ed, but take it off its guard every laugh is a
prayer or a cry.

II

IF I WERE A NATION

Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.

The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected
up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.

Why should I propose, if I were a nation--just because I am being a
hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a
human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a really
simple thing like there being so many of me?

I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States would
act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act,
when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for
him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem
would at once become direct and deep and simple.

All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.

Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to
one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it
would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on
being human and close to essentials.

And that is all there is to it.

The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being
as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on
Committees.

* * * * *

The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away
from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him
home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.

The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they
would run the factory themselves.

A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running
the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to
ask him to come back to his desk.

He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a
committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through
jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted
him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.

The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.

The crowds laughed.

But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy--had some
imagination about each other and went to work.

I