Engineers
Those who work
Men who invent Men who invent out and finish
things to do. ways and means what the see-ers
and make it possible and engineers
to do them. have begun.

I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy
or rather this biology of a nation's human nature.

In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with
the reconception of a nation.

Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a
boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the
American people.

In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but
the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great
nation is to fall in love.

I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts--that
is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an
understanding and get together.

I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by
the people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn
into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great
hour in history, a great people may be born again.

II

NATIONAL BIOLOGY

A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born
again is the finding of oneself, oneself,--the spiritual invention of
one's own life.

Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who
have done it.

When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is
not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it.
And nobody else could help it.

When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can
know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around
can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first,
America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has
taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess.

A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut.

But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only
manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing
herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion,