a man and a God had not been born in a
crowd, if he had not loved and grappled with it, and been crucified and
worshipped by it, He might have been a Redeemer for the silent, stately,
ancient world that was before He came, but He would have failed to be a
Redeemer for this modern world--a world where the main inspiration and
the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great problem and
every great hope is one that deals with crowds. It is a world where,
from the first day a man looks forth to move, he finds his feet and
hands held by crowds. The sun rises over crowds for him, and sets over
crowds; and having presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last,
in a crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God. Ten human lives
deep they have them--the graves in Paris; and whether men live their
lives piled upon other men's lives, in blocks in cities or in the
apparent loneliness of town or country what they shall do or shall not
do, or shall have or shall not have--is it not determined by crowds, by
the movement of crowds? The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as
he rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat; but
the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the voice of the crowd
to him, thousands of miles away, shouting in the Stock Exchange: "You
shall not sell your wheat! Let it lie! Let it rot in your barns!"

And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a surveyor's chain,
there would seem to be plenty of room for all who are born upon it. The
fact that there are enough square miles of the planet for every human
being on it to have several square miles to himself does not prove that
a man can avoid the crowd--that it is not a crowded world. If what a man
could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed be a gentle
and graceful earth to live on. But an acre of Nowhere satisfies no one;
and how many square miles does a man want to be a nobody in? He can do
it better in a crowd, where every one else is doing it.

In the ancient world, when a human being found something in the wrong
place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he found himself face to
face with a few men. He found he had to deal with these few men. To-day,
if he wants anything put where it belongs, he finds himself face to face
with a crowd. He finds that he has to deal with a crowd. The world has
telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a man
proposes to do a certain thin