act.

I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next
four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.

Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down
in a minute after Chateau-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into
treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the
vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost--unholy,
cowardly, voiceless, helpless--just a light in its eyes--just a vast
national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.

Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to
salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists,
but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the
Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something
were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff.

It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in
this vague, breathy way.

The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done
and done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politic
people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if
it were as substantial as a coal strike--as what happened at Ypres,
Cambrai and Chateau-Thierry.

Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we
pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest
of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.

I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped
for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of
idealists, are true to the American character and real.

But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent.
Forty nations are depending on us--are waiting for us--in the world's
long desperate minutes--waiting for America to grow up.

This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and
religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its
daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful
evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from
this body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy
and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and
threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world.

All really religious men and all