In ——­’s factory in ——­, the workers in brass, a few years ago, could not be kept alive more than two years because they breathed brass filings.  When ——­ installed, at great expense, suction machines to place beside the men to keep them from breathing brass, some one said, “Well surely you will admit this time, that this is philanthropy?”

“Not at all.”

The saving in brass air alone, gathered up from in front of the men’s mouths, paid for the machines.  What is more he said that after he had gone to the expense of educating some fine workmen, if a mere little sucking machine like that could make the best workmen he had, work for him twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to let them die.

Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point, until they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone about business.  One can talk with them for hours, for days at a time, about their business—­some of them, without being able a single time to corner them into being decent or into admitting that they care about anybody.

Now I will not yield an inch to ——­ or to anybody else in my desire to displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life.  I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of view.  I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding identities, for putting people’s interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and help themselves.

And why not believe this and drop it?  Why should nearly every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with goodness—­either his own or other people’s?

In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our governments everywhere are groping to find out what business men are really like and what they propose to be like, if a man is good (far more than if he is bad) everybody has a right to know it.  The President has a right to know it.  The party leaders have a right to know it.

It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness pay, but what is the man’s real, deep, happy, creative, achieving motive in making goodness pay?  What is it in the man that fills him with this fierce desire, this almost business-fanaticism for making goodness pay?

It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of being in a human world, his passion for human economy, for world efficiency and world-self-respect.  This is what it is in him that makes him force goodness to pay.

The business men of the bigger type who let themselves talk in this tone to-day, do not mean it, they are letting themselves be insensibly drawn into the tone of the men around them.

We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying that we have none, that we have believed it.  We all know men finer than we are who say they have none.  So we have not, probably.