What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America—the all-class class, class-conscious—is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life.
The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:
A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them.
The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans.
What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up.
Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away—permanently drop away from waiting on crowds—are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?
What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.
Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?
XVI