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.

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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 planet when we try to keep one man from doing wrong.

We will butt our way through to the man who sees where to butt and how to butt.  Then all together!

Very few of the wrongs that are done to society by individuals would be done if civilization were supplied with the slightest adequate machinery or conveniences for bringing home to people vividly who the people are they are wronging, how they are wronging them, and how the people feel about it.  This machinery for moral and social insight, this intelligence-engine or apparatus of sympathy for a planet to-day, before our eyes is being invented and set up.

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Sometimes I almost think that history as a study or particularly as a habit of mind ought to be partitioned off and not allowed to people in general to-day.  Only men of genius have imagination enough for handling history so that it is not a nuisance, a provincialism and an impertinence in the serene presence to-day of what is happening before our eyes.  History makes common people stop thinking or makes them think wrong, about nine tenths of the area of human nature, particularly about the next important things that are going to happen to it.

Our modern life is not an historian’s problem.  It is an inventor’s problem.  The historian can stand by and can be consulted.  But things that seem to an historian quite reasonably impossible in human nature are true and we must all of us act every day as if they were true.  We but change the temperature of human nature and in one moment new levels and possibilities open up on every side.

Things that are true about water stop being true the moment it is heated 212 degrees Fahrenheit.  It begins suddenly to act like a cloud and when it is cooled off enough a cloud acts like a stone.  Railroad trains are run for hundreds of miles every year in Siberia across clouds that are cold enough.  We raise the temperature of human nature and the motives with which men cannot act to-day suddenly around a world are the motives with which they cannot help acting to-morrow.