Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me!  God forgive me!  Believe me, I never meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve you!  If you insist on it and keep saying that I have been improving you, all I can say is that I was merely looking as if I were improving you. You did it.  I did not.  God help me if I am trying to improve you!  I am trying to find out in this book who I am.  If, incidentally, while I am quietly working away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are yourself, and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling all by yourself, do not mix me up in it.  I deny that I have tried to improve you or anybody.  I have written this book to get my own way, to express my America.  I have written it to say “i,” to say “I,” to say (the first minute you let me), “you and I,” to say we, WE about America—­to drive the news through to a President of what America is like.

I am not improving you.  I am telling you what may or may not be news about you.

Take it or leave it.

=V=

I want to be good.

I do not feel superior to other men.

And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it, to be compelled to feel superior.

I believe we all want to be good.

The one thing I want in this world is to prove it.  I want my own way.

I am not going to slump into being a beautiful character.  I have written this book to get my own way.

I have said I will not be mixed up in the fate of people who do not know where they are going, who have not decided what they are like, who do not know who they are.  What do the people want?  Some people tell me they want nothing.  They tell me it would only make things worse and stir things up for me to want to be good.

Or perhaps they think it is beautiful to lower the price of oil.  They want oil at seven cents a gallon.

Do they?  Do you?  Do I?

I say no.  Let oil wait.  I want to raise the price of men and to put a market value on human life.  I find as I look about me that there are two classes of statesmen offering to be helpful in making life worth living in America.

There are the statesmen who think we are going to be good and who believe in a program which trusts and exalts the people and the leaders of the people.

There are the statesmen who seem to believe that American human nature does not amount to enough to be good.  They are planning a program on the principle that the best that can be done with human nature in America in business and public life is to have it expurgated.

Which class of statesmen do we want?

In some of our state prisons men who are not considered fit to reproduce themselves are sterilized.  The question that is now up before this country is, Do we or do we not want American business sterilized?  Are we or are we not going to put a national penalty on all initiative in all business men because some men abuse it?