Of course, I can only speak for myself.  I do not deny that a little while at a time I can sit by a brook in the woods and be happy; but if, as it happens, I would rather have other people about me—­people who do not spoil things, I find that the machines about me everywhere have made most people very strange and pathetic in the woods.  They cannot sit by brooks, many of them; and when they come out to the sky, it looks to them like some mere, big, blue lead roof up over their lives.  Perhaps I am selfish about it, but I cannot bear to see people looking at the sky in this way....

* * * * *

So, as I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want most of all in this world is the inspired employer—­or what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the machines off the backs of the people and take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls.

If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people.

I believe that the time has come when the world is to make its last stand for idealism, great men, and crowds.

I believe that great men can be really great, that they can represent crowds.  I believe that crowds can be really great, that they can know great men.

The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first will probably be a kind of everyday great man or business statesman, the man who represents all classes, and who proves it in the way he conducts his business.

I have called this man the Crowdman.

I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired millionaire I have in mind, but I have known scores of men who have reminded me of him and of what he is going to be, and I am prepared to say that in spirit, or latent at least, he is all about me in the world to-day.  If it is proved to me that no such man exists, I am here to say there will be one.  If it is proved to me that there cannot be one, I will make one.  If it is proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of young men and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young mothers, and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the schools, I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one!  I say this with all reverence for other men’s desires and with all respect for natural prejudgments.  As I have conceived it, the one business of the world to-day is to find out what we are for and to find out what men in the world—­on the whole—­really want.  When men know what they want they get it.  Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life is due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get it, due to the passions and the dreams of men; and the one single way in which these wrong things will ever be overcome is with more passions and with more and mightier dreams of men.