A——­ C——­, the little stoopy cobbler on ——­ street in ——­, bought some machines to help him last year before I went away and added two or three slaves to do the work.  I find on coming back that he has moved and has two show windows now, one with the cobbling slaves in it cobbling, and the other (a kind of sudden, impromptu room with a show window in it) seems to be straining to be a shoe store.  When you go in and show C——­ in his shirt sleeves,—­your old shoes hopefully, he slips over from his shining leather bench to the shoe-store side and shows you at the psychological moment a new pair of shoes.

He is in the train now with me this morning, across the aisle, looking out of the window for dear life, poor fellow, for all the world as if he could suck up dollars and customers—­and people who need shoes—­out of the fields as he goes by, the way the man does mists, by looking hard at them.

I watched him walking up and down the station platform before I got on, with that bent, concentrated, meek, ready-to-die-getting-on look.  I saw his future while I looked.  I saw, or thought I saw, windows full of bright black shoes, I saw the cobbler’s shop moved out into the ell at the back, and two great show windows in front.  A——­ C——­ looks like an edged tool.

Millions of Americans are like A——­ C——­, like chisels, adzes, saws, scoops.  You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who is for something and who is not for anything else.  He is not for being talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved.  At best he is a mere feminine convenience—­a father or a cash secreter; until he wears out at last, buzzes softly into a grave.

An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements—­a big hollow handle with all sorts of tools inside.

Is this man a typical American?  Does he need to be?

What I want is news about us.

All an American like C——­ needs is news.  His eagerness is the making of him.  He is merely eager for what he will not want.

All he needs is the world’s news about people, about new inventions in human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are made, and news about how they work.

I demand three things for A——­ C——­: 

I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I see him.

I want a moving picture of him that he will go to and like and go to again and again.

I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him awake with what he might be all that night.

I want a news-book for A——­ C——­, a news-book for all of us.

* * * * *

I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people—­a masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the greatness of a nation.