The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations—on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed.
The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth.
This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological fact—the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in America—inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it.
Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.
The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own attention.
The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body, is that some one had a body for—the vision that if all the different kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the world war could be won.
This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it go.
The leaders of the Red Cross—Mr. Davison and the men he gathered about him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to have.
The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would have thought they could have.
This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people and made other people have, is what the people liked about it. The people threw down their jewels for it—for something to believe about themselves and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threw down their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices for it—a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every day.