Without the least critical analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is passed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the meanest little people in the community--the kind who cannot look upon a nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or entertain a significant idea without losing their faith. The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No wonder de Tocqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in America than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.