orporation--that had a soul, and consequently worked.

BOOK TWO

LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD

TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip--drip.

Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.

CHAPTER I

SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD

It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.

Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.

But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the
crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is.

_I want to be good._

And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and
live all alone on an island in the sea.

I go a step further.

I believe that the crowds want to be good.

But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the
sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am
going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member
of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a
mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other
what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and
we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite
agreement on our two main points.

1. We want to be good.

2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience
for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want
to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.

The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and
exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but

3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.

4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world
hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular
planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful,
squirming state.

It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new,
clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient
people on it, and then expec