Excerpt from We: A Confession of Faith for the American People During and After War; A Study of the Art of Making Things, Happen; A Recommendation of the First Person Plural for Men and Nations The first thing the war has done to most of us is to undermine our daily assumptions about one another - about human nature and ourselves. For years, ever since we were children, apples have fallen to the ground from trees. Everything about us has had a humble but reliable way of holding down hard to the ground itself, and now suddenly our whole world has changed. It's as if everything had turned around - as if everything the moment we touched it or struck it, at once started to the sky. Our moral force of gravity has been upset. We go around, some of us, holding things down and holding one another down. At least this is the way we feel. If anything is to be kept where it is or as we have known it in this world, we have got to take hold of it personally with both hands and with all our might and hold it there. Here arc all our assumptions about foreigners, for instance. We do not really feel we arc different from the Germans and the English, and yet there they all are over there living in what looks like a kind of regulated craziness. All this must be latent in us. we say to ourselves. We arc crazy, too. I am. You are. John Doe is. Americans by being luckily tucked away in time on a perfectly fresh continent a little one side may have managed to keep up appearances, but that is all. We may break out any minute. It's as if all the people about us were mined. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.