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President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the
nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.

At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be
perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next
President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and
hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times
of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another.
Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be
lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can
take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who
in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how
to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten
blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where
they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we
ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans,
wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--partitioning
each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts,
bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might
keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers,
that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks.
One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every
man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of
America from his idea of America.

If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear
the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel
lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and
labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off
as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the
American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway
and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W.
could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with
each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole
hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of
people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each
audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and sa