--the first practical working belief the
next President of this country should have about the people.

Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief
about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President
for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and
reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of
America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a
people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were.

The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world
to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the
industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us
express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.

The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect
arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for
their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America,
which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they
ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he
bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good
advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to
the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite
safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor
unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to
be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels
he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is
doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now,
and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.

The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in
America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our
machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads.
Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers
and workmen to one another, caricature us.

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in
which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working
together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.

The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody
who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he o