s for the people to blurt out the
truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both
great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is,
the kind of President they want.

So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically
innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead
of like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nation
speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple
sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are
making democracy work--making a loophole for the fate of the world.

* * * * *

I am trying to answer three questions.

What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the
people?

What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of
themselves and expect of their new President?

What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament
do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them
together, to help the people do what the people have to do?

I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President
will expect the people to do, can be done by the people.

What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag,
predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot
be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it
themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing
around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by
voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together.

BOOK I

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE

I

GIST

The Crowd is my Hero.

The Hero of this book is a hundred million people.

I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political
conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions
just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves
more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really
have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a
whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like Senator
Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won't
trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--I am
thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can
come to feel as if it m