I am sitting and correcting, one by one, as they are brought to me, these last page proofs in the factory.  The low thunder on the floors of the mighty presses, crashing down into paper words I can never cross out—­rises around me.  In a minute more—­minute by minute that I am counting, that low thunder will overtake me, will roar down and fold away these last guilty, hopeful, tucked-in words with you, Gentle Reader, and you will get away!  And the book will get away!

There is no time to try to hold up that low thunder now, and to say what I have meant to say about false simplicity and democracy, and about our all being bullied into being little old faded Thomas Jeffersons a hundred years after he is dead.

But I will try to suggest what I hope that some one who has no printing-presses rolling over him—­will say: 

One cannot help wishing that our socialists to-day would outgrow Karl Marx, and that our individualists would outgrow Emerson.  Democrats by this time ought to grow a little, too, and outgrow Jefferson, and Republicans ought to be able by this time to outgrow Hamilton.

Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on a continent 3,000 miles wide?  Why should we live Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s lives?  Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live ours?

The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be Jefferson over again.  It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself.  If Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers, statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself.

I like to imagine how it would strike him.  I am not troubled about what he would do.  Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds, rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines.  Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway!  Jefferson in his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty, tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders!

He had not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility—­that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without leaders.

Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of governing, as a means of getting the will of the people.

A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since Jefferson.  This is the main fact about the modern man, that he is gloriously self-made.  He is practising democracy, inventing his own life, making his own soul before our eyes.