It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or admiring Mr. Rockefeller’s skilled labour at getting too rich, to point out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great permanently successful business.  His sin has consisted in his not taking pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his mind and finding out what he really wanted to do.  It would seem to be better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man.  There are things that he has not thought of that every one else has.

We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the most colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced.  To point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller.  He merely has not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow for Mr. Rockefeller to see.  The one thing that the world could accept gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in time how they can keep from being like him.  If Mr. Rockefeller leads in this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly being the world’s most lonely man.

Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation—­eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he really looked in all the world—­this has been Mr. Rockefeller’s experience.  He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty years.

Goodness may be defined as getting one’s own attention, as boning down to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to do.  Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable times for getting his own attention will be good.  Any one else from outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of expression or—­of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will make him good.

CHAPTER XI

DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS

If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be good in the morning.