crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives--the man, if
we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat.

It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines
the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has the most dominion over the
imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of
our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night
after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world
above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and
motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is
the man to whom we look for our daily bread.

It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all
relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom
we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those
huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of
attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through
the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what
really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall
be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the
way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of
its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no--the feeling that they
come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably
the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and
the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the
subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and hells
are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and
roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over
us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the
man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I
won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight
and the manhole of life.

The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk,
one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window,
the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand--it is
these, godlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our
unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath
and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our
lives. It is decreed that