ss stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes and
begin fighting one another, why--because now the soldiers we have been
helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more
than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting
Germans--why should we stop helping them?

On the day after the armistice--the very day when our war with just
Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate
war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins,
why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the
men of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peace
basis?

The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years the
vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the
liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now--before the
same people--that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the
vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children
fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the
liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to
wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germans
is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in
the world.

I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made
the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted
representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find
themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime,
most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a
world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose
their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations,
forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have
helped before.

The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the Red
Cross to do--the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill,
the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on
following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on
with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be
bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not
to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.

VI

WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE L