It is easier when one is going under water for the third time and sees a rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the rope, reach up to forty more years of one’s life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one’s life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the end of one’s year at the tiptop of one’s being, as if it had only taken five minutes.  And yet it is only an act of the creative imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily, detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its setting of the whole—­going without a piece of mince pie.  If one could only make one’s self see the piece of mince pie as it is, it would not be difficult.  If one could see it on the plate there and see the not taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little triangular link of coupling in the chain that keeps one holding on forty years longer to this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a plate would become a Vision.

This seems to be the principle that works best in getting other people to be good.

Perhaps the President will succeed in getting Trusts to be good, by taking hold of specific Trusts, one by one, and setting them—­all mankind looking on—­in the nation’s vision, setting them even in their own vision—­taking the Trusts that thought they had got what they wanted, making them stand up and look (in some great public lighted place) at what pathetic, tragical failures they are, letting them see that what their Trust had wanted all along, if it had only thought about it, was not success one went to jail for—­success by getting the best out of the most people, but success by serving the most people the best.

A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds for a long time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the trouble we were going to have in curbing the eagerness of the Trusts.

Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them.

What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that they did not want.

The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each other’s heels, asking the government to please investigate them.  The more they can get the people to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them.

All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern business will change.  First the expression will change and then the face itself.