II

THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE

The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other
nations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to
do it--is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of
these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to
what we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attention
first and by making our own sacrifice at home first.

We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown
self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in
emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision
for others and gave a body to their vision at home.

I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in
the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living
every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and
hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as
the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight.

I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that
one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in
an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped
back into the little life.

I do not know as I would have minded them--three thousand miles of them
going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I
have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to
move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had
to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and
driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them
daily together.

The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in
living--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily
trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much
more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and
exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather
rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever
dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the
leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war
with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty
nations with themselves, at the very moment when wi