I propose to live the next few years in a glass house.  There are millions of other men who want to.  We want to see if we cannot at last live confidentially with a world, live naively and simply with a world like boys and like great men and like dogs!

What I have written, I have written.  I propose to run the risk of being good.  When driven to it, I will run the risk of saying I am good.

My motives are fairly high.  See! here is my scale of one hundred!  I had rather stand forty-five on my scale than ninety-eight on yours!

If there is any discrepancy between my vision and my action, I am not going to be bullied out of my life and out of living my life the way I want to, by the way I look.  Though it mock me, I will not haul down my flag.  I will haul up my life!

Here it is right here in this paragraph, in black and white.  I take it up and look at it, I read it once more and lay it down.

What I have written, I have written.

=III=

People do not seem to agree in the present crisis of our American industrial and national life, about the necessity of getting at the facts and at the real news in this country about how good we are.

Last November in the national election, four and a half million men (Republicans) said to Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore! do not be good so loud!”

Four and a half million other men, also Republicans, told him not to mind what anybody said, but to keep right on being good as loud as he liked, for as long as it seemed necessary.

They wanted to be sure our goodness in America such as we had, was being loud enough to be heard, believed in, and acted on in public.

The other set of men, last November (who were really very good too, of course), were more sedate and liked to see goodness modulated more.  They stood out for what might be called a kind of moral elegance.

The governing difference between the Roosevelt type and the Taft type in America has not been a mere difference of temperament but a difference in news-sense, in a sense of crisis in the nation.

Thousands of men of all parties, with the nicest, easiest stand-pat Taft temperaments in the world, with soft, low voices and with the most beautiful moral manners, have let themselves join in a national attempt to shock this nation into seeing how good it is.  A great temporary crisis can only be met by a great temporary loudness.

This is what has been happening in America during the last six months.  At last, all men in all parties are engaged in trying to find out:  Is it true or not true that we want to be good?

We are trying to get the news through.  It may not be very becoming to us and we know as well as any one, that loudness, except when morally deaf people drive us to it is in bad taste.  We are looking forward, every one of us, to being as elegant as any one is, and the very first minute we get the morally deaf people out of office where we will not have to go about shouting out at them we will tone down in our goodness.  We will modulate beautifully!