Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived to say to the older nations of the earth, “All men are created equal.”  It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent. better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years, should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that every man in America was free to try to be equal to.  A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all.  Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle?  On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth.  The main difference between the heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom now, is that tyranny now is crowding around the Rock, and climbing up on the Rock, eighty-seven million strong, and that tyranny then was a half-idiot king three thousand miles away.

* * * * *

We know or think we know, some of us—­at least we have taken a certain joy in working it out in our minds, and live with it every day—­how people in crowds are going to be beautiful by and by.

The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express.  It seems better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is before trying to meet it.

And now we would like to try to meet it.  How can we determine what is the most practical and natural way for crowds of people to try to be beautiful now?

It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd technique, and of determining how human nature works.

All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim.

Everything turns on the method.

In the following chapters we will try to consider the technique of being beautiful in crowds.

BOOK FOUR

CROWDS AND HEROES

TO WALT WHITMAN