The way to honour any artist or any creative man, any man a country is in need of especially, is to let him have his own way.

* * * * *

We are told that the way to govern trusts is to untrammel competition.

But the way to untrammel competition is not to try to untrammel it in its details with lists of things men shall not do.

This is cumbersome.

We would probably find it very much more convenient in specifying 979 detailed things trusts cannot do, if we could think of certain sum-totals of details.

Then we could deal with the details in a lump.

The best sum totals of details in this world that have ever been invented yet, are men.

We will pick out a man who has a definite, marked character, who is a fine, convenient sum-total that any one can see, of things not to do.

We will pick out another man in the same line of business who is a fine, convenient sum-total of things that people ought to do.

The government will find ways, as the Coach of Business as the Referee of the Game for the people, to stand by this man until he whips the other, drives him out of business or makes him play as good a game as he does.

* * * * *

When a child finds suddenly that his father is not merely keeping him from doing things, that his father has a soul, the father begins to get results out of the child.

As a rule a child discovers first that his father has a soul by noticing that he insists on treating him as if he had one.

Of course a corporation that has not a soul yet does not propose to be dictated to by a government that has not a soul yet.  When corporations without souls see overwhelmingly that a government has a soul, they will be filled with a wholesome fear.  They will always try at first to prevent it from having a soul if they can.

But the moment it gets one and shows it, they will be glad.  They will feel on firm ground.  They will know what they know.  They will act.

In the hospital on the hill not far from my house, one often sees one attendant going out to walk with twelve insane men.  One would think it would not be safe for twelve insane men to go out to walk with one sane man, with one man who has his soul on.

The reason it is safe, is, that the moment one insane man or man who has not his soul on, attacks the man who has a soul, all of the other eleven men throw themselves upon him and fling him to the ground.  Men whose souls are not on, protect, every time, the man who has his soul on because the man who has a soul is the only defence they have from the men who have not.

It is going to be the same with governments.  We believe in a government’s having as much courage in America as a ten-dollar-a-week attendant in an insane asylum.  We want a government that sees how courage works.