You may see it in the dim morning of every London day, struggling from the outskirts of the city into tramcars and trains which are dragging it to its centres of labour: numberless shabby figures hurrying over the bridges or pouring out of the exits of the central railway stations. You may discern in places the very pavements torn apart, and tunnels burrowed in the bowels of the earth, so that the astonished visitor from afar beholds a perpetual stream of people emerging from the middle of the street, seemingly manufactured in some laboratory below. It flows always along the high road of the huge town in the daytime, like a liquid unprecipitated, or a river in even stream carrying down dust to the sea. But at any moment an unexpected incident, tragic or trivial, may change the liquid from clear to cloudy, or reveal, like the river suddenly banked in obstruction, the debris and turgid elements which it has hitherto borne along so buoyantly. A motor omnibus stands still, a cab horse collapses, men’s voices are raised in altercation, an itinerant agitator demands work for all, or announces the day of judgment. Immediately a knot appears in the texture of the wood, a whirlpool in the water. The multitude of the unimportant gather together, “having hopes.” With incredible rapidity appear amongst them the criminal, the loafer, the enthusiast; the stream of busy persons has become transferred into the city Crowd. There is a note of menace in it, in the mixed clamour which rises from its humours and angers, like the voice of the sea in gathering storm. There is the evidence of possibilities of violence in its waywardness, its caprice, its always incalculable mettle and temper, forming in the aggregate a personality differing altogether from the personalities of its component atoms. Satisfied, curious, eager only for laughter and emotion, it will cheer the police which is scattering it like chaff and spray, mock openly at those who have come with set purposes, idle and sprawl on a summer afternoon at Hyde Park or an autumn evening in Parliament Square. But one feels that the smile might turn suddenly into fierce snarl or savagery, and that panic and wild fury are concealed in its recesses, no less than happiness and foolish praise. But more than the menace, the overwhelming impression is one of ineptitude; a kind of life grotesque and meaningless. It is in the city Crowd, where the traits of individual distinction have become merged in the aggregate, and the impression (from a distance) is of little white blobs of faces borne upon little black twisted or misshapen bodies, that the scorn of the philosopher for the mob, the cynic for humanity, becomes for the first time intelligible. Separate the drops and particles of it, follow each man homeward through the various ways of the city labyrinth--at the end you will find Humanity in its unchangeable and abiding existence: a tiny suburban home with cottage