ying as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human
nature, masters in not treating men alike--Crowbars, lemonade-straws,
chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and AEolian harps by the people,
for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and
will be used for what they are for.

This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in
government.

* * * * *

Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer
Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man
like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation
half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with
them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow
human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them?

Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but
the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses
probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not
really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the
telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all,
all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.

A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who
inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who
swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says "Come!"
is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real
live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,--men who can
express a people in a business--to express them.

The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come"
goes.

We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the
White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White
House.

I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We
have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation
and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human
and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a
place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would
make a poet out of anybody.

A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a
belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the
world is impracticable or visionary.

So we do not say