th it, as full of adulterated motives and of
fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they
could think up--a little innocent spool of thread--wreaking all their
sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments
on it as an offering....

It was A.T. Stewart, a very ordinary-looking, practical man in a plain,
everyday business, who arrested the attention of a nation and changed
the habit of thought and trend of mind of a great people, and made them
a candid, direct people, a people that went with great sunny prairies
and high mountains, a yea and nay people, straightforward, and free from
palavering forever. A.T. Stewart was accustomed, in his own personal
dealings from day to day, to cut people short when they tried to heckle
with him. He liked to take things for granted, drive through to the
point, and go on to the next one. This might have ended, of course, in a
kind of _cul de sac_ of being a merely personal trait in a clean-cut,
manful, straightforward American gentleman; and if Stewart had been a
snob or a Puritan, or had felt superior, or if he had thought other
people--the great crowds of them who flocked through his store--could
never expect to be as good as he was, nothing would ever have come of
it.

It is not likely that he was conscious of the long train of spiritual
results he had set in motion; of the way he had taken the habit of mind,
the daily, hourly psychology of a great people, and had wrought it
through with his own spirit; or of the way he had saved up, and set
where it could be used, everyday religion in America, and had freed the
business genius of a nation for its most characteristic and most
effective self-expression.

He merely was conscious that he could not endure palavering in doing
business himself, and that he would not submit to being obliged to
endure it, and he believed millions of people in America were as
clean-cut and straightforward as he was.

And the millions of people stood by him.

Perhaps A.T. Stewart touched the imagination of the crowd because he had
let the crowd touch his and had seen what crowds, in spite of
appearances, were really like.

The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness,
which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has
to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large
degree unconscious of it. There are few department stores in England or