n order to
counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes.

Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old
name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page
for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the
head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion
of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw
chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to
placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in
Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me
a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No
tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that.
Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or
winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike
in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool
yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a
tea-toper.

It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The
openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but
gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it
was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation
is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same
story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments
"606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to
detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
other men can understand.

But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A
wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of
dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They
have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow
incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light
of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
is our use of symbols.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
idealizations and selections whi