rim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian
Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our
time. Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of
business and singing great hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in
it--prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below.

I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it--one more
look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyielding, alive, sinewy,
imperturbable, lifting up within itself the steel and soul of the world.
I am content to go to sleep.

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