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Four Minute Essays By Dr. Frank Crane: 101 total pages.

us to go where we would not, to do what we hate, to say what we do not believe. Like a magnet it draws us down, down with the innumerable feet that tread the broad way. Like a formless fear it curtails our liberty, destroys our individuality, reduces us to the dead level of mediocrity. Like a huge spiritual press it forces us into set, conventional, artificial shapes. As by a wave, a heaving decuman, we are 38 FOUR MINUTE ESSAYS swept on to corporate crimes, follies, cruel-ties, stupidities, of which as individuals we would not have dreamed. What is this pressure? It is that gray, shadowy mass we call "They." The ghost fingers of the many manipulate us in little things as in great affairs. "They" determine our clothing, our speech, our manners, our morality, our sins. Scientifically we name this adumbration heredity and environment. Against it the soul of each man is in un­ceasing struggle. Most tragedies, from AEschylus to Ibsen, are descriptions of the desperate human unit striving hopelessly to free itself from this iron rim.

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