a supreme catholic, summing-up
individualist, a great man or artist--a man who is all of us in one--to
express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go,
what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want.

This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world is
collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible.

The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the rest of the
world if they were to have one) is the one great outstanding fact and
result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but
they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out
of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the
Hebrews for two thousand years.

And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made
it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal,
masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see
all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the
question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"

I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and
outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and
say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and
where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what
might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very
small and unimportant question--"Where is it that I really want to go
myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly
considered, I really want to be in?"

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he
can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been
so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to
my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me
what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never
have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange
a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as
an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book
is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one
man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds'
machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world,
until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a
breath of air a