And so it goes on.  I grow more and more tired every year of going about the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse than they are!

It is not exactly a lie.  It is a Humdrum.  People do not deliberately lie about human nature.  They merely say pianola-minded things.

One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or Broadway.  One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging like a kind of street piano, through men’s minds, “Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh, SH-SH!  Oh, do not let anybody know I’m being good!”

=II=

I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to make me believe they have.

They have lied long enough.

I have lied long enough.

My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it.

And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got the necessary brains to go with them) the better they have worked.

Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has been my fault.

Sometimes it is John Doe’s fault.

I am going to speak to John Doe about it.  I am going to tell him what I am driving at.  I have turned over a new leaf.  In the crisis of a great nation and as an act of last desperate patriotism, I am going to give up looking modest.

For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and stand up before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with it and say what I think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister threats against our having or getting a real national life in America.

I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always kept him wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-looking coats and trousers.  Except for a few moments a year he never caught up.  Nobody ever saw that boy and his long shoes when he was not butting bravely about, stubbing his toes on the world and turning up his sleeves.

It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he grew up.

I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least until our present national crisis is over in business and in politics, like that boy.

There are millions of other men in this country who want to be like that boy.  Nations may smile at us if they want to.  We will smile too—­rather stiffly and soberly, but for better or worse we propose from to-day on, to let people see what we are trying to be daily, grimly, right along side of what we are!

I have come to the conclusion that the only way, for me, at least, to keep modest and kind, is to have my ideals all on.  When one is going around in sight of everybody with one’s moral sleeves rolled up, and one’s great wistful, broad trousers that do not look as if they would ever get filled out, it is awkward to find fault with other people for not filling out their moral clothes.  It may be a severe measure to take with one’s self hut the surest way to be kind is to live an exposed life.