or in the apparent loneliness of town or country what they shall do or shall not do, or shall have or shall not have—­is it not determined by crowds, by the movement of crowds?  The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as he rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat; but the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the voice of the crowd to him, thousands of miles away, shouting in the Stock Exchange:  “You shall not sell your wheat!  Let it lie!  Let it rot in your barns!”

And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a surveyor’s chain, there would seem to be plenty of room for all who are born upon it.  The fact that there are enough square miles of the planet for every human being on it to have several square miles to himself does not prove that a man can avoid the crowd—­that it is not a crowded world.  If what a man could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed be a gentle and graceful earth to live on.  But an acre of Nowhere satisfies no one; and how many square miles does a man want to be a nobody in?  He can do it better in a crowd, where every one else is doing it.

In the ancient world, when a human being found something in the wrong place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he found himself face to face with a few men.  He found he had to deal with these few men.  To-day, if he wants anything put where it belongs, he finds himself face to face with a crowd.  He finds that he has to deal with a crowd.  The world has telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a man proposes to do a certain thing in it, the telephones tell the few, and the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd gets on to the railroad; and before he rises from his sleep, behold the crowd in his front yard; and if he can get as far as his own front gate in the thing he is going for, he must be—­either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius?  None of these.  Let him be a corporation—­of ideas or of dollars; let him be some complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do anything for himself, or for anybody else, or for everybody else, in a world too crowded to tell the truth without breaking something, or to find room for it, when it is told, without breaking something.

This is the Crowd’s World.

* * * * *

What I have written I have written.

I have been sitting and reading it.  It is a mood.  But there is an implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be gotten out and used.

As I have been reading I have looked up.  I see the quiet little mountain through my window standing out there in the sun.  It looks around the world as if nothing had happened; and the bobolinks out in the great meadow are all flying and singing in the same breath and rowing through the air, thousands of them, miles of them.  They do not stop a minute.

A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside on the piazza, four years old, going by my window back and forth, listening to the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the music of the spheres.  Why should not I do as well?  I thought.  The Child is merely seeing her shoes as they are with as many senses and as many thoughts and desires at once as she can muster, and with all her might.