The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people’s vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole, he governs the people.

He is the Chancellor of the People’s Attention.

The business of being a President is the business of focusing the vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to be seen by, while he is doing it.

The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour.  The Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both listen to It, understand It and act on It.

The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with the general vision.  Then it does not need to be dealt with.  Then strangely, softly, and almost before we know—­out there in the Light, it automatically deals with itself.

When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,—­all its methods and its motives—­and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative.  “Certainly” they will say “there is not anything affirmative about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail.”  Many people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done.  Moses himself would have done it.

It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was essentially negative.  It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant, crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.

By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the nation’s championship of the men that had been defeated in the competition with the National Cash Register Company.  They affirmed that these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail.

The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head of this vast affirmative and assertive continent, indicted the Cash Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by pushing back a button he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and flooded a nation with light.  We, the American people, suddenly, all in a flash, looked into each other’s faces and knew what we were like.