ecome automatic. In
saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more
creative and newer levels. We are asserting that the literal belief in
honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery.
People ought to be honest automatically and by assumption, by dismissing
it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted.

This is what is going to happen.

Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars,
each copy.

With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about
six hundred dollars.

The second costs--twenty-nine cents.

The same principle holds good under the law of moral automatics.

Let the plates be cast. Everything follows. The fire in the Iroquois
Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies.

Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets
around a world.

Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.

They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for
making everybody know that they knew it--the moral and spiritual
machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all
swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been
set up.

Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead
bodies or three dead bodies--but the principle holds good--let the moral
plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively
little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to
more original things.

The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in
seeing how to make goodness in a city work.

Let the plates be once cast--say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa,
and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national
automatically.

Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission
government in three years.

* * * * *

The failure for the time being apparently of the more noble and
aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of
technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil
really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it.

Our religious inventors have failed to use the most scientific method.
We have gone at the matter of butting through evil without thinking
enough. Less butting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not
try any longer to butt a whole