e right
slide or possibly try three or four up there on his canvas a second, no
one would ever have any trouble in doing right.
* * * * *
It is not too much to say that this way of looking at evil and good--at
the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a man once believes
it, and if a man once practises it as a part of his daily practical
interpretation and mastery of men, will soon put a new face for him on
nearly every great human problem with which he finds his time
confronted. We shall watch the men in the world about us--each for their
little day--trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral
experiments, and we shall see the men--all of the men and all of the
good and the evil in the men this moment--daily before our eyes working
out with an implacable hopefulness the fate of the world. We know that,
in spite of self-deceived syndicalism and self-deceived trusts, in spite
of coal strikes and all the vain, comic little troops of warships around
the earth, peace and righteousness in a vast overtone are singing toward
us.
We are not only going to have new and better motives in our modern men,
but the new and better motives are going to be thrust upon us. Every man
who reads these pages is having, at the present moment, motives in his
life which he would not have been capable of at first. Why should not a
human race have motives which it was not capable of at first? If one
takes up two or three motives of one's own--the small motives and the
large ones--and holds them up in one's hand and looks at them quietly
from the point of view of what one would wish one had done in twenty
years, there is scarcely one of us who would choose the small ones.
People who are really modern, that is, who look beyond themselves in
what they do to others, who live their lives as one might say six people
away, or sixty people farther out from themselves, or sixty million
people farther, are becoming more common everywhere; and people who look
beyond the moment in what they do to another day, who are getting more
and more to live their lives twenty years ahead, and to have motives
that will last twenty years, are driven to better and more permanent
motives.
Thinking of more people when we act for ourselves means ethical
consciousness or goodness, and better and more permanent motives.
In the last analysis, the men who permanently succeed in business will
have to see farther than the oth
|