e the matter with them, could hardly be
excelled.

I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of
three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the
technique of self-criticism.

1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.

2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize
him.

3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.

XVI

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER

If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from
Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down--if all
the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on
platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in
mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent
sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of
this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail
and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the
envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do
to Albert Sidney Burleson?

The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every
day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the
Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving
their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would
point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of
unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by
ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel
post to Austin, Texas, before night.

I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker
than if he were sent like a mere letter.

Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present
quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in
a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most
national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be
to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the
most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can
produce.

Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to
believe and who keeps fooled about himself.

An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about
how money could be saved in business, made up his mi