Money?  The lecturer would get his expenses from his home and back again, and be cared for appropriately in one of the apartments.  Otherwise the incidental expenses of administration.  Aside from the single and simple building the whole thing should not cost more than $100,000 a year.

To illustrate—­it took years for the world to know what Rutherford was doing with radium.  Why should he not have been brought to some central place and there, before all the students who might choose to come, tell his story?  Pasteur, Einstein, Bergson, Wright Brothers, Wells (theory of Education).  These names are suggestive.  The great of the world could walk, as it were, in the groves with their pupils and critics, and we could have a new Athens.  Whatever progress the world had made, in whatever line, would be reported at that time.  And the world would know in advance that this was to be so.  Germany has been the world thought center for forty years.  England is now planning to take Germany’s place.  Why not America?  But the government has not the imagination, and this must be done quickly.

Why not the Times?  And why shouldn’t you start it for the Times—­ be the first Director?

Then I want someone to take over another of my ideas—­a sort of Federal Reserve Board on the good of the nation, an unofficial group of men with foresight, who would be a spur to government and suggest direction.  Somebody whose business it would be to attend to that which is nobody’s business and so waits, and waits, until sometimes too late.  Why should we have had no plans for caring for our soldiers as to employment and giving them the right bent on their return?

There was no one to concentrate attention—­the attention of Congress and the public—­on any definite plan.  I tried it with my scheme for making farms for soldiers, but Congress, as soon as it found that I was really agitating, passed laws making it impossible for me to use a sheet of paper or the frank for the purpose.  I do not say my plan was the best possible.  Then someone should have come forward with another, and pushed it against a Congress made up of Republicans who feared that Democrats would get the credit, and Democrats who feared Republicans would.  Hence, deadlock, and a great opportunity lost! ...

Seers, or see-ers, that’s what these men should be.  Elder Statesmen, if you please, independent, away above politics.

Doesn’t it seem to you that we are coming to be altogether too dependent on the President?  That office will be ruined.  Every one with a sore thumb has come into the habit of running to the President.  This is all wrong, all wrong.  He cannot do his job well now.  And he is only nominally doing it, and only nominally has been doing it for years.  But each month seems to add to his duties as arbiter of everything from clothes to strikes, from baseball to disarmament.

I see a tremendous field for a body of a few ripe minds who would talk so little, and so wisely, and so collectively, that they could get and hold the ear of the country, governmental and otherwise.