be rich
because they represent us, not because they hold us up, and because the
hold-up has gone by, that is: getting all one can, and service--getting
what we have earned--has come in.
The new kind and new size of politician will win his power by his faith,
like U. Ren of Oregon; the new kind and new size of editor is going to
hire with brains a millionaire to help him run his paper; and the new
kind and new size of author, instead of tagging a publisher, will be
paid royalties for supplying him with new ideas and creating for him new
publics. Power in modern life is to be light and heat and motion, and
not a gift of being heavy and solid. Even Money shall lose its inertia.
We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and new sizes of
men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some of them will be poor,
and no one will care. We will simply look at the man and at what size he
is.
If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will. Sometimes one
suspects that the reason goodness is not more popular in modern life is
that it has been taken hold of the wrong way. Perhaps when we stop
teasing people, and take goodness seriously and calmly, and see that
goodness is essentially imagination, that it is brains, that it is
thinking down through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to
be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or
imagination at all, it will be popular.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been
saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of
the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to
maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of
possibility, and the present strength of manhood. But I can only hope
that these objections that people make will turn out like mine. I have
been making objections all my life, as all idealists must--only to watch
with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of
going by.
People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they
were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto! The automobile becomes
silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty.
Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the balloon succeeds,"
we said, "there will be no way of going just where and when you want
to." And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the
balloon goes on.
"Aeroplanes," we said, "may be s
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