th one touch of a
button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of
the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them,
snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped them
back into their ten thousand cities into the common life.

The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting
up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who
would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross--the
redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a
whole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole world
yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal
complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace!

What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was,
the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is.

In the Red Cross a hundred million people--American people, had looked at
the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same
thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same
thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a
hundred million people became as the feet of one man.

The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the
attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety
mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the
armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up
in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a
pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of
the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when
it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when
it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it,
at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to
any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.

If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one
man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his
opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning
the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse
as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to
turn it to the left and then I would leave him