The question that
faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, "Is a
government or is it not a moral-brake system--a machine for stopping
people nine times out of ten?"

There is a considerable resemblance between Moses' position and the new
President's in the United States. When Moses looked around on the things
he saw the men around him doing, and took the ground that at least nine
out of ten of the things should be stopped, he was academically correct.
And so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country
to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things that trusts
and corporations have been doing, will be academically correct in
telling them to stop, in having his little, new, helpless, unproved,
adolescent government stand up before all the people and speak in loud,
beautiful, clear accents and (with its left fist full of prisons, fines,
lawyers, of forty-eight legislatures all talking at once) bring down its
right fist as a kind of gavel on the world and say to these men, before
all the nations, that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped
and that one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some
way of keeping on doing it--nobody will hurt them.

But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world
looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career
of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping
people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will?

Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they
are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that
does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear,
inspired statement of what it wants--a government that has only tried to
say what it does not want, is not a government.

The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants.

The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement.

How shall this statement be made?

CHAPTER IV

THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO

It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but
because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the
seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or
could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a
particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have
found keeping it a ver