ionaire they want. If a nation really wants
a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and
that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty
years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had
been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He
could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily
thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the
sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on
him, on making him a Lincoln.

Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man
with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful,
believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons'
lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from
the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray
a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night
and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim
glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way
he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it,
if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in
the vise of our hopes.

Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be
siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in
them that they get them.

If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and
kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born
again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and
overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they
conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.

It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true,
steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the
vision, the expectation of a great nation.

To be born again is simple with ninety million people to help. We have
all been born again in little things with a few people to help. We have
been swung over from little short motives to big, long-levered
controlling ones. We have known in a small way what Conversion is. We
have seen how naturally it works out in little things.

There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what