end either for Senator Reed or
for America in but one way.

It's going to end in a plunge of the ship.

It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the
deck the last minute.

I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that
from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of
Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck
and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may
have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a
practical or business-like example for his country.

I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present
the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line
League.

The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it)
that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war
and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make
democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and
they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in
industry and keep up with Germans in peace.

Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial
democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing,
a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and
a good many people in America--extreme reactionaries and extreme
radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.

If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America
to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is
living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead
for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty
nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and
grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before
they murder ours.

Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right.

Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to
challenging the Germans--to telling them that they are as fooled about
what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it
could do in war.

The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else
to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in
industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight