And now I am going to try to express these three fears that go with the three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn on them and face them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance.

CHAPTER II

THE CROWD SCARE

Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely fashion.  A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for him.  He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man’s estate.  He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, “What shall I be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?” And the sky and the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all said, “Come!”

On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a shovel—­a tool for living a little longer.

The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it.  The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world has been changed to conform to it.  We live in crowds.  We get our living in crowds.  We are amused in herds.  Civilization is a list of cities.  Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being.  The power of a man can be measured to-day by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for—­the centre of mass.

The crowd principle is the first principle of production.  The producer who can get the most men together and the most dollars together controls the market; and when he once controls the market, instead of merely getting the most men and the most dollars, he can get all the men and all the dollars.  Hence the corporation in production.

The crowd principle is the first principle of distribution.  The man who can get the most men to buy a particular thing from him can buy the most of it, and therefore buy it the cheapest, and therefore get more men to buy from him; and having bought this particular thing cheaper than all men could buy it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then, having all the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell them for a little more than nothing to everybody.  Hence the department store—­the syndicate of department stores—­the crowd principle in commerce.