The main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief.
The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League--the gist of our platform--is this one sentence:
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET OTHER'S ATTENTION.
Everything we believe and propose to do follows from this.
The way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better.
The way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. Then compel them to listen.
We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people.
Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute.
The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these:
Disputes can not be fought out--not even by the people themselves.
Disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them.
All other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other.
Doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable.
The moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight each other. They organize to listen to each other.
What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other.
I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a League, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face--before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words.
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET EACH OTHER'S ATTENTION.