To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go. The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit. The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross. The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross. But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before. IV THE CALL OF A WORLD The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession. Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill. Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--to keep them from walking too soon. The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth. The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.