This is my news or vision.  I say that this is where we are going in America.  I compel no man to follow my news but I will pursue him with my news until he gives me his!

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This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about you.

If it is not true news, say so.  Say what is.  We all have a right to know.  The one compulsion of modern life is our right to know, our right to compel people who live on the same continent or who live in the same country with us, to open up their hearts, to furnish us with their share of the materials for a mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual misunderstanding, on which to live.

It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty.  All liberty is in it.  These people who have to live with us and that we have to live with, these people who breathe the same moral air with us, drink the same water with us, these people who have their moral dumps, who throw away their moral garbage with us—­these people who will not help provide some daily, mutual understanding for these common decencies for our souls to live together these people we defy and challenge!  We will compel them to reveal themselves.  We will drive them away, or we will drive them into driving us away, if they will not yield to us what is in their hearts—­Mars, hell, anywhere we go, it matters not to us where we go, except that we cannot and we will not live with men about us who thrust down their true feelings and their real desires into a kind of manhole under them, and sit on the lid and smile.  Some seem to have manholes and some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others who have convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide their feelings in.  But whatever their real feelings are, and wherever they keep them, they belong to us.

We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to have, if we live in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit system for getting our minds through to one another.  We demand a system for having the streets of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air or atmosphere—­and all the common conveniences for having decent and self-respecting souls in crowds—­all the intelligence-machines, the love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of one another’s lives!

We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need them, some of us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the main common fund of motives for living together, for growing up into a world together, the desires, motives, and intentions in men’s hearts, their desires toward us and ours toward them, we are going to know and compel to be made known.  We will fight men to the death to know them.

Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each man of us, all our years, all our days, to drive through to some sort of mutual understanding with our own selves?  Now we will fight through to some mutual understanding with one another and with the world.