n a day when men make vast crowds of things, so
that the things are seen everywhere, and when the things are made to
stand the test of crowds--crowds of days, or crowds of years--and when
they make them for crowds of people, goodness does not need scared and
helpful people defending it. I have seen that goodness is a thing to be
sung about like a sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and
grounded in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen
that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the huge daily
passionate moral experiment of the human heart--that all men are at work
on it, that goodness is an implacable crowd process, and that nothing
can stop it.

CHAPTER VII

THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE

But Fate has so arranged our lives that we all have to live cooped up in
one particular generation. Living in all of them, especially the ages
just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon them how goodness wins, may
be well enough when one is tired or discouraged and is driven to it, but
in the meantime all the while we are living in this one. The faces of
the people we know flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd
haunts us--the crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and
drop into the Darkness--a whole generation of it, without seeing how
things are coming out; and there is something about the streets, about
the look of women as they go by, something about the faces of the little
children, that makes one wish goodness would hurry. One cannot think
with any real pleasure of goodness as a huge, slow, implacable moral
glacier, a kind of human force of gravity, grinding out truths and
grinding under people, generation after generation, down toward some
vast, beautiful, happy valley with flowers and children in it and
majestic old men thousands of years away. One wishes goodness would
hurry. We are not content, some of us, with having the good people climb
over the so-called evil ones and gain the supremacy of the world, and
all because the evil people do not see what they really want to do or
would have wished they had done afterward. We want the evil ones, so
called, to see what they really want now. We cannot help believing that
there is some way of attracting their attention to what they really want
now.

I have seen, or seemed to see, in my time that there is almost no limit
to what people can do if they can get their own attention, or if some
p