I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these same two requests. I find that the authorities do not seem to notice their requests any more than they have noticed mine. Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask a world--a great, vague thing like the world in general--to make any slight arrangement we may need for being beautiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in particular with whom we can do it. There is getting to be but one course open to a man if he wants to be beautiful. He must bone down and work hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is standing between him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire probably first--his employer, for instance--to stop getting in his way, and at least to step one side and let him reason with him. And when he cannot ask his millionaire--his own particular humdrum millionaire--to step one side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and reason with him. After this he must ask crowds to please to step one side and reason with him. Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great, imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful--the humdrum millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds. In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more convenient. There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make room and help. Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask everybody. Every man finds it the same. He must ask millions of people to let him be something, one after the other in rows, that they do not want him to be or do not care whether he is or not. He has to ask more people than he could count, before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors. I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for a man to break through to being beautiful, past millionaires and past iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the people-machines or crowds, and how perhaps to break past them and be beautiful in behalf of them, in spite of them. CHAPTER II COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES The problem seems to be something like this. One finds one has been born and put here whether or no, and that one is inextricably alive in a state of society in which men are coming to live in a kind of vast disease of being obliged to do everything together.