thou a crowd for thy greatness. Then come with thy
crowd and we will deal with thee. It shall be even as thou wilt." The
pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, that men who
are of small or ordinary calibre can only be more pressed by it. They
are pressed smaller and smaller--the more they are civilized, the
smaller they are pressed; and we are being daily brought face to face
with the fact that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for
the evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd who can
withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say, the one solution of
a crowd civilization is the great-man solution--a solution which is none
the less true because by name, at least, it leaves most of us out or
because it is so familiar that we have forgotten it. The one method by
which a crowd can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the
great-man method--the method of crucifying and worshipping great men,
until by crucifying and worshipping great men enough, inch by inch, and
era by era, it is lifted to greatness itself.

Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of
infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock
protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived
to say to the older nations of the earth, "All men are created equal."
It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that
all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent.
better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would
not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had
said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had
ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years,
should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that
every man in America was free to try to be equal to. A civilization by
numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes,
could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to
live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the
hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question
whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall
among the civilizations of the earth. The main difference between the
heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and
the heroes who must contrive to proclaim fr