All responsible people are forced to be good, with crowds around them, expecting it of them.

Crowds at the very least are a kind of vast, insinuating, penetrating, omnipresent, permeating police force of righteousness.

In a department store, the crowds, twelve thousand a day, are like some huge coil of hose or vacuum cleaner, lying about the place, sucking up, drawing out, and demanding goodness from the clerks.  Clerks develop human insight and powers faster in department stores than machinists do in factories because they are exposed to more people and to larger crowds.  The stream clears itself.

The last forms of business to yield to the new spirit are to be the lonely ones, the ones where light, air, human emotions, and crowds are shut out.

The lonely forms of business will at last be vitalized and socialized by men of organizing genius, who will invent the equivalent of crowds going by, who will contrive ways of putting a few responsible persons in sight or in a position where they will feel crowds going by their souls, looking into them as if they were shop windows.  Crowds can keep track of a few.  The crowds will see that these few are the kind of men who will keep track of all.

Crowds in the end will not accept less than the best.  With crowds of people and crowds of places and crowds of times we are good.  In all things crowds can see or be made to see we are safe.  Progress lies in making crowds see through people, making crowds go past them.  While they are going past them, they lure their goodness on.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW

The people who are worried and discouraged about goodness in this world, one finds when one studies them a little, are almost always worried in a kind of general way.  They do not worry about anything in particular.  Their religion seems to be a kind of good-hearted, pained vagueness.

The religion of the people who never worry at all, the thoughtless optimists, is quite the same too, except that they have a kind of happy, rosy-lighted vagueness instead.

For about two thousand years now, goodness has been in the hands of vague people.  Some of them have used their vagueness to cry with softly, and some of them have used it to praise God with and to have many fine, brave, general feelings about God.

I have tried faithfully, speaking for one, to be religious with both of these sets of people.

They make one feel rather lonesome.

If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron joy in seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches a great, worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in New York, one looks up and sees a new skyscraper going slowly up, unfolding into the sky before one, lifting up its gigantic, restless, resistless face to God; there comes to seem to be something about churches and about good people and about the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy.