Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their
culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their
religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in
their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over
in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of
a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, "The thing that hath been
is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall
be done and there is no new thing under the sun."
There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the
culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can
be educated.
We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted.
We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted.
I speak for a thousand, thousand men.
In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the
Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men--for all of us. _We are not
cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can
be born again._
Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and
say that human nature will not change.
We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change
it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two
or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.
The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a
vision of the kind of man of wealth--the kind of employer they want, the
moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national
expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people,
the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants
a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and
that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty
years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had
been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He
could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily
thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the
sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on
him, on making him a Lincoln.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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