o "Movies"--and walking,
walking, walking on. Going up into their tenement homes to eat and
drink, love, breed and sleep, to wake up and come down to another day.

So the crowd moved on and on, while the great harbor surrounding their
lives and shaping their lives, went on with its changes unheeded.

I tried to think of this harbor as being run by this common crowd--of
the railroads, mines and factories, of the colleges, hospitals and all
institutions of research, and the theaters and concert halls, the
picture galleries, all the books--all in the power of the crowd.

"It will be a long time," I thought. "Before it comes the crowd must
change. But they will change--and fast or slow, I belong with them while
they're changing."

Something Joe had once said came into my mind:

"They're the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time
of peace."

And I thought of the crowds across the sea--of men being rushed over
Europe on trains, or marching along starlit roads, or tramping across
meadows. And I thought of long lines of fire at dawn spurting from the
mouths of guns--from mountainsides, from out of woods, from trenches in
fast blackening fields--and of men in endless multitudes pitching on
their faces as the fire mowed them down.

And with those men, it seemed to me, went all the great gods I had
known--gods of civilization and peace--the kind god in my mother's
church and the smiling goddess in Paris, the clear-eyed god of
efficiency and the awakening god of the crowd--all plunging into this
furnace of war with the men in whose spirits all gods dwell--to shrivel
and melt in seething flame and emerge at last in strange new forms. What
would come out of the furnace?

I thought of Joe and his comrades going about in towns and camps,
speaking low and watching, waiting, hoping to bring a new dawn, a new
order, out of this chaotic night.

And I heard them say to these governments:

"Your civilization is crashing down. For a hundred years, in all our
strikes and risings, you preached against our violence--you talked of
your law and order, your clear deliberate thinking. In you lay the hope
of the world, you said. You were Civilization. You were Mind and
Science, in you was all Efficiency, in you was Art, Religion, and you
kept the Public Peace. But now you have broken all your vows. The
world's treasures of Art are as safe with you as they were in the Dark
Ages. Your Prince of Peace you have trampled d