When I corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar. But the truth I have spoken has not melted away. What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in. BOOK V THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN I RECONSTRUCTION I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero--that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People. I have proceeded upon two premises. A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family. A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family. Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into Inventors Artists Hewers or or See-ers Engineers Those who work Men who invent Men who invent out and finish things to do. ways and means what the see-ers and make it possible and engineers to do them. have begun. I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature. In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation. Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the American people. In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love. I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts--that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together. I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again. II NATIONAL BIOLOGY A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,--the spiritual invention of one's own life. Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.