For years, I have held myself back from taking a plain or possibly loud stand for goodness as a shrewd, worldly-wise program for American business and public life, because I was afraid of people, and afraid people would think I was trying to improve them.
What was worse, I was afraid of myself too. I was afraid I really would.
I am afraid now, or rather I would be, if I had not drilled through to the news about myself and about other people and about human nature that I am putting into this chapter.
I have written five hundred pages in this book on an awkward and dangerous subject like the Golden Rule, and I appeal to the reader--I ask him humbly, hopefully, gratefully if he can honestly say (except for a minute here and there when I have been tired and slipped up), if he has really felt improved or felt that I was trying to improve him in this book.
On your honour, Gentle Reader--you who have been with me five hundred pages!
You say "Yes"?
Then I appeal to your sense of fairness. If you truly feel I have been trying to improve you in this book, turn this leaf down here and stop.
It is only fair to me. Close the book with your improved and being improved feeling and never open it again until it pa.s.ses over. You have no right to go on page after page calling me names, as it were, right in the middle of my own book in this way behind my back, you!--hundreds and thousands of miles away from me, by your own lamp, by your own window--you come to me here between these two helpless pasteboard covers where I cannot get out at you, where I cannot answer back, and you say that I am trying to improve you!
Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me! G.o.d forgive me! Believe me, I never meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve you! If you insist on it and keep saying that I have been improving you, all I can say is that I was merely looking as if I were improving you. _You_ did it. I did not. G.o.d help me if I am trying to improve you! I am trying to find out in this book who I am. If, incidentally, while I am quietly working away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are yourself, and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling all by yourself, do not mix me up in it. I deny that I have tried to improve you or anybody.
I have written this book to get my own way, to express my America. I have written it to say "i," to say "I," to say (the first minute you let me), "you and I," to say we, WE about America--to drive the news through to a President of what America is like.
I am not improving you. I am telling you what may or may not be news about you.
Take it or leave it.
=V=
I want to be good.
I do not feel superior to other men.
And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it, to be compelled to feel superior.
I believe we all want to be good.
The one thing I want in this world is to prove it. I want my own way.
I am not going to slump into being a beautiful character. I have written this book to get my own way.
I have said I will not be mixed up in the fate of people who do not know where they are going, who have not decided what they are like, who do not know who they are. What do the people want? Some people tell me they want nothing. They tell me it would only make things worse and stir things up for me to want to be good.
Or perhaps they think it is beautiful to lower the price of oil. They want oil at seven cents a gallon.
Do they? Do you? Do I?
I say no. Let oil wait. I want to raise the price of men and to put a market value on human life. I find as I look about me that there are two cla.s.ses of statesmen offering to be helpful in making life worth living in America.
There are the statesmen who think we are going to be good and who believe in a program which trusts and exalts the people and the leaders of the people.
There are the statesmen who seem to believe that American human nature does not amount to enough to be good. They are planning a program on the principle that the best that can be done with human nature in America in business and public life is to have it expurgated.
Which cla.s.s of statesmen do we want?
In some of our state prisons men who are not considered fit to reproduce themselves are sterilized. The question that is now up before this country is, Do we or do we not want American business sterilized? Are we or are we not going to put a national penalty on all initiative in all business men because some men abuse it?
There is but one thing that can save us, namely, proving to one another and to our public men, that we are good, that we are going to be good and that we know how. We face the issue to-day. Two definite programs are before the country.
Those who have put their faith in being afraid of one another as a national policy have devised several By-laws for an Expurgated America.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to do wrong. Deny him the right of moral experiment because some of his experiments do not work. We say let him try. We can look out for ourselves or we will have bigger men than he is, to look out for us.
They say, eliminate the right of a man to be an owner, because n.o.body has the courage to believe that a man can express his best self in property. We say that property may express a man"s religion, and that the way a man has of being rich or of being poor may be an art-form.
Most men can express themselves better in property than in anything else.
They say, eliminate all monopoly indiscriminately and the occasional logical efficiency of monopoly because it has not worked well for the people the first few times and because we have not learned how to handle it. We say learn how to handle it.
They say eliminate the middleman. They say that the one strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because n.o.body believes America can produce a middleman. We say instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual and morally-engineering inst.i.tution like the middleman because the average middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt the middleman raise him to the n-th power, make him--well--do you remember, Gentle Reader, the walking beams on the old sidewheel steamers? We say do not eliminate him--lift him up--make him what he naturally is and is in position to be--the walking beam of Business!
If the average middleman does not know how to be a real middleman we will make one who does.
And all the other eliminations that we have watched people being scared into, one by one, we will turn into exaltations--each in its own kind and place. There is not one of our fears that is not the suggestion, the mighty outline, the inspiration for the world"s next new size and new kind of American man. We say place the position before the man--with its fears, with its songs, with its challenge. We say, tell him what we expect of him and demand of him. Put him in a high place on a platform before the world! There with the truth about him written on his forehead in the sight of all the people, call him by name, glorify him or behead him! We are men and we are Americans. We will stand up to each of our dangers one by one. Each and every danger of them is a romance, a sublime adventure, a nation-maker. Our threats, our very by-words and despairs, we will take up, and, in the sight of the world, forge them into shrewd faiths and into mighty men!
This is my news or vision. I say that this is where we are going in America. I compel no man to follow my news but I will pursue him with my news until he gives me his!
This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about you.
If it is not true news, say so. Say what is. We all have a right to know. The one compulsion of modern life is our right to know, our right to compel people who live on the same continent or who live in the same country with us, to open up their hearts, to furnish us with their share of the materials for a mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual misunderstanding, on which to live.
It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty. All liberty is in it. These people who have to live with us and that we have to live with, these people who breathe the same moral air with us, drink the same water with us, these people who have their moral dumps, who throw away their moral garbage with us--these people who will not help provide some daily, mutual understanding for these common decencies for our souls to live together these people we defy and challenge! We will compel them to reveal themselves. We will drive them away, or we will drive them into driving us away, if they will not yield to us what is in their hearts--Mars, h.e.l.l, anywhere we go, it matters not to us where we go, except that we cannot and we will not live with men about us who thrust down their true feelings and their real desires into a kind of manhole under them, and sit on the lid and smile. Some seem to have manholes and some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others who have convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide their feelings in.
But whatever their real feelings are, and wherever they keep them, they belong to us.
We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to have, if we live in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit system for getting our minds through to one another. We demand a system for having the streets of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air or atmosphere--and all the common conveniences for having decent and self-respecting souls in crowds--all the intelligence-machines, the love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of one another"s lives!
We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need them, some of us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the main common fund of motives for living together, for growing up into a world together, the desires, motives, and intentions in men"s hearts, their desires toward us and ours toward them, we are going to know and compel to be made known. We will fight men to the death to know them.
Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each man of us, all our years, all our days, to drive through to some sort of mutual understanding with our own selves? Now we will fight through to some mutual understanding with one another and with the world.
We will knock on every door, make a house to house canva.s.s of the souls of the world, pursue every man, sing under his windows. We will undergird his consciousness and his dreams. We will make the birds sing to him in the morning, "_Where are you going_?" We will put up a sign at the foot of his bed for his eyes to fall on when he awakes, "_Where are you going_?"
Whatever it is that works best, if we blow it out of you with dynamite or love or fear or draw it out of you with some mighty singing going past--ah, brother, we will have it out of you! You shall be our brother!
We will be your brother though we die!
We will live together or we will die together.
What do you really want? What do you really like? _Who are you_?