tients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then
you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.

* * * * *

The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they
tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor
anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the
more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by
wanting to pay for it.

This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a
regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going
down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how
going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people
in one's work.

The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about
himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a
man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of
himself and present him a world with the truth.

This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense.
People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an
operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he
has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a
man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order
to have any one willing to let him live?

We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are
done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal
and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and
operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundreds
of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be
operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of
the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as
they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated
on.

IX

GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS

The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is
going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they
really are.

If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on,
one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement
of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy
they proposed to adopt