If we have a poet in the White House, this is the main fact he is going to reckon with:  He will not be seen taking sides with the Alexander Hamilton model or with the Thomas Jefferson model or with Karl Marx or Emerson.  We will see him taking Karl Marx and Emerson and Hamilton and Jefferson and melting them down, glowing them and fusing them together into one man—­the Crowd-Man—­who shall be more aristocratic than Hamilton ever dreamed, and be filled with a genius for democracy that Jefferson never guessed.  America to-day, on the face of the earth and in the hearts of men, is a new democracy, as new as Radium, Copernicus, the Wireless Telegraph, as new and just beginning to be noticed and guessed at as Jesus Christ!

Copernicus, Marconi, Wilbur Wright, and Christianity have turned men’s hearts outward.  Men live for the first time in a wide daily consciousness of one another.

Alexander Hamilton, had really a rather timid and polite idea of what an aristocrat was and Jefferson had merely sketched out a ground plan for a democrat.  If Hamilton had been aristocratic in the modern sense, he would have devoted half his career to expressing a man like Jefferson; and if Jefferson had been more of a democrat, he would have had room in himself to tuck in several Alexander Hamiltons.  Either one of them would have been a Crowd-Man.

By a Crowd-Man I do not mean a pull-and-haul man, a balance of equilibrium between these two men, I mean a fusion, a glowed together interpenetration of them both.  They did not either of them believe in the people as much as a man made out of both of them would—­a really wrought-through aristocrat, a really wrought-through democrat or Crowd-Man, or Hero or Saviour.

* * * * *

I am afraid that some of us do not like the word Saviour as people think we ought to.  There seems to be something about the way many people use the word Saviour which makes it seem as if it had been dropped off over the edge of the world—­of a real world, of a man’s world.

I do not believe that Christ spent five minutes in His whole life in feeling like a Saviour.  He would have felt hurt if He had found any one saying He was a Saviour in the tone people often use.  He wanted people to feel as if they were like Him.  And the way He served them was by making them feel that they were.

I do not believe that Thomas Jefferson, if he were here to-day, would object to a hero, or aristocrat, a special expert or a genius in expressing crowds, if he lived and wrought in this spirit.

The final objection that people commonly make to heroes or to men of marked and special vision or courage is that they are not good for people, because people put them on pedestals and worship them.  They look up at them wistfully.  And then they look down on themselves.

But I have never seen a hero on a pedestal.

It is only the Carlyle kind of hero who could ever be put on a pedestal, or who would stay there if put there.