It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world.  I would rather have said that business needed a steeple before until I saw the Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the streets.  But I had always wanted (without knowing it), in a modern office building, a great solemn bell to remind us what the common day was.  I like to hear it striking a common hour and what can be done in it.  I stop in the street to listen—­to listen while that great hive of people tolls—­tolls not the reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the religion of business—­of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the women.

CHAPTER X

THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL

The imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most successfully when it is appealed to in one of four ways: 

    THE STUPENDOUS.  THE UNUSUAL.  THE MONOTONOUS.  THE SUCCESSFUL.

Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or the successful are the most in evidence, and have something showy about them, so that we can look at them afterward, and point out at a glance what they have done.  But probably the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its imagination, the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a crowd’s ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds are like inside—­is the Monotonous.

The man who tells the most people what they shall be like in this world is not the great man or the unusual man.  He is the monotonous man.

He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious beat and rhythm with which we live our daily lives.

If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines the crowd’s monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives—­the man, if we can find him, who arranges the crowd’s heart-beat.

It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines the crowd’s heart-beat.  The man who has the most dominion over the imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is the man to whom we look for our daily bread.