No one would accuse me—­though I might like or need for my own personal use at one time or another, a slower sidewalk or a faster one than others—­no one would accuse me of being inconsistent if I supplied extra sidewalks for people of different temperaments to move over to suddenly any time they wanted to.  I have come to some of my truth by a bitterly slow sidewalk—­slower than other people need, and sometimes I have come by a fast one (or what some would say was no sidewalk at all!) but it cannot fairly be claimed that there is anything inconsistent in my offering people every possible convenience I can think of—­for believing me.

Mr. Cadbury is not inconsistent if he tells truth at a different rate to different people, or if he chooses to put truths before people in Indian file.

A man is not inconsistent who does not tell all the news he knows to all kinds of people, all at once, all the time.

There is nothing disingenuous about having an order for truth.

It is not considered compromising to have an order in moving railway trains.  Why not allow an order in moving trains of thought?  And why should a schedule for moving around people’s bodies be considered any more reasonable than a schedule or timetable or order for moving around their souls?

Truth in action must always be in an order.  Nine idealists out of ten who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying desperately to make the beautiful work themselves.  It is more comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the beautiful—­the way a Poet is—­to dump all one’s ideals down before people and walk off.  But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental, lazy, and ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them—­to give everybody all of them all the time without considering what becomes of the ideals or what becomes of the people.

CHAPTER XVI

CROWD-MEN

MARCH 4, 1913.

As I write these words, I look out upon the great meadow.  I see the poles and the wires in the sun, that long trail of poles and wires I am used to, stalking across the meadow.  I know what they are doing.

They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President, the one they are making this minute, down in Washington, for these United States.  With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has sworn before God and before his people to serve the destinies of a nation.  And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty people goes by.  And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us.

What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer, of crying to God, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the plains?