IV
REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST
When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.
When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.
When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.
Business talks bass. Patriotism is an Æolian harp.
During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact.
I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.
Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.