At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another. Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--partitioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks. One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of America from his idea of America. If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W. could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are not America. We only are America!" This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other. The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with his temperament. III THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT