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Contents |
BOOK FIVE
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
CHAPTER III
PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES
WE ARE deeply interested in the United States just now, in
seeing what will be the fate of President Wilson's government
in getting men to be good. The fate of a government in 1918
may be said to stand on the government's psychology or knowl-
edge of human nature or of what might be called human engin-
eering, it's mastery of the principles of lifting over in great
masses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great
masses of people's minds over as on some huge national derrick
up on The White House, from one lookout on life to another.
There are certain aspects of human nature when power is
being applied to it in this way, and when it is being got to be
good, that may not be beside the point.
If one could drop in on a government and have a little
neighbourly chat with it, as one was going by, I think I would
rather talk with it (especially our government, just now),
about Human Nature than about anything.
I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a
government to be a plain and homely way.
I would ask the government what it thought of two or three
observations I have come to lately about the way that human,
nature works, when people are getting it to be good. What
a government thinks about them might possibly prove before
many months to be quite important to It.
The first observation is this:
The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he
spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women
he will not marry.
Possibly it is because many people are following the same [450]
principle in trying to be good and in getting other people to be
good that they make such poor work of it.
Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked
people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the
Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried
to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that
is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of
one that they must.
Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when
we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being
focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to
what one really wants to do.
Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of
getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on
nine things, was not conducive to goodness. The fundamental
principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a con-
tradiction in terms. It is a principle that would make wicked
people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable principle
for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It
did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has
never worked with people since.
It does not call people out, in getting them to take up good-
ness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and
one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.
. . . . . . .
All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the
groups or classes of people who are especially not what they
should be. The people who never get on morally (as different
as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity)
all have one illusion in common. There is one thing they
always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once
more to get them to be good.
They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they
try to be good and cannot do it.
And this is not true. [451]
When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he
sits down and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying
to be good at all. He is trying to be not bad.
A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process,
by being not bad, and it is still harder for him and for every-
body, when other people try to do it—those who are near
him, and it is still, still harder for a President down in Wash-
ington to do it.
An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be
got to keep up an interest very long in being not bad. Being
not bad is a glittering generality. It is like being not extrava-
gant or economical.
Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable
degree to a pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have
reflected upon their experiences, have come to conclusions that
may not be very far from the point in a fine art like getting one's
self to be good or getting other people to be good.
To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the
street, looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of
things one will not buy, Cannot be said to be a practicable
method of attaining economy.
The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to
upon the opposite principle. Even if the good thing he tries
for is merely a negative good thing like economy, he instinctively
seeks out some positive way of getting it.
A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be
economical, or of getting his wife to be economical, does not
make a start by sitting down with a pencil and making out a list,
by concentrating his. mind on rows of things that he and his
family must get along without. He knows a better way. He
goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a big
shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand
he cannot get. As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he
will get it.
Then a subtle, spiritual change passes over him and over his [452]
family while they listen. He would not have said before he
started that sitting down and thinking of things he could get
along without—making lists in his mind of things that he
must not have—could ever be in this world a happy, even an
almost thrilling experience. But as a matter of fact, as he sits
by the piano and listens, he finds himself counting off economies
like strings of pearls, and he greets each new self-sacrifice he can
think of with a cheer. While the Steinway Grand fills the room
with melody all around him, there he actually is sitting, and
having the time of his life dreaming of the things he can get
along without!
When he goes home, he goes home thinking. And the family
all go home thinking.
Then economy sets in. The reason most people make a fail-
ure of their economy is that they are not artistic with it, they
do not enjoy it. They do not pick out anything to enjoy their
economy with.
With some people an automobile would work better than a
Steinway Grand and there are as many ways, of course, of
practising the Steinway Grand principle in not being bad as
there are people, but they all consist apparently in selecting
some big, positive thing that one wants to do, which logically
includes and bundles all together where they are attended to in
a lump, all the things that one ought not to do.
Most sins (every one who has ever tried them knows this)
most sins are not really worth bothering with, each in detail,
even the not-doing them and the most practical, firm method of
getting them out of the way (thousands of them at once, some-
times, with one hand) is to have something so big to live for
that all the things that would like to get in the way, and would
like to look important, look, when one thinks of it, suddenly
small.
The distinctive, preeminent, official business for the next
four years, of making small things in this country look small
and of gently, quietly making small men feel small, has been [453]
assigned by our people recently, to Mr. Woodrow Wilson.
Now it naturally seems to some of us, the; best way for Mr.
Wilson's government to do in getting the Trusts to give up
lying and stealing, is going to be to place before them quietly a
few really big, interesting, equally exciting things that Trusts
can do, and then dare them, as in some great game or tourna-
ment of skill—all the people looking on—dare them, challenge
them like great men, to do them.
There are three ideas President Wilson may have of the
government's getting people to be good.
First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.)
Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.)
Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.)
The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The
second, means government by Usurpation, that is, the moment
a man amounts to enough to choose to do right or do wrong of
his own free will, the moment he is a man, in other words, being
so afraid of him and of his being a man, that we all, in a kind
of panic, shove into his life and live it for him—this is Socialism,
a scared machine that scared people have invented for not
letting people choose to do right because they may choose to
do wrong.
The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them
be self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily
good people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men
by trying it.
Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake
system, a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten.
The question that faces President Wilson just now, while the
world looks on is, "Is a government or is it not a moral-brake
system—a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten?"
There is a considerable resemblance between Moses' position
and the new President's in the United States. When Moses
looked around on the things he saw the men around him
doing, and took the ground that at least nine out of ten of the [453]
things should be stopped, he was academically correct. And
so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country
to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things
that trusts and corporations have been doing, will be academi-
cally correct in telling them to stop, in having his little, new,
helpless, unproved, adolescent government stand up before all
the people and speak in loud, beautiful, clear accents and (with
its left fist full of prisons, fines, lawyers, of forty-eight legisla-
tures all talking at once) bring down its right fist as a kind of
gavel on the world and say to these men, before all the nations,
that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped and that
one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some
way of keeping on doing it—nobody will hurt them.
But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our
world looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering
upon a career of stopping people. The real and serious question
is, does stopping people stop them? And if stopping people
does not stop them, what will?
Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing
things they are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done.
A government that does not express what it wants, that has
not given a masterful, clear, inspired statement of what it
wants—a government that has only tried to say what it does
not want, is not a government.
The next business of a government is a statement of what
it wants.
The problem of a government is essentially a problem of
statement.
How shall this statement be made?
CHAPTER IV
THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO
IT WAS not merely because the seventh commandment was
negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so
hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife)
could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful
to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place,
could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found
keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a
statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little
further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses
had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete,
but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does
things.
One of the things about the real artist that makes him an
artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will
be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an
emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges God,
he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about
him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of
purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates some-
thing concrete and living to express his idea of purity.
How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be
corrupt, in trying to win them—how can President Wilson
make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a
Low Voice?
A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting
business men to be good, upon the tone in which they are
addressed. Every government, like every man, soon comes to
have its own characteristic tone in addressing the people. [456]
And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the tone in a
government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the
most definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and
effective expression of what it wants and is the most practical
way of getting what it wants. Everybody has noticed that
a man's voice works harder for him, works more to the point
for him in getting what he wants than his words do. It is
his voice that makes people know him, that makes them
know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them
whether he is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it
is his voice that tells them whether he is in habit of getting
what he wants, and of knowing what to do with what he wants
when he gets it.
A government does not need to say very much if it has the
right tone.
The tone of a government is the government.
If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business
men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depend-
ing on three principles.
These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be
stated as three principles or as three personal traits.
First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from
Moses.)
Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.)
Third, by being specific, by seeing the universal in the partic-
ular. (Like any artist or man who does things.)
The value of being affirmative and the value of being con-
crete have already been touched upon. There remains the
value of being specific.
Possibly, in this present happy hour, when our country has
grown suddenly sensible and has become practical enough to
pick out at last, once more, a President with a real serious work-
ing sense of humour, even a sense of humour about himself, it
may not be considered disrespectful if I continue a little longer
dropping in on the Government, and saying what I have to say [457]
in a few plain and homely words.
The trouble with most people in being economical with their
money is, that when they spend it, they spend it on something
in particular, and when they save it, they try to save it in a kind
of general way. The same principle applies to doing right. It
is because when people do right, they do it in a kind of general
pleasant, abstract way, and when they do wrong they always
do something in particular, that they are so Wicked.
A man will do almost anything to save his life at a particular
place and at a particular time, say at ten o'clock to-morrow
morning, if he is drowning, but if he has a year to save it in,
a year of controlling his appetites, of daily, detailed mastering
of his spirit, of not taking a piece of mince pie, of stopping his
work in time and of going to bed early, he will die.
It is easier when one is going under water for the third time
and sees a rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the
rope, reach up to forty more years of one's life, all concentrated
for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one's
life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365
dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse,
of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the
end of one's year at the tiptop of one's being, as if it had only
taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the creative
imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily,
detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its
setting of the whole—going without a piece of mince pie.
If one could only make one's self see the piece of mince pie as it
is, it would not be difficult. If one could see it on the plate there
and see the not taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little
triangular link of coupling in the chain that keeps one holding
on forty years longer to this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a
plate would become a Vision.
This seems to be the principle that works best in getting
other people to be good.
Perhaps the President will succeed in getting Trusts to be [458]
good, by taking hold of specific Trusts, one by one, and setting
them—all mankind looking on—in the nation's vision, setting
them even in their own vision—taking the Trusts that thought
they had got what they wanted, making them stand up and look
(in some great public lighted place) at what pathetic, tragical
failures they are, letting them see that what their Trust had
wanted all along, if it had only thought about it, was not success
one went to jail for—success by getting the best out of the
most people, but success by serving the most people the best.
A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds
for a long time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the
trouble we were going to have in curbing the eagerness of the
Trusts.
Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we
were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it,
it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing
about them.
What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is
not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for
things that they did not want, and for things that almost every-
body is coming to see that they did not want.
The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an
eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be
seen piling over each other's heels, asking the government to
please investigate them. The more they can get the people
to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the
people will trust them and deal with them.
All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees
the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take
up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to
make them think, think hard what they really want, and what
their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern
business will change. First the expression will change and then
the face itself.
The moment it is found that the government is a specific [459]
government, all the trusts that know what they really want and
know what they really are doing, will want to be investigated,
because they will want everybody to know that they know.
In case of the trusts that do not know what they want and that
do not know what they are doing, the government will just step
in, of course, and investigate them until they find out.
A specific government will not need to be specific many times.
It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly,
empties its contents out before the people and says to every-
body, "This particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind
of Trust, which it found out afterward, it did not want to be.
It is the kind of Trust whose officers hide their faces when they
think of what it was that they thought that they thought that
they wanted . . .
"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on,
hundreds and thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting,
public-serving, creative, successful business men, whom all the
world envies looking on, do hereby beg to declare to all business
men who know them and to the people, that they did not ever
really want these things for themselves that their business says
or seems to say they wanted.
"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places
and to refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down,
seriously thought it all out, that they had planned to express to
everybody what their natures really were in a blind, brutal, fool-
ish business like this which we have just been showing you.
They beg to have it believed that their business misrepresents
them, that it misrepresents what they want, and they ask to
be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and forgive-
ness, the companionship of a great people.
"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are
not the men they seem. They are merely men in a hurry.
They want it understood that they have merely hurried so
fast and hurried so long that they now wake up at last only to
see, see with this terrific plainness what it really is that has been
[460]
happening to them all their lives, viz.: for forty, fifty, or sixty
years they have merely forgot who they were and overlooked
what they were like.
"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use
machines to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associ-
ating almost exclusively with machines, their machines (pump
handles, trip-hammers, hydraulic drills, steam shovels and
cranes and cash registers) have grown into them.
"This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful
to them,' the government will then say, and dismiss the
subject."
. . . . . . .
What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a
nation in one specific, particular man who expresses everybody.
This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions
and services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific
man.
The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the
people's vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a
part of a whole, he governs the people.
He is the Chancellor of the People's Attention.
The business of being a President is the business of focusing
the vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around
a man and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is
doing by, and to be seen by, while he is doing it.
The corporations have expressed or focused the employers
of labour. The Labour Unions have focused or expressed the
will of the labourers, and the government focuses and expresses
the will of the consumers, of the people as a whole, rich and poor,
so that Labour and Capital, both listen to It, understand It
and act on It.
The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with
the general vision. Then it does not need to be dealt with.
Then strangely, softly, and almost before we know—out there [461]
in the Light, it automatically deals with itself.
When the Government takes hold quietly of the National
Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,
—all its methods and its motives—and all the things It thought
It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-
nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to
me that this action of the government as a method of tempting
people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete
and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other
virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative.
"Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative
about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many
people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a
President could have done. Moses himself would have done it.
It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or
that it was essentially negative. It could not unfairly be
claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was
the most massive, significant, crushing affirmation that a
great people has made for years.
By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash
Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around
the world the nation's championship of the men that had been
defeated in the competition with the National Cash Register
Company. They affirmed that these men who were not
afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they
were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were
the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the
officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind
of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do
business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not
live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail.
The President of the United States, sitting in Washington,
at the head of this vast affirmative and assertive continent,
indicted the Cash Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed
negative action, by pushing back a button he turned on the [462]
great chandelier of a nation and flooded a nation with light.
We, the American people, suddenly, all in a flash, looked into
each other's faces and knew what we were like.
We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave
men and in men against machines but we could not prove it.
Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves.
Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our
national Flag. If we liked, we could swing our hats.
Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to
get this news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with
and do business with. I have been trying to get my question
answered. What are the American people really like?
The President points at the National Cash Register Company
and I find out. All the people find out.
In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and
constructive part of being a President of the United States—
the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the
position from being a position which only the second rate or
No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the
President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United
States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what
Americans really want.
He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out
its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across
the country. "Here are the kind of business men that the peo-
ple of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of
men that we do!"
The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirma-
tive act is the advertising in it.
Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of
Marie Bashkirtseff's.
Twenty nations read the little book.
Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that
would make a nation. One wishes one had some way of being
the sort of person or being in the kind of place where one could [463]
make a nation out of it.
One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of
the United States. It would be like having a great bell up
over the world that one could reach up to and ring! But it is
better than that. One touches a button at one's desk if one
is President of the United States, a nation looks up. He
whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes away
a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin's
engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this
world like this! He has been in the world all this while without
our suspecting it. Did you know there was or could be any-
where a man like THIS? And here is a man like this! Which
do you prefer? Which are you really like?"
There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing
that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire
all by himself, in 1913, like saying "Look! Look!"
Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great
reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a
mile, "Look! look! look! look!!!—President Wilson says it once
and without exclamation points. Skyscrapers listen to him!
Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world. And
the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams.
Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says,
"Look!"
Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like
twenty thousand field-glasses that he could hand out every
morning and lend to people to look through—he would not
have had to say, "Thou shalt not."
The precise measure of the governing power a man can get
out of the position of being President of the United States
to-day is the amount of advertising for the people, of the
people, and by the people he can crowd every morning, every
week, into the papers of the country.
A President becomes a great President in proportion as he
acts authoritatively, tactfully, economically, and persistently [464]
as the Head Advertising Manager of the ideals of the people.
He is the great central, official editor of what the people are
trying to find out—of a nation's news about itself.
By his being the President of what people think, by his dictat-
ing the subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out
the men whom the people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meet-
ing of ninety million men we call the United States—comes
to order.
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