boys marching under it as if it were a real
one!

We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--to
take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.

We make this week a wager to the world,--a four and a half billion dollar
dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the
American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and
hurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase Peace up,
that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations--into
the eternal underpinning of a world.

In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch,
all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake,
with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim
unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!

We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no
small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!

* * * * *

When I corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the last
advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--it
was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the
Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has
melted away into roar.

But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.

What The Air Line League is for in its national and international
organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to
answer the boy who stuck his foot in.

BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN

I

RECONSTRUCTION

I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero--that faint bodiless
phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the
People.

I have proceeded upon two premises.

A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the
mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost
trying to have a family.

A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing
what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and
self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family.

Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided
people off roughly into

Inventors Artists Hewers
or or
See-ers