Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns.  Nothing stays adjourned.  We have reports that think for us, committees that do right for us, and platforms that spread their wooden lengths over all the things we love, until there is hardly an inch of the dear old earth to stand on, where, fresh and sweet and from day to day, we can live our lives ourselves, pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God, garner our grain, and die.  Every new and fresh human being that comes upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into a machine as soon as we get at him.  We have already come to the point where we do not expect to interest anybody in anything without a constitution.  And the Eugenic Society is busy now on by-laws for falling in love.

What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think.  He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed.  Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts.  When they have been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be stirred to something.  To the bigotry of the man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry on the earth—­the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who, with a more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a mass meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd can give, backs his opinions with forty states, and walks the streets of his native town in the uniform of all humanity.  This is a kind of fool that has never been possible until these latter days.  Only a very great many people, all of them working on him at once, and all of them watching every one else working at once, can produce this kind.

Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has so mastered the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle reader, have found ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps, in a certain sheepish feeling at being caught in a small audience.  Being caught in a small audience at a lecture is no insignificant experience.  You will see people looking furtively about, counting one another.  You will make comparisons.  You will recall the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you had the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing confidently to itself before the lecture began.  The hush of disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room, every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm through—­all these are signs of the times.  People look at the empty chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great personality saying to each and all of us:  “Why are you here?  Did you not make a mistake?  Are you not ashamed to be a party to—­to—­as small a crowd as this?” Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty Chairs—­we who are to be lectured to—­until the poor lecturer who is to lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs begins.