to the dignity and value
of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of
men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as
craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the
silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's
eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the
reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of
offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be
greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied
scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a
hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach,
laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of
interest as the Health Service.

The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its
lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain
that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have
to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw
the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct
of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have
nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a
price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason
isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and
dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the
mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own
lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an
emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all
that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire.

When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of
a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he
didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few
months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify
who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document,
though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the