One commonly hears it said to-day, by those who have made the catchwords of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a social entity and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more commercial ability--that of organizing industry and selling goods--has been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability, because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies--large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc. A Whittier may be ever so great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in the general store of his little country village, and no one thinks he is so very wonderful. Some may envy him his fame, but few will envy and therefore be fascinated by that in him which they do not understand. But a multimillionaire in their community is understood; everyone can see and envy his success; he is at once both envied and admired. Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort which the average man most commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern society, and denounces the successful business man as an exploiter and fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect that their own dreams of "aping the rich" may never come true that they begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd. That the dominant crowd is just as much to blame for this state of affairs as the under crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the history of every period preceding a revolutionary outbreak. I will dwell at some length on this fact later. My point here is that, first, a revolution, in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon--and second, that it takes two crowds to make a revolution. Writers, like Le Bon, have ignored the part which the dominant crowd plays in such events. They have thought of revolution only as the behavior of the under crowd. They have assumed that the crowd and the people were the same. Their writings are hardly more than conservative warnings against the excess and wickedness of the popular mind once it is aroused. Sumner says: