mparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones that wear the
longest, and one by one taking the old ones down.

The crowd takes a hero up in its huge rough hand, gazes through him at
the world, sees what it wants through him. Then it takes up another, and
then another.

Heroes are crowd spy-glasses.

Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann for example.

Pierpont Morgan is a typical American business man raised to the n-th
or hero power.

The crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Pierpont Morgan, the Tom
Mann of the banks. It will see what it wants, through him.

And the crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Tom Mann, too, the
Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions. It will see what it wants, through
him.

CHAPTER IV

THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN

One keeps turning back every now and then, in reading the "Life of
Pierpont Morgan," to the portrait which Carl Hovey has placed at the
beginning of the book. If one were to look at the portrait long enough,
one would not need to read the book. The portrait puts into a few square
inches of space what Mr. Hovey takes half an acre of paper for. And all
that he really does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one
again and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan's
eyes--the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, implacable
concentration, and, when all is said, a certain terrible, inexplicable
blindness.

The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite believe it. The
portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about
it that one cannot but stand back with one's little judgments and give
the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a
personality like this, and fix it here--all in one small human face--the
benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always taken
Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently
set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments. It seems as if,
of course, he must be seeing things--things that we and others possibly
do not and cannot see. The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set
in such a full array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of
vision. The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little
walls, as if real eyes were in behind them. One wonders if there is any
one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little
ordinary human things--personality, for instance, atmosphere, or