An American crowd is wedge-shaped, and any force applied to it only drives all of it together, further and harder together.

An American crowd is like a cartridge.

A German crowd is shaped like a hammer, with the Kaiser for a handle.

KAISER

Germans allow themselves to be placed in neat orderly squares fitting closely together, where they can be easily handled, but a German crowd, unlike an English or an American crowd, has no intrinsic bottled-up nitroglycerine of its own. It is just a square, splendidly massive, unconscious, stupendous iron-end on a handle.

Of these three types of crowds, it is easy to see that the American crowd-a comparatively new invention in human nature, over here on a new continent-constitutes the most sublime and terrific form in which human nature has ever been put up.

ACT V

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK, ALSO THE COLONEL

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK

THE COURAGE TO UNDERSTAND

THE WILL TO BE UNDERSTOOD

FEAR-SURGERY

A FEW OPERATIONS

LOOK I

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK

I

THE PRESIDENT AND THE PARLOUR CAR

Τ'

HE President feels as deeply as anyone about America's self-expression and about America's defending itself by looking as if we were ready to shoot.

People who have a definite proposition naturally crowd up to the White House and flock in around the President-say they are the country first. People who have no counter-program to offer except objections naturally stay away.

And they stay away from their Congressmen.

The armament program which has been outlined by Mr. Wilson has been put forward as an inquiry of the people.

The only possible way in which President Wilson or any other President would have the right to make a revolutionary, contradictory move for this nation would be to make it as an inquiry of the people.

"You have not shown that you have thought of a better program or that you would back me up in a different one. In the meantime, here is this one which is being loudly called for. Now is your time to say what you think of it," Mr. Wilson seems to be saying to the people. No President could say otherwise. A President who finds himself heckled daily with men who are afraid, with men who have been infected and caught away with the orgy of self-defense now going on in Europe, is naturally obliged to let the scared people in the country have their way.

One always tries to be considerate at first to the people who are most scared. And unless the people who are not scared in America can back up their program, which seems to many to be a mere negative vague program of not being scared, by definite reasons, by proposing a shrewd, expert, highly organized, highly definite campaign of getting the attention of all nations and making, in this moment of forty frightened peoples, a blow or a shock of common sense and fearlessness upon the world, the humdrum program of looking terrible, of having a big armament, will have to go through.

America is not going to be effectively fearless in a general way. We can only be fearless by facing out one by one definite fears and misunderstandings, with a definite appropriation for dredging them out of people's minds, by undertaking an assured, scientific, persistent engineering feat of excavating from ourselves and from hostile nations before everybody's eyes the cause of their fears and ours.

If Mr. Wilson is the President of a scared country, he must have a policy that goes with scared people and that people who are feeling scared can instinctively and automatically carry out. Just at the present writing the President is probably feeling a little like the porter of a parlour car when somebody in the car makes a faint hopeful move and seems to believe that air ought to be allowed in it. I have often brooded on the porter in a parlour car and the way he always acts when a great moral crisis like being allowed to breathe or keeping other people from breathing is brought before him. Why is it that when there are two kinds of people in a car-the people who are afraid of breathing and the people who are not afraid of it—the porter with unvarying suave monotony all over this land is seen taking sides with the people who feel that air is improper?

It is because there is something roomy-minded about people who like outdoor air and they are willing to keep still and to give up. They sit and smother hopefully. And the people who are filled with fear, who run through life everywhere they go, in one