Socialists are not picturesque and personal.  They do not think in pictures.

Then they wonder why they do not make more headway.

Crowds and great men and children think in pictures.

A hero pictures greatness to them.  Then they want it for themselves.

From the practical, political point of view of getting things for crowds, perhaps the trouble lies, not in our common popular idea of having heroes, but in the heroes.  And perhaps the cure lies not in abolishing heroes, but in making our heroes move on and in insisting on more and better ones.

Any man who looks may watch the crowd to-day making its heroes move on.

If they do not move on, the crowd picks up the next hero at hand who is moving—­and drops them.

One can watch in every civilized country to-day crowds picking up heroes, comparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones that wear the longest, and one by one taking the old ones down.

The crowd takes a hero up in its huge rough hand, gazes through him at the world, sees what it wants through him.  Then it takes up another, and then another.

Heroes are crowd spy-glasses.

Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann for example.

Pierpont Morgan is a typical American business man raised to the n-th or hero power.

The crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Pierpont Morgan, the Tom
Mann of the banks.  It will see what it wants, through him.

And the crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Tom Mann, too, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions.  It will see what it wants, through him.

CHAPTER IV

THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN

One keeps turning back every now and then, in reading the “Life of Pierpont Morgan,” to the portrait which Carl Hovey has placed at the beginning of the book.  If one were to look at the portrait long enough, one would not need to read the book.  The portrait puts into a few square inches of space what Mr. Hovey takes half an acre of paper for.  And all that he really does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one again and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan’s eyes—­the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, implacable concentration, and, when all is said, a certain terrible, inexplicable blindness.

The blindness keeps one looking again.  One cannot quite believe it.  The portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about it that one cannot but stand back with one’s little judgments and give the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a personality like this, and fix it here—­all in one small human face—­the benefit of the doubt.  This is the way the crowd has always taken Pierpont Morgan at first.  The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments.  It seems as if, of course, he must be seeing things—­things