ke
tackling the high cost of living.

What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America--the
all-class class, class-conscious--is to organize the consumers of America
locally and nationally so that the comparative cooeperation of crowds and
geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all
lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the
label of modern successful business life.

The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:

A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers
or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert
attention of the men who make them.

The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has
been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon
to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait
on them while they whip the Germans.

What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to
arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of
the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to
keep this up.

Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our
experts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--are
really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting
on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?

What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds
can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and
power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.

Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and
powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping
the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?

XVI

THE TOWN PENDULUM

The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches
will act as a Listening Machine.

A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward.
Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the
same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people
listen until they understand.

There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League
who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in
motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass.