principle of our commerce and
industry; the law of production, education, and journalism; the method
of our life; the controlling characteristic and the significant force in
our literature; and the thing our religion and our arts are about.

PART THREE

PEOPLE-MACHINES

CHAPTER I

NOW!

This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of
crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future. We want
daily a future. But, after all, it is a future.

I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something
now.

I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous
arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born. This
arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live
while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of
person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the
proper authorities.

In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps
the reader will remember. I said, "I want to be good now."

In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities: "I want
to be beautiful."

I want to be beautiful now.

I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these
same two requests. I find that the authorities do not seem to notice
their requests any more than they have noticed mine.

Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in
the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask a world--a great, vague thing
like the world in general--to make any slight arrangement we may need
for being beautiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in
particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in
particular with whom we can do it. There is getting to be but one course
open to a man if he wants to be beautiful. He must bone down and work
hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is
standing between him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular
persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be
allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire probably
first--his employer, for instance--to stop getting in his way, and at
least to step one side and let him reason with him. And when he cannot
ask his millionaire--his own particular humdrum millionaire--to step one
side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and
reason with him. A