The Ghost in the White House | Page 7

four years to make the Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike--as what happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Chateau-Thierry.
Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.
I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the American character and real.
But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent. Forty nations are depending on us--are waiting for us--in the world's long desperate minutes--waiting for America to grow up.
This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world.
All really religious men and all real patriots know this.
In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means--in just one simple item--for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body.
But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am groping in these pages for a body for the Public.
The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind--whether good or bad, whether a President or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the Public is a Ghost.
Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with the Public, as if the Public was not there.
The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip.
Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us.

V
THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now.
We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world.
International war ending to-night.
To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations--between classes--unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day.
When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody.
The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is