The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is the advertising in it.
Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie Bashkirtseff's.
Twenty nations read the little book.
Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that would make a nation. One wishes one had some way of being the sort of person or being in the kind of place where one could make a nation out of it.
One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of the United States. It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one could reach up to and ring! But it is better than that. One touches a button at one's desk if one is President of the United States, a nation looks up. He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes away a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin's engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this! He has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it. Did you know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS? And here is a man like this! Which do you prefer? Which are you really like?"
There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913, like saying "Look! Look!"
Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, "Look! look! look! look!!!—President Wilson says it once and without exclamation points. Skyscrapers listen to him! Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world. And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams."
Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says, "Look!"
Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like twenty thousand field-glasses that he could hand out every morning and lend to people to look through—he would not have had to say, "Thou shalt not."
The precise measure of the governing power a man can get out of the position of being President of the United States to-day is the amount of advertising for the people, of the people, and by the people he can crowd every morning, every week, into the papers of the country.