The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words--who mix them so people cannot tell them apart. BOOK VI WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT I THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express. We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look. This belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief the next President of this country should have about the people. Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were. The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are. The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.