Crowds Part 66

Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point, until they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone about business. One can talk with them for hours, for days at a time, about their business--some of them, without being able a single time to corner them into being decent or into admitting that they care about anybody.

Now I will not yield an inch to ---- or to anybody else in my desire to displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life. I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of view. I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding ident.i.ties, for putting people's interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and help themselves.

And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with goodness--either his own or other people's?

In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our governments everywhere are groping to find out what business men are really like and what they propose to be like, if a man is good (far more than if he is bad) everybody has a right to know it. The President has a right to know it. The party leaders have a right to know it.

It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness pay, but what is the man's real, deep, happy, creative, achieving motive in making goodness pay? What is it in the man that fills him with this fierce desire, this almost business-fanaticism for making goodness pay?

It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of being in a human world, his pa.s.sion for human economy, for world efficiency and world-self-respect. This is what it is in him that makes him force goodness to pay.

The business men of the bigger type who let themselves talk in this tone to-day, do not mean it, they are letting themselves be insensibly drawn into the tone of the men around them.

We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying that we have none, that we have believed it. We all know men finer than we are who say they have none. So we have not, probably.

And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year of going about the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse than they are!

It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not deliberately lie about human nature. They merely say pianola-minded things.

One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging like a kind of street piano, through men's minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh, SH-s.h.!.+ Oh, do not let anybody know I'm being good!"

=II=

I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to make me believe they have.

They have lied long enough.

I have lied long enough.

My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it.

And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got the necessary brains to go with them) the better they have worked.

Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has been my fault.

Sometimes it is John Doe's fault.

I am going to speak to John Doe about it. I am going to tell him what I am driving at. I have turned over a new leaf. In the crisis of a great nation and as an act of last desperate patriotism, I am going to give up looking modest.

For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and stand up before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with it and say what I think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister threats against our having or getting a real national life in America.

I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always kept him wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-looking coats and trousers. Except for a few moments a year he never caught up. n.o.body ever saw that boy and his long shoes when he was not b.u.t.ting bravely about, stubbing his toes on the world and turning up his sleeves.

It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he grew up.

I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least until our present national crisis is over in business and in politics, like that boy.

There are millions of other men in this country who want to be like that boy. Nations may smile at us if they want to. We will smile too--rather stiffly and soberly, but for better or worse we propose from to-day on, to let people see what we are trying to be daily, grimly, right along side of what we are!

I have come to the conclusion that the only way, for me, at least, to keep modest and kind, is to have my ideals all on. When one is going around in sight of everybody with one's moral sleeves rolled up, and one's great wistful, broad trousers that do not look as if they would ever get filled out, it is awkward to find fault with other people for not filling out their moral clothes. It may be a severe measure to take with one's self hut the surest way to be kind is to live an exposed life.

I propose to live the next few years in a gla.s.s house. There are millions of other men who want to. We want to see if we cannot at last live confidentially with a world, live navely and simply with a world like boys and like great men and like dogs!

What I have written, I have written. I propose to run the risk of being good. When driven to it, I will run the risk of saying I am good.

My motives are fairly high. See! here is my scale of one hundred! I had rather stand forty-five on my scale than ninety-eight on yours!

If there is any discrepancy between my vision and my action, I am not going to be bullied out of my life and out of living my life the way I want to, by the way I look. Though it mock me, I will not haul down my flag. I will haul up my life!

Here it is right here in this paragraph, in black and white. I take it up and look at it, I read it once more and lay it down.

What I have written, I have written.

=III=

People do not seem to agree in the present crisis of our American industrial and national life, about the necessity of getting at the facts and at the real news in this country about how good we are.

Last November in the national election, four and a half million men (Republicans) said to Theodore Roosevelt, "Theodore! do not be good so loud!"

Four and a half million other men, also Republicans, told him not to mind what anybody said, but to keep right on being good as loud as he liked, for as long as it seemed necessary.

They wanted to be sure our goodness in America such as we had, was being loud enough to be heard, believed in, and acted on in public.

The other set of men, last November (who were really very good too, of course), were more sedate and liked to see goodness modulated more. They stood out for what might be called a kind of moral elegance.

The governing difference between the Roosevelt type and the Taft type in America has not been a mere difference of temperament but a difference in news-sense, in a sense of crisis in the nation.

Thousands of men of all parties, with the nicest, easiest stand-pat Taft temperaments in the world, with soft, low voices and with the most beautiful moral manners, have let themselves join in a national attempt to shock this nation into seeing how good it is. A great temporary crisis can only be met by a great temporary loudness.

This is what has been happening in America during the last six months.

At last, all men in all parties are engaged in trying to find out: Is it true or not true that we want to be good?

We are trying to get the news through. It may not be very becoming to us and we know as well as any one, that loudness, except when morally deaf people drive us to it is in bad taste. We are looking forward, every one of us, to being as elegant as any one is, and the very first minute we get the morally deaf people out of office where we will not have to go about shouting out at them we will tone down in our goodness. We will modulate beautifully!

=IV=

There are three other bug-a-boos, besides the Modesty Bug-a-boo that America will have to face and drive out of the way before it can be truly said to have a national character or to have grown up and found itself. There is the Goody-good Bug-a-boo, the Consistency Bug-a-boo, and the Bug-a-boo that Thomas Jefferson if he were living now, would never never ride in a carriage.

Each of these bug-a-boos in the general mistiness and muddle-headiness of the time can be seen going about, saying, "Boo! Boo!" to this democracy from day to day and year to year, keeping it scared into not getting what it wants.

There is not one of them that will not evaporate in ten minutes the first morning we get some real news through in this country about ourselves and about what we are like.

What is the real news about us, for instance, as regards being goody-good?

I can only begin with the news for one.