. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A
hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by
twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd
into a book.

So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or
employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred
million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind
of President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal
four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts.

We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians may
not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as
well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty
Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we
have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed
by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They are
not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them
and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many
thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy
building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief
far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by
themselves.

Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through
themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see
through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered.

Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their
hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next
President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin
listening to the people's prayer to God.

The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires,
out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to God.

And they are voting to God, too.

The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner
they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little
would-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running
around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people
picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live
believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being
President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves