Where courage is required, it proceeds as it proceeds with automobile speeding laws. Everybody knows that one man driving his car three miles an hour may be more dangerous than another kind of man who is driving his car thirty.
When our government begins to be a government, begins to express the American temperament, it will be a government that will devote its energy, its men, and its money to being expert in divining, and using differences between men. It will govern as any father, teacher, or competent business man does by treating some people in one way and others in another, by giving graded speed licenses in business, to labour unions, trusts, and business men.
The government will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human nature, masters in not treating men alike—Crowbars, lemonade-straws, chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and Æolian harps by the people, for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and will be used for what they are for.
This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in government.
Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them?
Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all, all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.
A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says "Come!" is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,—men who can express a people in a business—to express them.
The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come" goes.
We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White House.