While it cannot be said of many of these tools of existence that they are beautiful now, it is enough to affirm that when they are perfected they will be beautiful; and that if we cannot make beautiful the things that we need, we cannot expect to make beautiful the things that we merely want. When the beauty of these things is at last brought out, we shall have attained the most characteristic and original and expressive and beautiful art that is in our power. It will be unprecedented because it will tell unprecedented truths. It was the mission of ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls together on the earth. The fulfillment of the word that has been written, "Your valleys shall be exalted, and your mountains shall be made low," is by no means a beautiful process. Democracy is the grading principle of the beautiful. The natural tendency the arts have had from the first to rise from the level of the world, to make themselves into Switzerlands in it, is finding itself confronted with the Constitution of the United States--a Constitution which, whatever it may be said to mean in the years to come, has placed itself on record up to the present time, at least, as standing for the tableland. The very least that can be granted to this Constitution is that it is so consummate a political document that it has made itself the creed of our theology, philosophy, and sociology; the principle of our commerce and industry; the law of production, education, and journalism; the method of our life; the controlling characteristic and the significant force in our literature; and the thing our religion and our arts are about. PART THREE PEOPLE-MACHINES CHAPTER I NOW! This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future. We want daily a future. But, after all, it is a future. I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something now. I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born. This arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the proper authorities. In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps the reader will remember. I said, "I want to be good now." In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities: "I want to be beautiful." I want to be beautiful now.