It will not be the government that first gets the truth that will govern us.  The government that gets the truth big enough to sing first, and sings it, will be the government that will govern us.  The political party in this country that will first be practical with the people, and that will first get what it wants, will be the political party that first takes Literature seriously.  Our first great practical government is going to see how a great book, searching the heart of a nation, expressing and singing the men in it, governs a people.  Being a President in a day like this, if it does not consist in being a poet, consists in being the kind of President who can be, at least, in partnership with a poet.

It is not every President who can be his own David, who can rule with one hand and write psalms and chants for his people with the other.

The call is out, the people have put in their order to the authors of America, to the boys in the colleges, and to the young women in the great schools—­Our President wants a book.

Before much time has passed, he is going to have one.

Being a President in this country has never been expressed in a book.

The President is going to have a book that expresses him to the people and that says what he is trying to do.  He will live confidentially with the book.  It shall be in his times of trial and loneliness like a great people coming to him softly.  He shall feel with such a book, be it day or night, the nation by him, by his desk, by his bedside, by his silence, by his questioning, standing by, and lifting.

In the book the people shall sing to the President.  He shall be kept reminded that we are there.  He shall feel daily what America is like.  America shall be focussed into melody.  We shall have a literature once more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all great ages, shall go singing through the streets.

There is no singing for a President now.  All a President can do when he is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation.

When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the news of what was happening to people about him from week to week.

Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913?

Why is no one stuttering out our Bible—­one the President could have to refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground beneath our feet?

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It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table, to pick out the real news about us?  Who shall paint the portrait of a people?