This is what five million men are trying to express in writing this book.  If people deny that I have the right to give the news about America for five million men; if they say that this is not true about American human nature, that this is not the news, then I will say, I am the news!  I am this sort of an American!  God helping me, I say it!  “Look at me!” I am this sort of man of whom I am writing!  If I am not this sort of man this afternoon, I will be in the morning!  Though I go down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking to the end of my days—­I am this sort of man!  I say, “Look at me!”

If you will not believe me—­that this is an American, if you say that I cannot prove that there are five million of men like this in America, then I will still say, “Here is one!  What will you do with ME?” Though I die in laughter, all my desires and all my professions in a tumult about my soul, I say it to this nation, “Your laws, your programs, your philosophies, your I wills, and I won’ts, I say, shall reckon with me!  Your presidents and your legislatures shall reckon with Me!”

Here I am.  The man is here.  He is in this book!

I will break through to the five million men.  I will make the five million men look at me until they recognize themselves.  If no one else will attend to it for me, and if there shall be no other way, I will have a brass band go through the streets of New York and of a thousand cities, with banners and floats and great hymns to the people, and they shall go up and down the streets of the people with signs saying, “Have you read Crowds?” I will have the Boston Symphony Orchestra tour the country singing—­singing from kettledrums to violins to a thousand silent audiences, “Have yon read ’CROWDS’?”

I live in a nation in which we are butting through into our sense of our national character, working our way up into a huge mutual working understanding.  In our beautiful, vague, patriotic, muddleheadedness about what we want and whether we really want to be good, and about what being good is like and I say, for one, half-laughing, half-praying, God helping me—­Look at =ME=!

=VI=

I was much interested some time ago when I had not been long landed in England, and was still trying in the hopeful American way to understand it—­to see the various attitudes of Englishmen toward the discussions which were going on at that time in the Spectator and elsewhere, of Mr. Cadbury’s inconsistency; and while I had no reason, as an American, fresh-landed from New York, to be interested in Mr. Cadbury himself, I found that his inconsistency interested me very much.  It insisted on coming back into my mind, in spite of what I would have thought, as a strangely important subject—­not merely as regards Mr. Cadbury, which might or might not be important, but as regards England and as regards America, as regards the way a modern man struggling day by day with a huge, heavy machine civilization like ours, can still manage to be a live, useful, and possibly even a human, being in it.