We defy the business men.  We believe the bishops can be converted.

I speak for a thousand, thousand men.

In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief.  I speak for these men—­for all of us. We are not cogs and wheels.  We are men.  We are born again ourselves.  Other men can be born again.

Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and say that human nature will not change.

We will change it.  If we cannot get but two or three together to change it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.

The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth—­the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want.  If a nation really wants a great man it invents him.  We have hut to see we really want him, and that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.

Necessity is the mother of invention.  Here in these United States sixty years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln?  We had been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln.  He could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the sense of crisis in a great people.  All these had been set to work on him, on making him a Lincoln.

Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful, believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons’ lives in his hands.  He did not have the smallest possible chance from the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray a nation, or to back down out of being himself.  He had been filled night and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim glory of it.  He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it, if he had tried.  We had clinched Lincoln in 1862.  He was caught fast in the vise of our hopes.

Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in them that they get them.

If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and overshadow him.  They will create him, in scorn and joy will they conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.

It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true, steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the vision, the expectation of a great nation.