What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the people? What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of themselves and expect of their new President? What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do? I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people. What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together. BOOK I WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE I GIST The Crowd is my Hero. The Hero of this book is a hundred million people. I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won't trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want. II THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night? The Ghost in the White House. The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people. The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.