ld only be possible through an
unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day,
every day until the war was over.

Our people did not believe this idea.

How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning
the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that
something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The
Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the
country needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire the
people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to
teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the
people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of
America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the
Germans.

I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand
Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike
Sunday we had during the war.

A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had
for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.

I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about
human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and
looked down Madison Avenue.

I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred
thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the
loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon
the earth--a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to
stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I
looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.

It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three
thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the
corner and told me--one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer
up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans
with the silence on this street."

I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the
invisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over
me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were
reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a
thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San
Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.