nly speak for myself. I do not deny that a little
while at a time I can sit by a brook in the woods and be happy; but if,
as it happens, I would rather have other people about me--people who do
not spoil things, I find that the machines about me everywhere have made
most people very strange and pathetic in the woods. They cannot sit by
brooks, many of them; and when they come out to the sky, it looks to
them like some mere, big, blue lead roof up over their lives. Perhaps I
am selfish about it, but I cannot bear to see people looking at the sky
in this way....

* * * * *

So, as I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want
most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or what I have
called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the
machines off the backs of the people and take the machines out of their
wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls.

If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the
social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation
and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people.

I believe that the time has come when the world is to make its last
stand for idealism, great men, and crowds.

I believe that great men can be really great, that they can represent
crowds. I believe that crowds can be really great, that they can know
great men.

The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first will
probably be a kind of everyday great man or business statesman, the man
who represents all classes, and who proves it in the way he conducts his
business.

I have called this man the Crowdman.

I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired millionaire
I have in mind, but I have known scores of men who have reminded me of
him and of what he is going to be, and I am prepared to say that in
spirit, or latent at least, he is all about me in the world to-day. If
it is proved to me that no such man exists, I am here to say there will
be one. If it is proved to me that there cannot be one, _I will make
one_. If it is proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of
young men and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young
mothers, and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the
schools, I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write
the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one! I say this