We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel—­the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds.

We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main emotions men are having to-day.  And the main emotion men are having to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization.  Every other important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from this one.  It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged to express.  Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World’s Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

* * * * *

After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear.  Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds.  As the crowds grow the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes.

CHAPTER III

THE MACHINE SCARE

I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London.  Most of the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by long-vanished hands.  As I stand and watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who loved them.

When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly in quite a new company.  So far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much.  Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were—­but the lines on the stones give no sign.  One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows