In the Red Cross a hundred million people--American people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man.
The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.
If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two until he found it.
The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look.
Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.
It was a Focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man.