with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it
is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one
that will be underwritten by the people.

The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the
great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that
will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate
the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted
people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping
from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have
courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice that
thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly
politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the
people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This
nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any
nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty
nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling
hope, to be trifled with.

So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way
to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real
spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their
eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they
take themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated
by acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without
giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President
can be ordered by a people.

We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the
wills of the people.

Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when
they meet.

In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers
across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can
put what they want before the country--a hundred million people in a
book can rise to make a motion.

We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to
which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late,
to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to
take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the
initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our
line, instead of toeing theirs, i