shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its
own House.

There must be things--broad simple things about Capital and Labor people
can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President
timidly stop guessing what they want.

It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer
for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius--a seer, a
man who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes not
only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly
unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party
in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in
the White House.

The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body--to
find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without
saying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word
our President, our Politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put up
naturally with having to be in the Senate--the kind of men who can feel
happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the
People--the real people in this country are like.

I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so
that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead,
instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can
do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to
prove to a President what we are like and what we want--so that each man
of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a
President with--something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl
(like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years.

IV

REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST

When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he
meant something and knew what he meant.

When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him
bewhiffle it.

When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of
Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and
when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some
mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of
The Invisible.

Business talks bass. Patriotism is an AEolian harp.

During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating
America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily f