Crowds | Page 5

the one great outstanding fact and result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the Hebrews for two thousand years.
And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal, masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very small and unimportant question--"Where is it that I really want to go myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly considered, I really want to be in?"
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds' machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world, until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a breath of air and looked at the light. The book is merely a life-preserver--that is all; and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the man is representative, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is. Anybody else who can use it is welcome to it.
* * * * *
The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists in wanting it still harder and still harder until one can express it.
This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new world. Here are all these other people who have to be asked. And until one wants it hard enough to say it, to get it outside one's self, possibly make it catching, nothing happens.
If one were to point out one trait rather than another that makes Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has never wanted anything.
If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which Mr. Shaw had merely said what he wanted himself, it is quite possible this book would not have been written. Even if Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted, had ever shown in any corner of any book that one man's wanting something in this world amounted to anything, or could make any one else want it, or could make any difference in him, or in the world around him, perhaps I would not have written this book.
Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen in America, in England, I have found, not the things that they wanted in their books, but always these same deadly lists or bleak inventories--these prairies of things that they did not want.
Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them harder. And Mr. Wells's measles and children's diseases, too. I knew already that I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me--nor could it supply any other man with