fter this he must ask crowds to please to step one
side and reason with him.

Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great,
imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful--the humdrum
millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds.

In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more
convenient. There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than
he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had
craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make
room and help.

Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask everybody. Every man
finds it the same. He must ask millions of people to let him be
something, one after the other in rows, that they do not want him to be
or do not care whether he is or not. He has to ask more people than he
could count, before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that
he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors.

I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for a man to
break through to being beautiful, past millionaires and past
iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the people-machines or
crowds, and how perhaps to break past them and be beautiful in behalf of
them, in spite of them.

CHAPTER II

COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES

The problem seems to be something like this. One finds one has been born
and put here whether or no, and that one is inextricably alive in a
state of society in which men are coming to live in a kind of vast
disease of being obliged to do everything together.

We are still old-fashioned enough to be born one at a time, but we are
educated in litters and we do our work in the world in herds and gangs.
Even the upper classes do their work in gangs, and with overseers and
little crowds called committees. Our latest idea consists in putting
parts of a great many different men together to make one great
one--forming a committee to make a man of genius.

There is no denying that, in a way, a committee does things; but what
becomes of the committee?

And the lower in the scale of life we go the more committees it takes to
do the work of one man and the more impossible it becomes to find
anything but parts of men to do things. I put it frankly to the reader.
The chances are nine out of ten that when you meet a man nowadays and
look at him hard or try to do something with him you find he is not a
man at all but is some sub