letter three hundred miles away--a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to

it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.

I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a Post Office the way some women would run--or rather used to run a parlor store--with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr. Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase.

But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get the things I want there I go into some other store.

I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street.

When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr. Burleson says Pooh!

Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week.

Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them.

So one's letters wait over a day--a night and a day, or until one gets back from Chicago.

Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?

Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?

Who asked him to?

It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time.

It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.

The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America. His mind is jet black about all the rest.

Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.

XX

FLAT-THINKING

THINKING IN ME-FLAT

What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions.

The thickness is what I think.

The breadth is what other people think.

The length is what God thinks.

Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is--who I am and what I amount to.

Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.

The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to God.

Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think.

There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this:

XXI

LOST-MINDEDNESS

OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS

I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.

To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.

I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.

It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.

Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.

As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.

In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.

America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.

The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.

Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the _Literary Digest_ be fined for it? Why fine the readers of the _Review of Reviews_ or _Collier's_ or _Scribner's_ for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the _Youth's Companion_.

Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.

A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.

As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation.

There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation--some place where three million people act as one.

It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.

And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the _Saturday Evening Post_, like _Collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home and read the _Hampshire County Gazette_.

It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end in the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in behalf of all of us.

XXII

I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the sins of all of us.

We are all concerned. We all want to know.

It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.

But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?

XXIII

SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY

My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people.

I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this.

Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves.

Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office.

There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves.

And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business.

I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs.

* * * * *

It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking.

One could tell them across a room.

But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too.

The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens.

XXIV

MACHINE-MINDEDNESS

The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head.

The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness.

A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is.

Everybody knows how it is.

XXV

NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS

Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves.

I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.

But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better--things they want already.

The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do.

On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work.