te by minute that I am
counting, that low thunder will overtake me, will roar down and fold
away these last guilty, hopeful, tucked-in words with you, Gentle
Reader, and you will get away! And the book will get away!

There is no time to try to hold up that low thunder now, and to say what
I have meant to say about false simplicity and democracy, and about our
all being bullied into being little old faded Thomas Jeffersons a
hundred years after he is dead.

But I will try to suggest what I hope that some one who has no
printing-presses rolling over him--will say:

One cannot help wishing that our socialists to-day would outgrow Karl
Marx, and that our individualists would outgrow Emerson. Democrats by
this time ought to grow a little, too, and outgrow Jefferson, and
Republicans ought to be able by this time to outgrow Hamilton.

Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on
a continent 3,000 miles wide? Why should we live Thomas Jefferson's and
Alexander Hamilton's lives? Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live
ours?

The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be
Jefferson over again. It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take
the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself. If
Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers,
statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself.

I like to imagine how it would strike him. I am not troubled about what
he would do. Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to
the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds,
rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines.
Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway! Jefferson in
his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or
chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty,
tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited
and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders!

He had not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that
bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility--that terrific,
devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without
leaders.

Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of
governing, as a means of getting the will of the people.

A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since