me,
put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White
House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people
and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.

The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak.
They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they
could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees
best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White
House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this
country as clean as a whistle.

IV

THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION

I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to
the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and
lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about
being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live
the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would
refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult
business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the
United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my
religion together into it.

The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition
constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One
might say cooeperation of course, but what makes cooeperation powerful and
what selects the people who shall lead cooeperation--what gives it
character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him
to find a way to do or not to do certain things--when he competes.

Competition--the way a man threads his way through the men who compete
with him--would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of
spiritual values--the real monastery of modern life.

All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to
refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially,
or clap them into jail.

There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and
be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them.
As for the rest of us, competition--fair, manly, sporting competition,
keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge
of ourselves and others that make cooeperation a noble as well as
pra