men to buy a particular thing from him can buy the most of it, and therefore buy it the cheapest, and therefore get more men to buy from him; and having bought this particular thing cheaper than all men could buy it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then, having all the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell them for a little more than nothing to everybody. Hence the department store—the syndicate of department stores—the crowd principle in commerce.
The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps passing by it in twenty-four hours. The value of a railroad is the number of people near it who cannot keep still. If there are a great many of these people, the railroad runs its trains for them. If there are only a few, though they be heroes and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons, trains shall not be run for them. The railroad is the characteristic property and symbol of property in this modern age, and the entire value of a railroad depends upon its getting control of a crowd—either a crowd that wants to be where some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants a great many tons of something that some other crowd has.
When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the same principle running through them both. The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity. A man's destiny is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul—if he has a soul—is an atom acted upon by a majority of other atoms.
When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find the same emphasis upon them all—the emphasis of mass, of majority. Not that the church exists for the masses—no one claims this—but that, such as it is, it is a mass church. While the promise of Scripture, as a last resort, is often heard in the church about two or three gathered together in God's name, the Church is run on the working conviction that unless the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred in God's name, He will not pay any particular attention to them, or, if He does, He will not pay the bills. The church of our forefathers, founded on personality, is exchanged for the church of democracy, founded on crowds; and the church of the moment is the institutional church, in which the standing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the congregation. The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman, is seen on every hand amongst us—the agent of an audience, who, instead of telling an audience what they ought to do, runs errands for them morning and noon and night. With coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he carefully picks his way. He does his people as much good as they will let him, tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at last, and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered by majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a new world without the help of majorities at all.
Theology reveals the same tendency. The measuring by numbers is found in all belief, the same cringing before masses of little facts instead of conceiving the few immeasurable ones. Helpless individuals mastered by crowds are bound to believe in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He stands in the midst of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His worlds: to those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens, who, in a kind of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would say), seems to want everybody to be good and hopes they will, but does not quite know what to do about it if they are not.
Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea of hell (in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which), and every civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civilization with sovereign men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd civilization, reflecting its mood on the heavens, is inclined to a pleasant, large-minded God, eternally considering everybody and considering everything, but inefficient withal, a kind of legislature of Deity, typical of representative institutions at their best and at their worst.
If we pass from our theology to our social science we come to the most characteristic result of the crowd principle that the times afford. We are brought face to face with Socialism, the millennium machine, the Corliss engine of progress. It were idle to deny to the Socialist that he is right—and more right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that there is a great wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly trying to create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet, that shall be large enough to swallow the wrong we have. The term "Socialism" stands for many things, in its present state; but so far as the average Socialist is concerned, he may be defined as an idealist who turns to materialism, that is, to mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men by all other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the Socialist expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying the other.
The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be produced by setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals is Socialism, as the average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences for heroes, to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless to do right because it would be impossible to do wrong. It is a philosophy of helplessness, which, even if it succeeds in helplessly carrying its helplessness out—in doing away with suffering, for instance—can only do it by bringing to pass a man not alive enough to be capable of suffering, and putting him in a world where suffering and joy alike would be a bore to him.
But the main importance of Socialism in this connection lies in the fact that it does not confine itself to sociology. It has become a complete philosophy of life, and can be seen penetrating with its subtle satire on human nature almost everything about us. We have the cash register to educate our clerks into pure and honest character, and the souls of conductors can be seen being nurtured, mile after mile, by fare-recorders. Corporations buy consciences by the gross. They are hung over the door of every street car. Consciences are worked by pulling a strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth, and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to vote the way they think. And when, in the course of human events, we came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman's right to dress in good taste—that is, appropriately for what she is doing, what did we proceed to do to bring it about? Conventions were held year after year, and over and over, to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress reform associations were founded, syndicates of courage were established all over the land—all in vain; and finally—Heaven help us!—how was this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished? By an invention of two wheels, one in front of the other. It was brought about by the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut in two short years.
Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies. It is the socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, there is some machine that can surely be invented that will take the place of men: not only of hands and feet, but of all the old-fashioned and lumbering virtues, courage, patience, vision, common sense, and religion itself, out of which they are made.
But we depend upon machinery not only for the things that we want, but for the brains with which we decide what we want. If a man wants to know what he thinks, he starts a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he calls a convention. From the National Undertakers' Association and the Launderers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World's Congress—the Midway Pleasance of Piety—the Convention strides the world with vociferousness. The silence that descends from the hills is filled with its ceaseless din. The smallest hamlet in the land has learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It, as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times.
Every idea we have is run into a constitution. We cannot think without a chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws. Literature is a club. Philosophy is a society. Our reforms are mass meetings. Our culture is a summer school. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without Carnegie hall and forty vice-presidents. We remember our poets with trustees, and the immortality of a genius
