The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war—the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the National Council of Defense—the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the Red Cross—all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation.
Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and most of the people in it mechanical.
In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation—if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own.
Hence the Look-Up Club coöperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States.
V
THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT
§ 1. I + You = We.
If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead.