By organizing our various impressions into a union, and
inducing them to work together, we are enabled to do collective
bargaining with the Universe.

If, for example, I were asked to tell what I think of the individuals
inhabiting the United States, I should have to give it up. Assuming a
round eighty million persons, all of whom it would be a pleasure to
meet, there must be, at the lowest computation, seventy-nine million,
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-five
people of whose characters I do not know enough to make my opinion of
any value. Of the remaining fragment of the population, my knowledge is
not so perfect as I would wish. As for the whole eighty million, suppose
I had to give a single thought to each person, I have not enough
cogitations to go around.

What we do is to stop the ruinous struggle of competing thoughts by
recognizing a community of interests and forming a merger, under the
collective term "American." Then all difficulties are minimized. Almost
all our theorizing about human affairs is carried on by means of these
symbols. Millions of different personalities are merged in one mental
picture. We talk of a class even more readily than we talk of an
individual.

This is all very well so long as we do not take these generalizations
too seriously. The mistake of the Doctrinaire lies not in classifying
people, but in treating an individual as if he could belong to only one
class at a time. The fact is that each one of us belongs to a thousand
classes. There are a great many ways of classifying human beings, and
as in the case of the construction of tribal lays, "every single one of
them is right," as far as it goes. You may classify people according
to race, color, previous condition of servitude, height, weight,
shape of their skulls, amount of their incomes, or their ability to
write Latin verse. You may inquire whether they belong to the class
that goes to church on Sunday, whether they are vaccinationists or
anti-vaccinationists, whether they like problem plays, whether they are
able to read a short passage from the Constitution of the United States,
whether they have dyspepsia or nervous prostration or only think they
have; or, if you will, you may make one sweeping division between the
sheep and the goats, and divide mankind according to location, as did
the good Boston lady who was accustomed to speak of those who lived out
of sight of the Massachusetts State H