ade a very substantial difference to somebody what
they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million
people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a
Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor
union,--get what they want.

II

THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH

What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is
inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned
to him, or at least that night?

The Ghost in the White House.

The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of
ghost of a nation, called the people.

The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The
man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there
would), has to commune with a Generalization.

What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of
his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else
is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him
over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in
wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never
Was, and Who Never Is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial,
lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.

Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.

That is all there is to Her.

It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis
to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to
this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It
does not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundred
million people or to the President.

It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million
people to do to a President--to be a Ghost.

It is not efficient.

Naturally--much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or
hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.

III

THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST

There are a number of things about going into the White House the next
four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that
are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest
job on earth.

The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as
the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is
expected to put up, and put up every day,