Things,--who could emphasise Things. It is a great spectacle and a
memorable one--the one we are in to-day, the spectacle of the wonder
that men are doing with Things, but when one begins to see that it is
all being turned around, that it is really a spectacle of what Things
are doing with men, one wakes with a start. One wonders if there could
be such a thing as having all the personalities of a whole generation
lost. One looks suspiciously and wistfully at the children one sees in
the schools. One wonders if they are going to be allowed, like their
fathers and mothers, to have personalities to lose. I have all but
caught myself kidnapping children as I have watched them flocking in the
street. I have wanted to scurry them off to the country, a few of them,
almost anywhere--for a few years. I have thought I would try to find a
college to hide them in, some back-county, protected college, a college
which still has the emphasis of Persons as well as the emphasis of
Things upon it. Then I would wait and see what would come of it. I would
at least have a little bevy of great men perhaps, saved out for a
generation, enough to keep the world supplied with samples--to keep up
the bare idea of the great man, a kind of isthmus to the future.

The test of civilisation is what it produces--its man, if only because
he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the
specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or
vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or
getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of
emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The
specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race
of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a
nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist
to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but
one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is
willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the
race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be
the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to
create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it.
One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world
which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the
spending of ma