They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a good carpenter, a good farmer; the many have not even found the secret of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the day’s task in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the wherewith to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew. They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls; and this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed_! They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or the police. From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... You see, I have left the Countryside and am lost in the crowd now, any crowd, the world-crowd, whose gods today are trade, patriotism and a certain limp-legged tumbler. ... Yet we are told by every authoritative voice out of the past, and we know it from the urge of our own souls, that we must love the many before we can serve them. It is fatuous to love blindly, therefore we must understand what we are about. I have touched here some small things of the crowd, which are well enough to know; otherwise we are apt to stand apart from the many crying: “How noble are the simple-minded! How sweet the people of the Countryside! How inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!” As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man’s vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.