e one the new President
is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which
little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his
sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.

It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President
and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to
try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this
time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer.

All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a
President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot
collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all
you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him
up--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent
action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his
employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him
what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can
the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it
is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this?

I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a
lonely President the next four years.

The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next
election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people
will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that
will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not
let him feel lonely with us.

The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the Public has
every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and
treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works
as badly one way as it does the other.

The President does not want a Ghost.

The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.

The object of this book is to resent--to expose to everybody as unfair
and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front
of it, "The Ghost in The White House."

The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out
of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to
try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all
time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world,
from being an inarticulate,