n emotion men are having
to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the
nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other
important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from
this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the
thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged
to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret
anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd
principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central
place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and
bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish
and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of
his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

* * * * *

After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear.
Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow
the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the
little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and
beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes.

CHAPTER III

THE MACHINE SCARE

I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by
an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of
the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and
reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by
long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and
cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had
been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and
of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who
loved them.

When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to
the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly
in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the
gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather
thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of
course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be
true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim,
capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness
and reverence before their dead as the others were--but th