rder in moving trains of thought? And why
should a schedule for moving around people's bodies be considered any
more reasonable than a schedule or timetable or order for moving around
their souls?

Truth in action must always be in an order. Nine idealists out of ten
who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful
work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying
desperately to make the beautiful work themselves. It is more
comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the
beautiful--the way a Poet is--to dump all one's ideals down before
people and walk off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental,
lazy, and ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them--to give
everybody all of them all the time without considering what becomes of
the ideals or what becomes of the people.

CHAPTER XVI

CROWD-MEN

MARCH 4, 1913.

As I write these words, I look out upon the great meadow. I see the
poles and the wires in the sun, that long trail of poles and wires I am
used to, stalking across the meadow. I know what they are doing.

They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President,
the one they are making this minute, down in Washington, for these
United States. With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has
sworn before God and before his people to serve the destinies of a
nation. And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden
poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty
people goes by. And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what
he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us.

What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer,
of crying to God, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the
plains?

Does he really overhear it--that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant
prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoarse cities, out of the
slow, patient fields, to God?

Does he overhear it, I wonder? What does he make out that we are like?

I should think it would sound like music to him.

It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his God
(and will he not please be alone with his God sometimes?), like some
vast ocean of people singing, a kind of multitudinous, faraway singing,
like the wind--ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and
mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by!