A leisurely person with an observant eye and a mind given over to rumination may station himself on any one of San Francisco’s prominent thoroughfares and be led into some interesting reflections by simply marking the speed with which the passing throngs go by him.
There is a great deal in this speed. It means more than rapid traveling up and down the street. And the significance of it is confined to San Francisco no more than is the habit of speed itself, which is a pedestrianic characteristic of the entire country, if not of the entire civilized world.
One must at first experience mild wonder at the haste which his sisters and brothers display in going by him as he stands under the protection of a doorway and gazes out upon them. Everybody appears to be in a most important hurry. Every face indicates a consuming determination to “get there” in the shortest possible space of time. So rigid are the countenances set in this unalterable purpose, that even the manners of their owners generally fail to assert themselves when the exigencies of personal encounters or collisions occur to warrant it; none of the conventions of the drawing-room prevail to divert our pedestrians from the one inveterate aim of annihilating space. Jostling and crowding, albeit spiced with smothered profanity or inaudible thoughts which ill become brother travelers, are the rule.
But after a moment’s reflection one perceives that in this regardless expense of speed lies the cause of the Nation’s, or mayhap of the human race’s, progress. As moves the individual in his intention to accomplish his certain little plan or bit of business, so moves the composite man, the community, the practical world. The individual is always characteristic of the multitude — his ways, in the average, are always synonymous with the definite results of his community’s ways, as evidenced in all the perfections and achievements of what we call modern inventions, or modern improvements. And in this respect of speedy traveling along the streets, the individual man’s relation to the age of progress in which he pursues his way is strikingly brought out.
One might demand a reason for so much haste, and deny that it is essentially characteristic of the Nation’s advancement, on the ground that a man might start earlier for his place of business and walk slower. Indeed he might. He might spend fewer moments over his morning pipe, or cut short his leisure time with baby in the back parlor, or he might in a hundred logical and convenient ways get started in good lime, instead of always late, to his office. And so, indeed, might the ducks out in Golden Gate Park walk about on the lawn all the while and never go into the water.
Our San Francisco crowds are human, and it is natural for a human individual to set the pace for the progress of his race. He sets it by walking fast, and his race corresponds with rapid strides in modern advancement. Wherefore let no man swear at the “madding crowds.” They verily are mad in their flights, but so is civilization in its flight of invention, penetration and achievement.
The San Francisco Call, March 27, 1897