interest anybody in anything without a constitution. And
the Eugenic Society is busy now on by-laws for falling in love.

What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he
does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think. He
has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized
from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense
of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have
been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the
crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on
it, if perchance it may be stirred to something. To the bigotry of the
man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry
on the earth--the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who,
with a more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a mass
meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd can give,
backs his opinions with forty states, and walks the streets of his
native town in the uniform of all humanity. This is a kind of fool that
has never been possible until these latter days. Only a very great many
people, all of them working on him at once, and all of them watching
every one else working at once, can produce this kind.

Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has so mastered
the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle reader, have found
ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps, in a certain sheepish feeling
at being caught in a small audience. Being caught in a small audience at
a lecture is no insignificant experience. You will see people looking
furtively about, counting one another. You will make comparisons. You
will recall the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you
had the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing
confidently to itself before the lecture began. The hush of
disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual
shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room,
every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm
through--all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty
chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great
personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not
make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to--to--as small a
crowd as this?" Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obei