Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now—just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,—from whatever walk of life he comes,—a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul—a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.
When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.
In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy—to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,—all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins.
XV
TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF
The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in the Saturday Evening Post."
When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the Post, and too late to change.
The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing—that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the Saturday Evening Post would approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it.