But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the
"L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that
the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human
history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison.
You see only a heaving mass of men and women who are not very well clad.
The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on
with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained
in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very
little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way
through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of
the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men
carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch
of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper
wrappers. But it is not an assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers,
or whatever class it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is
that most solemn of all things--a city crowd on its way home from the
day's work.
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