If America is to get its way--the way, as we like to think, of democracy and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the other nations want to know. The other nations want to know that America has a technique for getting its way with itself. The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or insuring the self-control of others. The other nations want to know--if they are going to let us have our way with them--put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way upon them, that we have a vision--a vision of human nature and of modern life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their vision. The other nations want to know,--if we are to have our way, that we not only have a vision of what our way is--a national vision, but a technique for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is historic--the facts of which--specifications, dates, names and places, can be placed in their hands. The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them, will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again. II THE VISION AND THE BODY I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how it would work. I would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had. The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed. The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth. This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological fact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in America--inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it. Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.