nalyse his
mind and cure him of his anti-social tendencies.

I thought it a jolly good article, and when a prominent Sunday paper
returned the manuscript to me I was surprised. My surprise left me on
the following Sunday when the same paper blared forth an article by
Horatio Bottomley. His title was: "Wanted--the Cat!"

My article was more thoughtful, more humane, more scientific. Why, then,
was it suppressed? The answer is simple: it did not fit in with the
passions of the crowd. It becomes clear why our best public
men--editors, cabinet ministers, publicists are not great thinkers. They
must keep in touch with the crowd; they must express the emotions of the
crowd.

The attitude of the crowd to the anti-crowd person, the Crank, is never
one of contemptuous indifference. It is always distinctly hostile. If I
travel by tube from Hampstead to Piccadilly without a hat the other
travellers stare at me with mild hostility. Why? Conway, in _The Crowd
in Peace and War_, an excellent book, says that this hostility comes from
fear. A crowd is always afraid of another crowd, because the only force
that can destroy a crowd is a rival crowd. Every individual who differs
from the herd is suspect because he is perhaps the nucleus of a rival
crowd. That is why the world always crucifies its Christs.

The Crank School, then, is a school where anti-crowd people send their
children. It is the school _par excellence_ of the Intelligentsia. The
tendency of every Crank School is to exaggerate the difference between
the crank and the crowd; hence its adoption of an ideal and its
concomitant crazes. I cannot for the life of me see why ideals are
associated with vegetarianism, long hair, Grecian dress, and sandals,
just as I cannot see why art should attach itself to huge bow-ties, long
hair, and foot-long cigarette holders.

The Crank School holds up an ideal. It plasters its walls with busts of
Walt Whitman and Blake; it hangs bad reproductions of Botticelli round
the walls; it sings songs to Freedom; it rhapsodises about Beethoven and
Bach. The children of the Crank Schools are, I rejoice to say, not
cranks. They leave the boredom of Bach and seek the jazz record on the
gramophone; they ignore the pictures of Whitman and Blake and study _The
Picture Show_ or _Funny Bits_. Many of them think more highly of Charlie
Chaplin than of William Shakespeare.

I say again that I rejoice in this; it serves the Crank School p