Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee

The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin that has ever been committed, seemed to think that when men committed a sin, it was because they did not really see what it was that they were doing. They did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did not do what they would have wished they had done in twenty years.

      I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in twenty years—twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe.

      It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting too rich, to point out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great permanently successful business. His sin has consisted in his not taking pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his mind and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem to be better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man. There are things that he has not thought of that every one else has.

      We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the most colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced. To point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one thing that the world could accept gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in time how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller leads in this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly being the world's most lonely man.

      Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation—eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he really looked in all the world—this has been Mr. Rockefeller's experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty years.

      Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as boning down to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to do. Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable times for getting his own attention will be good. Any one else from outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of expression or—of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will make him good.

CHAPTER XI

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DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS

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      If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be good in the morning.

      It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked. Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people, when a vice tempted them would be to step out, look at it in its window a minute—possibly take a look too at the other window—and they would be good.

      If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window—see it lying there, its twenty years' evil, its twenty days', its twenty minutes' evil, all branching up out of it—he would be good.

      When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically. Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the right is.

      A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do it. He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been the regular and conventional thing to do under the circumstances. But it occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind, that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant. He thought he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself more fully and adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven feet long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph—a long panorama of the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of yellowness trailing through the city. The box containing the rolls was sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the bottom of the pictures.

      A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at once.

      If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just the 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