ul, sinister, and weary.

I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of nobly sick way, visionary,
unpractical, and socially destructive.

I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the quality
of many heroes, possibly about most heroes. I would agree in a large
measure that the heroes the crowds choose are the wrong ones.

But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as to our
practical working policy in getting the things for crowds that we both
want for them. It seems to me that he does not believe in crowds. He is
filled with fear that they would select the wrong heroes. He says they
must not have heroes, or must be allowed as few as possible.

I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the
hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select from, the
finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the more deeply,
truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the more nobly they
will express themselves.

But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd
in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves
the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's ideal of the beautiful in
conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical,
hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the
crowd, what the crowd wants.

I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street
keeping step. It was a band that held them together. A band is a
practical thing.

Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of
economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of
music? What economics needs now is a march.

We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we
have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the
worship in them, and make them want to do something. The hero is the man
who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all
through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.

It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of
human nature which we have called hero-worship.

CHAPTER II

THE CROWD AND THE HERO

But it is not only socially destructive. It is dumb and helpless for
crowds to try to get on without heroes. Big events and big men are crowd
expressions. Heroes, World Fairs, and Titanic disasters are crowd words,
the crowd's w