t than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his
side, in spite of him, and claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it
for himself. The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for
the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average
men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow
massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is
highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them
shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life,
where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if
the ideal of democracy is tableland--that is--mountains for
everybody--a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out
of.

Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization--having the extraordinary
men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having
the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary
ones--are equally impracticable.

This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd cannot be made
beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made
beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man
who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful
whether it allows him to or not.

When this man is born to us and looks out on the conditions around him,
he will find that to be born in a crowd civilization is to be born in a
civilization, first, in which every man can do as he pleases; second, in
which nobody does. Every man is given by the Government absolute
freedom; and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government says
to him, "Now if you can get enough other men, with their absolute
freedom, to put their absolute freedom with your absolute freedom, you
can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking
to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the
number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of
masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to
his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can
cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one
ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd
civilization becomes, not "What does a thing mean?" or "What is it
worth?" but "How much is there of it?" "If thou art a great man," says
civilization, "get