Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS

But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people.

The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position.

The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they are like and what they want, and that business is another way.

Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses them where their being expressed counts the most?

The people have a Government. And the people have Business.

What is a Government for?

What is Business for?

Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of supplying them.

They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with and prefer to have prosper.

And the business men are not only in the most strategic and competent position to find out what the people who buy want, but to find out too, what the people who sell want. They are in the best position to know, and to know intimately, what the salesmen and saleswomen want and what they want to be and what they want to do or not do.

They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard to the conditions in the factories from which their goods come and with regard to what the employers, stockholders, foremen and workmen in those factories want.

What is more to the point, these same business men, when they have once found out just what it is the people want, are the only men who are in a position, all in the same breath, without asking anybody and without arguing with anybody, without meddling or convincing anybody—to get it for them.

Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be called, controlling business.

The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them?

If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting what I am doing for him—if I once get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s Weekly or with Horatio Bottomley or with the Daily Mail or the Times, with a score of other people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his back?

There is a very simple rule for it.

The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make one's back so efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.

The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself. And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.

This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be so good that he could not afford not being good too.

In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n^th power, in what might be called a kind of larger syndicalism.

The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves," is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories ourselves."

What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation, begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the factories?

Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all the world most competent to study together the working details of human nature, to act for themselves in self-respecting man-fashion and without whining at a nation.

Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they want from, could know more about human nature than they do? Are they not the men of all others, all up and down that little strip of Oxford Street, who devote their entire time to human nature? They are in the daily profession of knowing the soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and about what people will probably think. They are intimate with their peccadillos in what they want to wear and in what they want to eat; they have learned their likes and dislikes in human nature; they know what they will support and what they will defy in human nature, in clerks, and in stores, and in storekeepers.

And these things that they have learned about human nature (in themselves and other people) they have learned not by talking about human nature but by a grim daily doing things with it.

These things being so, it would almost seem that these people and people like them were qualified to act, and as they happen to be in the one strategic position, both employers and employees alike, to act and to act for themselves and act directly and act together, it will not be very long, probably, before the nation will be very glad to have them do it.

It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour and all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and crying "Help!" and calling in some third person to settle family difficulties that can be better settled by being faced and thought out in private, is an inefficient and incompetent thing to do.

I am only speaking for myself but certainly if I were an employer or an employee, I would not want to wait for an election a year away or to wait for the great engineering problem of compelling my member of Parliament by my one vote to act for me.

Perhaps workingmen in England and America are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving conditions of workingmen. Possibly women are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving the conditions of working women.

Possibly a woman could do more behind a counter or by buying a store than by voting to have some man she has read about in a paper, improve business by talking about it in the House of Commons.

There is also a kind of program or vision of action one can use as a customer as well as an employer or employee.

I might speak for myself.

I have about so much money I spend every year in buying things. I have proposed to study with my money every firm on which I spend it. I propose to take away my trade from the firm that does the least as it should and give it to the firm that does the most as it should. I will vote with my entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of employers who can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep the kind of salesmen and saleswomen I choose to do business with.

This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public, of the way for a people to express itself and to get what it wants.

What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about me so far as I go, as one member of the public. As I am only one person every item of the news about me must be put where it works. I will deal directly with the news of what I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can give it to me when they know it.

News is the real government now and always of this world.

When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, obviously the best art-form for telling news to employers and business men—the news of what we want and what we do not want and of what we want in them as well as in the things they sell, is to tell them the news in the language they have studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars, and cents, and by trading somewhere else.

Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind of store I know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them look a minute at the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk out with it quietly.

I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall circulate in my money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion, my gospel or news for this world, news about what I want and about what I will have in a world, if I cannot make every dollar, every shilling I earn, go through the world and sing my own little world-song in it, may I never have another shilling or earn another dollar as long as I live!

The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once more, fills me with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what a bargain it is and how I can use it twice over, thinking of the dollar's worth of news, to say nothing of the dollar's worth of things that belong with a dollar!

What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do and we will not do?

This news about us is the religion in us.

The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of late as to just where his religion is located. He has come to see that real religion in a man, very conveniently located (immediately at hand in him and personally directed), is his own action, his own divine "I will" or "I won't."

He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured, godlike "I will" and "I won't "—or News about himself.

PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES

We are deeply interested in the United States just now, in seeing what will be the fate of President Wilson's government in getting men to be good. The fate of a government in 1913 may be said to stand on the government's psychology or knowledge of human nature or of what might be called human engineering, its mastery of the principles of lifting over in great masses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great masses of people's minds over as on some huge national derrick up on The White House, from one lookout on life to another.

There are certain aspects of human nature when power is being applied to it in this way, and when it is being got to be good, that may not be beside the point.

If one could drop in on a government and have a little neighbourly chat with it, as one was going by, I think I would rather talk with it (especially our government, just now), about Human Nature than about anything.

I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a government to be a plain and homely way.

I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people are getting it to be good. What a government thinks about them might possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It.

The first observation is this:

The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not marry.

Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of one that they must.

Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to what one really wants to do.

Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not conducive to goodness. The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a contradiction in terms. It is a principle that would make wicked people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never worked with people since.

It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.

All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups or classes of people who are especially not what they should be. The people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in common. There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once more to get them to be good.

They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good and cannot do it.

When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he sits down and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying to be good at all. He is trying to be not bad.

A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process, by being not bad, and it is still harder for him and for everybody, when other people try to do it—those who are near him, and it is still, still harder for a President down in Washington to do it.

An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be got to keep up an interest very long in being not bad. Being not bad is a glittering generality. It is like being not extravagant or economical.

Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable degree to a pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have reflected upon their experiences, have come to conclusions that may not be very far from the point in a fine art like getting one's self to be good or getting other people to be good.

To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the street, looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of things one will not buy, cannot be said to be a practicable method of attaining economy.

The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to upon the opposite principle. Even if the good thing he tries for is merely a negative good thing like economy, he instinctively seeks out some positive way of getting it.

A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be economical, or of getting his wife to be economical, does not make a start by sitting down with a pencil and making out a list, by concentrating his mind on rows of things that he and his family must get along without. He knows a better way. He goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a big shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand he cannot get. As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he will get it.

When he goes home, he goes home thinking. And the family all go home thinking.

Then economy sets in. The reason most people make a failure of their economy is that they are not artistic with it, they do not enjoy it. They do not pick out anything to enjoy their economy with.

With some people an automobile would work better than a Steinway Grand and there are as many ways, of course, of practising the Steinway Grand principle in not being bad as there are people, but they all consist apparently in selecting some big, positive thing that one wants to do, which logically includes and bundles all together where they are attended to in a lump, all the things that one ought not to do.

Most sins (every one who has ever tried them knows this) most sins are not really worth bothering with, each in detail, even the not-doing them and the most practical, firm method of getting them out of the way (thousands of them at once, sometimes, with one hand) is to have something so big to live for that all the things that would like to get in the way, and would like to look important, look, when one thinks of it, suddenly small.

Now it naturally seems to some of us, the best way for Mr. Wilson's government to do in getting the Trusts to give up lying and stealing, is going to be to place before them quietly a few really big, interesting, equally exciting things that Trusts can do, and then dare them, as in some great game or tournament of skill—all the people looking on—dare them, challenge them like great men, to do them.

There are three ideas President Wilson may have of the government's getting people to be good.

First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.)

Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.)

Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.)

The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The second, means government by Usurpation, that is, the moment a man amounts to enough to choose to do right or do wrong of his own free will, the moment he is a man, in other words, being so afraid of him and of his being a man, that we all, in a kind of panic, shove into his life and live it for him—this is Socialism, a scared machine that scared people have invented for not letting people choose to do right because they may choose to do wrong.

The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them be self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily good people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men by trying it.

Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake system, a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten. The question that faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, "Is a government or is it not a moral-brake system—a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten?"

But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will?

Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear, inspired statement of what it wants—a government that has only tried to say what it does not want, is not a government.

The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants.

The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement.

How shall this statement be made?

THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO

It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things.

One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges God, he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity.

How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in trying to win them—how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a Low Voice?

A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone.

The tone of a government is the government.

If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three principles.

These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated as three principles or as three personal traits.

First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.)

Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.)

Third, by being specific, by seeing the universal in the particular. (Like any artist or man who does things.)

The value of being affirmative and the value of being concrete have already been touched upon. There remains the value of being specific.

The trouble with most people in being economical with their money is, that when they spend it, they spend it on something in particular, and when they save it, they try to save it in a kind of general way. The same principle applies to doing right. It is because when people do right, they do it in a kind of general pleasant, abstract way, and when they do wrong they always do something in particular, that they are so Wicked.

A man will do almost anything to save his life at a particular place and at a particular time, say at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, if he is drowning, but if he has a year to save it in, a year of controlling his appetites, of daily, detailed mastering of his spirit, of not taking a piece of mince pie, of stopping his work in time and of going to bed early, he will die.

It is easier when one is going under water for the third time and sees a rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the rope, reach up to forty more years of one's life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one's life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the end of one's year at the tiptop of one's being, as if it had only taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the creative imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily, detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its setting of the whole—going without a piece of mince pie. If one could only make one's self see the piece of mince pie as it is, it would not be difficult. If one could see it on the plate there and see the not taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little triangular link of coupling in the chain that keeps one holding on forty years longer to this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a plate would become a Vision.

This seems to be the principle that works best in getting other people to be good.

A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds for a long time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the trouble we were going to have in curbing the eagerness of the Trusts.

Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them.

What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that they did not want.

The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each other's heels, asking the government to please investigate them. The more they can get the people to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them.

All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern business will change. First the expression will change and then the face itself.

A specific government will not need to be specific many times.

It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly, empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they thought that they thought that they wanted....

"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative, successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their business says or seems to say they wanted.

"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.

"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associating almost exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers, hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have grown into them.

"This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful to them,' the government will then say, and dismiss the subject."

What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a nation in one specific, particular man who expresses everybody.

This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions and services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific man.

The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people's vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole, he governs the people.

He is the Chancellor of the People's Attention.

The business of being a President is the business of focusing the vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to be seen by, while he is doing it.

The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour. The Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both listen to It, understand It and act on It.

When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,—all its methods and its motives—and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative. "Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses himself would have done it.

It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant, crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.

By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the nation's championship of the men that had been defeated in the competition with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail.

We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men against machines but we could not prove it.

Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we liked, we could swing our hats.

Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the American people really like?

The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find out. All the people find out.

In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive part of being a President of the United States—the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the position from being a position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what Americans really want.

He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country. "Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!"

The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is the advertising in it.

Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie Bashkirtseff's.

Twenty nations read the little book.

One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of the United States. It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one could reach up to and ring! But it is better than that. One touches a button at one's desk if one is President of the United States, a nation looks up. He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes away a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin's engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this! He has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it. Did you know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS? And here is a man like this! Which do you prefer? Which are you really like?"

There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913, like saying "Look! Look!"

Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, "Look! look! look! look!!!—President Wilson says it once and without exclamation points. Skyscrapers listen to him! Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world. And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams."

Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says, "Look!"

Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like twenty thousand field-glasses that he could hand out every morning and lend to people to look through—he would not have had to say, "Thou shalt not."

The precise measure of the governing power a man can get out of the position of being President of the United States to-day is the amount of advertising for the people, of the people, and by the people he can crowd every morning, every week, into the papers of the country.

By his being the President of what people think, by his dictating the subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out the men whom the people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meeting of ninety million men we call the United States—comes to order.

THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!"

Our American President, if one merely reads what the Constitution says about him, is a rather weak-looking character.

The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody in particular—if it could be helped. They were discouraged about allowing governments to be efficient. Not very much that was constructive to do was handed over to him. And the most important power they thought it would do for him to have was the veto or power to say "No."

Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they would have allowed more people to have some; or if they had believed in democracy more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought it would do to let them have leaders, but they had just got away. They felt timid about human nature and decided that the less constructive the government was and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to interpret a people, to make opportunities and turn out events, the better.

Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable, water-tight arrangement for keeping a government from letting in an idea or ever having one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody, could have been conceived than the Constitution of the United States, as the average President interprets it.

Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep any other branch from doing anything, and then the people, every four years, look the whole country over for some new man they think will probably leave them alone more than anybody—and put him in for President.

He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for four years. Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into real life and begins to do things.

This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical American President. Merely reading the Constitution or the lives of the Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, "What is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other people's duties—what is there that is going to prevent him, with his school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from being a teachery or preachery person—a kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to Business?

News.

The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection important people have—that nearly everybody has (except ordinary people) to news—especially editors and publishers.

It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One set of people in this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo! shoo! SHSH! SHSH!"

Then I realize I live in an editor's world. I am expected to be in the world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.

Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me.

I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of climbing up to News.

I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic curves of truth on them the editors have laid out for me and for all of us. Then I looked at the world and asked myself, "Who are the men in this world, if any, who are able to walk on the Grass, who cut across the little park paths when they like?"

And as fate would have it (it was during the Roosevelt administration), the first two men I came on who seemed to be stamping about in the newspapers quite a little as they liked were the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States.

Just how much governing can a President do?

How many columns a day is he good for, how many acres of attention every morning in the papers of the country—all these white fields of attention, these acres of other people's thoughts, can he cover?

How many square miles of the people's thoughts can he spread out at breakfast tables, lift up in a thousand thousand trolleys before their faces?

I have seen the white fields of attention filled with the footprints of his thoughts, of his will, of his desires!

I have seen that the President is the Editor of that vast, anonymous, silent newspaper, written all the night, written all the day, and softly published across a country—the newspaper of people's thoughts.

I have seen the vision of the forests he has cast down, ground into headlines, into editorials, into news. Mountains and hills are laid bare to say what he thinks. Thousands of presses throb softly and the white reels of wood pulp fly into speech. Thousands of miles of paper wet with the thoughts of a people roll dimly under ground in the night.

The President is saying Look! in the night!

The newsboys hasten out in the dawn. They cry in the streets!

THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?"

If news is governing, how does the President do his governing?

By being News, himself.

By using his appointing power and putting other men who are News Themselves, news about American human nature—where all the people will see it.

By telling the people directly (when he feels especially asked) news about what is happening in his mind—news about what he believes.

By telling the people sometimes (as candidly as he can without giving the people's enemies a chance to stop him), what he is going to do next, sketching out in order of time, and in order of importance, his program of issues.

By telling the people news about their best business men, the business men and inventors who, in their daily business, free the energies, unshackle the minds and emancipate the genius of the people.

By telling these business men news about the people—and interpreting the people to them.

It is by being news to the people himself that all the other news a President can get into his government counts.

A man is a man according to the amount of news there is in him.

One of the most important facts about news is that while it can be distributed by machines, machines cannot make it, and as a rule they do not understand it. Important and critical news is almost always fresh and made by hand the first time. Most of the popular news as to what is practical in American polities for the last forty years has been produced by political machines, and of course men who were a good deal like machines were the best men to finish the ideas off and to carry them out.

And now one more hand-made man has been allowed to us.

The machines run very still in the White House.

The people of this country no longer go by the White House on their way to their business and just hear it humdrumming and humdrumming behind the windows as of yore. The nation stands in crowds around the gates and would like to see in. The people wonder. They wonder a million columns a day what is inside.

What is inside?

An American who governs by being news, himself.

The first thing that the people demand from our President now is that he shall be news himself. The news that they have selected to know first during the next four years—have put into the White House to know first is Woodrow Wilson.

"Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God's name?" the steeples and smoking chimneys, the bells and whistles, the Yales and Harvards, and the little country schools, the crowds in the streets, and the corn in the fields all say, "Who Are You?"

Then the people listen. They listen to his "I wills" and "I won'ts" for news about him. They look for news about him in the headlines he steers into the papers every morning, in the events he makes happen, in the editorials he makes men think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the National Wire—in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their long, patient, hopeful answer to their question, "Who Are You, Woodrow Wilson?"

THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?"

But if the President governs first by being news himself, he governs second by his appointments, by gathering about him other men who are news to people, too.

One need not divide people into good and bad, because the true line of division between good and bad instead of being between one man and another, is apt to be as a matter of fact and experience cut down through the middle of each of us.

But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting good things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over in the middle of some of us, than it is in others. Taking a life-average in any moral or social engineering feat, in any correct calculation of structural strain, how far over this line cuts through in a man, has to be reckoned with.

The president by appointing certain men to office, saying "I will" and "I won't" to certain types of men, in saying who shall be studied by the people, who shall be read as documents of our national life, puts, if not the most important, at least the most lively and telling news about his administration into print.

We watch our President acting for us, telling us news about what we are like, sorting men out around him the way ninety million people would sort them out if they were there to do it.

The President's appointments may be said to be in a way the breath of the nation.

With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr. Taft did not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it a little that there came such an outbreak at the end. Perhaps it is because Mr. Taft looked at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the country all the while looking on, and said, "Ballinger is the kind of man our people prefer, and Pinchot is not," that the people broke out so amazingly, so incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that a man who could pick out men for them like this would not do—as things are just now anyway—for a President of the United States.

NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT

A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE!"

The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.

The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, butting, good-natured familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless, relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, "Here we are! What are you believing this morning? Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as if you believed in us? Did you get anybody to believe in us? Who are the men you say are like us? What are they like this morning?

"We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once more. How do you think you are turning out yourself, Mr. President? Are you what you thought you would be? Do you think it is a good time for us to decide this morning what you are really like? And, after all, Mr. President—if you please—who are you? And once more, Mr. President, in God's name, who are we?"

This is always the gist of what it says, "Who are we?"

It is the people's main point, after all, asking a President who they are, wondering if he can interpret them.

Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet and thinks.

He listens.

It is very hard to be always President of the People when one is listening and the little-great go by.

One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one is quite alone. He sees again the Child; it is what he is in the White House for, he remembers, to express this dumb giant, this mighty Child, half weary, half glad, standing there by day by night, saying, "Who are we?" One would think it would be hard to be glib with the Child.

Sometimes it is so deep and silent!

Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, "Who are we?" he prayed.