Part 10 (1/2)
In the meantime we hold on. We do not propose to give up believing in it. Perhaps, after all, all that is the matter with goodness in the United States is the people who have taken hold of it.
They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting.
We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would make it hum!
I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been sitting (in some churches), or a.s.sociating, owing to circ.u.mstances, with very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk, businesslike man I see going by, and saying, ”My dear sir, I do wish that _you_ would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all, something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible mess of it!”
And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day, and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more particular. I went straight to the point. ”Here are at least sixteen valuable efficient brands of goodness in America,” I said, ”all worth their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I believe with my whole soul in them all, and I believe thousands of other men do, or are ready to, the moment some one makes a start.”
I pulled out a little list of items which I had made out and put down on a piece of paper, and handed them over to him, and said I wished he would take a few of them--the first five or six or so--and make them work.
He already had, I found, made two or three of the harder ones work.
I would not have any one suppose for a moment that I am presenting Lim as a kind of business angel.
No one who knows Lim thinks of him, or would let anybody else think of him, as being a Select Person, as being particularly or egregiously what he ought to be. This is one reason I have picked him out. Being good in a small private way, just as a small private end in itself, may be practicable perhaps without dragging in people who are not quite what they ought to be. But the moment one tries to make goodness work, one comes to the fact that it must be made to work with what we have. We have a great crowd of unselected people, people both good and bad, and the first principle in making goodness work (instead of being merely good) seems to be to believe that goodness is not too good for anybody.
Anybody who can make it work can have it, and what goodness seems to need, especially in America and England just now, is people who do not feel that they must at all hazards look good. Whatever happens, whatever else we do in any general investment or movement we may be making with goodness, we must let these people in. If there is one thing rather than another that those of us who know Lim all rely on and like, it is that nothing can ever make him slump down into looking good. We often find him hard to make out--everything is left open and loose and unlabelled in Lim's moral nature. The only really sure way any one can tell when Lim is being good is, that whenever he is being good he becomes suddenly and unexpectedly interesting. His goodness is daring, unexpected, and original. One has the feeling that it may break out anywhere. It is always doing things that everybody said could not be done before. It is true that some people are dazed, and no one can ever seem to feel sure he knows what it is that is going on in Lim when he is being good, or that it is goodness. He merely keeps watching it. There is a certain element of news, of freshness, of gentle sensation, in his goodness. It leads to consequences. And there always seems to be something about Lim's goodness which attracts the attention of people, and makes people who see it want it. So when I speak of goodness in this book, and put it down as the basis of the power of getting men to do as one likes, I do not deny that I am taking the word away and moving it over from its usual a.s.sociations. I do not mean by a good act, a good-looking act, but an act so const.i.tuted that it makes good. For the purpose of this book I would define goodness as efficiency. Goodness is the quality in a thing that makes the thing go, and that makes it go so that it will not run down, and that nothing can stop it.
There is the inefficiency of lying, for instance, and the inefficiency of force, or bullying.
CHAPTER IV
PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR
My theory about the Liar is that it is of no use to scold him or blame him. It merely makes him feel superior. He should be looked upon quietly and without saying anything as a case of arrested development. What has happened to him is that he merely is not quite bright about himself, and has failed to see how bright (in the long run) other people are.
When a man lies or does any other wrong thing, his real failure consists not in the wrongdoing itself, but in his failure to take pains to focus his mind on the facts in himself, and in the people about him, and see what it really is that he would wish he had done, say in twenty years.
It seems to be possible, after a clumsy fas.h.i.+on, to find out by a study of ourselves, and of our own lives and of other men's lives, what we would wish we had done afterward. Everything we have learned so far we have learned by guessing wrong on what we have thought we would want afterward. We have gradually guessed what we wanted better. We began our lives as children with all sorts of interesting sins or moral guesses and experiments. We find there are certain sins or moral experiments we almost never use any more because we found that they never worked. We had been deceived about them. Most of us have tried lying. Since we were very small we have tried in every possible fas.h.i.+on--now in one way, now in another--to see if lying could not be made to work. By far the majority of us, and all of us who are the most intelligent, are not deceived now by our desire to tell lies. Perhaps we have not learned that all lies do not pay. A child tells a lie at first as if a lie had never been thought of before. It is as if lying had just been invented, and he had just thought what a great convenience it was, and how many things there were that he could do in that way. He discovers that the particular thing he wants at the moment, he gets very often by lying.
But the next time he lies, he cannot get anything. If he keeps on lying for a long time, he learns that while, after a fas.h.i.+on, he is getting things, he is losing people. Finally, he finds he cannot even get things. n.o.body believes in him or trusts him. He cannot be efficient. He then decides that being trusted, and having people who feel safe to a.s.sociate with him and to do business with him, is the thing he really wants most; and that he must have first, even if it is only a way to get the other things he wants. It need not be wondered that the Trusts, those huge raw youngsters of the modern spirit, have had to go through with most of the things other boys have. The Trusts have had to go through, one after the other, all their children's diseases, and try their funny little moral experiments on the world. They thought they could lie at first. They thought it would be cunning, and that it would work. They did not realize at once that the bigger a boy you were, even if you were anonymous, the more your lie showed and the more people there were who suffered from it who would be bound sooner or later to call you to account for it.
The Trusts have been guessing wrong on what they would wish they had done in twenty years, and the best of them now are trying to guess better. They are trying to acquire prestige by being far-sighted for themselves and far-sighted for the people who deal with them, and are resting their policy on winning confidence and on keeping faith with the people.
They not only tried lying, like all young children, but they tried stealing. For years the big corporations could be seen going around from one big innocent city in this country to another, and standing by quietly and without saying a word, putting the streets in their pockets.
But no big corporation of the first cla.s.s to-day would begin its connection with a city in this fas.h.i.+on. Beginning a permanent business relation with a customer by making him sorry afterward he has had any dealings with you, has gone by as a method of getting business in England and America.
One of our big American magazines not long ago, which had gained especially high rates from its advertisers because they believed in it, lied about its circulation. The man who was responsible was not precisely sure, gave nominal figures in round numbers, and did what magazines very commonly did under the circ.u.mstances; but when the magazine owner looked up details afterward and learned precisely what the circulation was for the particular issue concerned, he sent out announcements to every firm in the country that had anything in the columns of that issue, saying that the firm had lied, and enclosing a check for the difference in value represented. Of course it was a good stroke of business, eating national humble pie so, and it was a cheap stroke of business too, doing some one, sudden, striking thing that no one would forget. Not an advertis.e.m.e.nt could be inserted and paid for in the magazine for years without having that action, and the prestige of that action, back of it. Every shred of virtue there was in the action could have been set one side, and was set one side by many people, because it paid so well. Every one saw suddenly, and with a faint breath of astonishment, how honesty worked. But the main point about the magazine in distinction from its compet.i.tors seems to have been that it not merely saw how honesty worked, but it saw it first and it had the originality, the moral shrewdness and courage, to put up money on it. It believed in honesty so hard that suddenly one morning, before all the world, it risked its entire fortune on it. Now that it has been done once, the new level or standard of candour may be said to have been established which others will have to follow. But it does not seem to me that the kind of man who has the moral originality to dare do a thing like this first need ever have any serious trouble with compet.i.tors. In the last a.n.a.lysis, in the compet.i.tion of modern business to get the crowd, the big success is bound to come to men in the one region of compet.i.tion where compet.i.tion still has some give in it--the region of moral originality. Other things in compet.i.tion nowadays have all been thought of except being good. Any man who can and will to-day think out new and unlooked-for ways of being good can get ahead, in the United States of practically everybody.
CHAPTER V
PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY
The stage properties that go with a bully change as we grow older. When one thinks of a bully, one usually sees a picture at once in one's mind.
It is a big boy lording it over a little one, or getting him down and sitting on him.