To be sure the touchstone he used was free speech, but democracy and free speech are Siamese twins; one can't stay alive without the other.

But Can I Be Effective? Notwithstanding the pretty picture in the last chapter of Muriel Busybody electing Mr. Upright, unseating Mr. Swivelchair, and eventually diereby effecting in at least one instance the whole course of national life you are still entitled to reasonable doubts as to whether or not the case is typical. After all, I wrote the plot; I may have phonied it.

Remember Susie? Susie, the one-woman army? Susie and her kids? (When her oldest was about nine Susie announced die intention of taking them all to the mountains for a week's vacation. The kid was not impressed. "Look here, Mother," she said, "is this really going to be a vacation - or just another convention?") The primary laws of the state in which Susie lives require that delegations to national conventions for the purpose of nominating candidates for president be elected by the people of the party and that the delegates be bound by law to support the candidate under whose name their names appear on the primary ballot, thus giving the people direct voice in the selection of presidential candidates. The law provides further that lists of such delegations may appear on the ballot only as a result of circulation of petitions among the party's voters and such petitions require a great many names to be valid.

Susie had volunteered to obtain for her candidate such a petition, but the Big Politicians downtown told her not to worry. 'Joe Whoosis up north has the whole thing under control," they told her. "He's got the money to take care of it and he is going to use experienced, professional, paid petition circulators." There was a strong implication diat her casual volunteer methods were too sloppy for this Big Time Stuff.

So Susie shut up but she did not put it out of her mind. She watched the newspapers for announcement of the filing of the petition, but failed to find it. With the deadline one week away she telephoned the Big Politician. "How's the petition coming along?"

"Huh? Oh, that - Whoosis is taking care of that. I told you."

"No forms have been filed as yet with the registrar."

"Oh, he'll file 'em up nordi. Don't worry."

On Friday, still seeing no newspaper announcement, Susie decided she would have to find out for herself; she put in a long-distance call to Joe Whoosis. She got his office but not him. Whoosis was sick. The petition? Well, there had been some mix-up about the money, but the secretary thought that it was probably being taken care of, down south.

Susie knew durn well it wasn't being taken care of down soudi; Susie swung into action.

She had a bunch of old petition filing forms thriftily saved from another election; she had her file of 3 x 5 cards; she had a telephone. It was Friday afternoon, beautiful weather, and about half the city had gone away for the weekend - including half her contacts. Never mind.

First she dug up several volunteer typists and put them to work filling out the headings of the petitions... . There were more than a thousand such headings to type. This started, she began calling her district leaders, thirty of them, volunteers all, the Muriel Busybodys of die organization.

She located about half of them, told them the house was on fire - get busy! By midnight the last of them had picked up her (or his) petition forms and had left to marshall the forces. The next morning Susie spent digging out secondary leaders in the uncovered districts.

Saturday and Sunday was all die time there was, as all day Monday, Monday night, and Tuesday would be needed to check the forms against the Great Register, cast out the unqualified names (about 40% on any petition) and arrange by precincts the remainder - then file the petitions by four p.m.

A weekend is a poor time to try to circulate a petition at best, but picnics and ball parks and union meetings and crowds pouring out of churches provided places where circulators could make their pitches and fill a form fairly quickly. Susie needed - and got - fifteen thousand names by Monday morning.

The petition was filed with twenty minutes to spare and was eventually qualified as valid. The Big Politicians never got around to submitting a single name.

Now as to the significance of this amazing display of the efficiency of the volunteer fireman-Susie's state is large; it holds about fifty votes in a national convention. It also holds its preferential primary for president much earlier than the primaries or conventions of most other states.

If Susie's state had failed to support her candidate it is quite unlikely that his name would ever have been offered at the national convention ... and without Susie's intervention -bare-handed, no money, no tools save some 3 x 5 file cards - it would have been impossible under die law for her candidate to receive the convention votes of her state. The situation was critical and could have been disastrous - in a fashion directly parallel to what happened to Mr. Willkie's chances in 1944 when the Wisconsin primary went against him.

Since it is not desirable to tie this example to a particular party we will omit the matter of whether or not Susie's candidate was nominated and subsequendy elected president-but I will say diis: On one weekend Susie, middle-class housewife and mother of three, working from her living room telephone, drastically changed the course of state and national politics and left her mark on world affairs and on world history for some generations to come.

Many have done so on a much larger scale and much more prominently - I don't recall ever having seen Susie's picture in die papers. But at dial point she was one of the indispensable factors in die present course of history, like die boy widi his finger in die dike.

There are hundreds of utterly essential moving parts in every automobile, which are never noticed unless they fail. The volunteer in politics is most conspicuous when he is absent.

Still, you probably won't try to nominate a president The wearying prospect of managing a candidate may be more than you will ever want to undertake. Is operating at a lower level worth die trouble?

The answer is emphatically "yes" - for many reasons; I will mention three.

Volunteers are trusted. This results in them being called on when the party needs a person of certain integrity in a pinch - which happens rather frequently. I remember one campaign organization which was almost entirely salaried; there were only halfa dozen unpaid volunteers in the whole outfit. It was necessary at one point to disburse some fifteen thousand dollars for poll workers on election day; there were entirely proper tactical reasons, involving in part the known presence of spies in the organization, for keeping it quiet and for doing it at the last possible minute. The money had to be in dollar bills to permit small individual payments.

As a matter of course two female volunteers were selected to do the job - two because fifteen thousand one-dollar bills are bulky: I can see them now, two young and pretty housewives, each with handbag bulging with three thousand dollars and one with a shoe box under her arm, stuffed with nine thousand more pieces of lettuce. Off they went to disburse it, looking as if they had been shopping. And back they came the next day and returned four thousand dollars-which they could have snitched and no one the wiser.

No one worried about the possibility that they might head for Mexico - they were volunteers with established reputations - and it was much better than hiring an armored car with bonded messengers.

Volunteers are upgraded with great speed, while a mercenary stays in the ranks. There was die case of- we'll call her Helen. Helen had no personal political ambitions but she was always willing to get in and work. Two years after she started we had an appointment to die state committee to place and we were quite choosy about it; we wanted to be sure of point of view on issues of die person who gotit