s and
disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power,
can be trusted by crowds.

The prejudice against the hero is due to the fact that heroes in days
gone by have been by a very large majority fighters, expressing
themselves against the world, or expressing one part of the world
against another.

The moment the hero becomes the artist and begins expressing himself and
expressing the crowd together, the crowd will no longer be touched with
fear and driven back upon itself by the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.

EPILOGUE

France is threatened by her childless women, Germany by her machines,
Russia is beginning the Nineteenth Century. It is to England and
America, struggling still sublimely with their sins, the nations
look--for the time being--for the next big free lift upon the world.

Looked at in the large, in their historic import and their effect on the
time, the English temperament and the American temperament are
essentially the same. As between ourselves, England and America are apt
to seem different, but as between us and the world, we blend together.
One could go through in what I have been saying about Oxford Street and
the House of Commons in this book, strike out all after Oxford Street
and read Broadway, and all after the House of Commons and read Congress,
and it would be essentially true with the necessary English or American
modulation. In the same way it would be possible to go through and
strike out all after the President and read Prime Minister or the
Government.

England and America have the individualistic temperament, and if we
cannot make a self-expressive individualism noble, and if we are not men
enough to sing up our individualism into the social and the universal,
we perish.

It is our native way. We are to be crowdmen or nobodies.

The English temperament or the American temperament, whichever we may
call it, is the same tune, but played with a different and almost
contrasting expression.

England is being played gravely and massively like a violoncello, and
America--played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the
ecstasy, the overriding glory of the violins.

But it is the same tune, and God helping us, we will not and we shall
not be overwhelmed under the great dome of the world, by Germany with
all her faithful pianolas, or by France with her cold sweet flutes, or
by Russia with her shrieks and her pauses, pounding her splendid
kettl