We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men against machines but we could not prove it.

Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves.  Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag.  If we liked, we could swing our hats.

Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this news for years.  It is news I have wanted to live with and do business with.  I have been trying to get my question answered.  What are the American people really like?

The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find out.  All the people find out.

In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive part of being a President of the United States—­the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the position from being a position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what Americans really want.

He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country.  “Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!”

The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is the advertising in it.

Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie Bashkirtseff’s.

Twenty nations read the little book.

Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that would make a nation.  One wishes one had some way of being the sort of person or being in the kind of place where one could make a nation out of it.

One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of the United States.  It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one could reach up to and ring!  But it is better than that.  One touches a button at one’s desk if one is President of the United States, a nation looks up.  He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, “Take your eyes away a minute,” he says, “from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin’s engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this!  He has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it.  Did you know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS?  And here is a man like this!  Which do you prefer?  Which are you really like?”

There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913, like saying “Look!  Look!”

Sometimes I think about it.  Of course I could take a great reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, “Look! look! look! look!!!—­President Wilson says it once and without exclamation points.  Skyscrapers listen to him!  Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world.  And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams.”