made books—and enjoy reading books by hand. We may have time for following an author in a book in the slow, old, deep, loving, happy, hand-made fashion we used to know—when we have enough machines.

It looks as if it might be something like this.

When the man has been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary, thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall be lent him to show him how his work can be done. The accumulated science and genius, the imagination and experience, of hundreds of years, of all climates, of all countries, of all temperaments shall be heaped up by his employers, gathered about the man's mind, wrought through his limbs, and help him to do his work.

All labour down in the basement of society shall be skilled labour. The brains of men of genius and of experts shall be pumped into labour from above until every man in the basement shall earn as much money in three hours a day as he formerly had earned in nine.

Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the time he saves by having the brains of great men and geniuses to work with, it will be possible for men to do enough work for other people down in the basement of the world in a few hours to shut the whole basement up, if we want to, by three o'clock. Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest of his time in planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and in creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things like an artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a man or like a human being.

THE MACHINE-TRAINERS

The fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-assertion.

The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is machinery.

Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the coöperative action of individuals.

If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them together according to their nature, we can only make vast masses of men work by putting them together according to their nature.

So far we have been trying to make vast masses of men work together in precisely the same way we make levers and iron wheels work together. We have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials of which they are made.

We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines. We have let our iron machines assert themselves against us. We have let our iron machines be models for us. We have overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men.

A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else.

In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own acts.

The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of each man who is, as we look him over and take him up, and propose to put him into it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you want?" "How can you get it?"

Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal, patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him, inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it, and let us work it into the common end.

In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of ourselves.

Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will grow up.

Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the passion, if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing, self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him.

It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine civilization. We need not be discouraged about machines, because the secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed.

The elephants are running around in the garden. But they have merely taken us by surprise. It is their first and their last chance. The men about us are seeing what to do. We are to get control of the elephants, first, by getting control of ourselves. We are beginning to organize our people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in them can keep on being people, and being better ones. And as our people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and help. As we look about us we shall see our iron machines at last, about all the world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million machines a day making the crowd beautiful.

MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS

A crowd civilization produces, as a matter of course, crowd art and art for crowded conditions. This fact is at once the glory and the weakness of the kind of art a democracy is bound to have.

The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd in a crowd age, is such as can be found in its literature, especially in its masterpieces.

The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the United States is that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands with two or three million people. The impressiveness of the Senator's Washington voice, the voice on the floor of the Senate, consists in the mystical undertone—the chorus in it—multitudes in smoking cities, men and women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States.

The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life has a corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The typical fact in modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence that immeasurably represents what it does not say. The difference between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to be that in Washington we have an epigram government, a government in which ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider what to do, and in which ninety million people are made to sit in one chair to see that it is done. In Athens every man represented himself.

What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us? The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live. The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and crowding is the logical architectural form of the city idea. The thirty-one-story block is the statue of a crowd. It stands for a spiritual fact, and it will never be beautiful until that fact is beautiful. The only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful (the crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful. The most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next is to make the crowd beautiful.