I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine. Nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this. I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it. And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people. And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me. I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry. II IF I WERE A NATION Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look. The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is. Why should I propose, if I were a nation--just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a really simple thing like there being so many of me? I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple. All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it. Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials. And that is all there is to it. The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees. * * * * * The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there. The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves. A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk.