to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some business where nobody has made it pay before.  Anybody can see that it almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there.  At all events, anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging on crosses.  It is also the part that is successful.  One knows scores of saints with ruddy cheeks.  It is getting to be a matter of principle almost in a modern saint—­to have ruddy cheeks.

I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York Sun, that vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park Row—­that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting fact in our modern life.  He is the next fact the honest pessimist will have to face.

I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable, imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.

He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.

He is successful because he is good.

Only religion works.

I am aware that the New York Sun might quarrel with just exactly this way of putting it.

I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again after saying something else first. Viz.:  The man who is successful in business is the man who can get people to do as much as they can do and a great deal more than they think they can do.

Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can do this.  He has to have something in him very like the power of inventing people or of making people over.

To be specific:  In some big department stores, as one goes down the aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks making fun of customers.

One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent ones, those who would keep coming and who have the best trade, go to other stores.

How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by a practical employer?  Can he stop it successfully by turning on his politeness?

Of course he can make his clerks polite-looking by turning on his politeness.  But politeness in a department store does not consist in being polite-looking.  Being polite-looking does not work, does not grip the customer or strike in and do things and make the customer do things.

A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five hundred human beings, which is carving out its will, its nature, stamping its pattern on a city, on a million men, or on a nation, cannot be made to work without religion.  If the clerks are making fun of people, only religion can stop it.