The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

THE CALL OF A WORLD

The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession.

Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill.

Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers—to keep them from walking too soon.

The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth.

The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.

The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs—with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.

The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself.

It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands.

The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do.