It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked.  Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people, when a vice tempted them would be to step out, look at it in its window a minute—­possibly take a look too at the other window—­and they would be good.

If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window—­see it lying there, its twenty years’ evil, its twenty days’, its twenty minutes’ evil, all branching up out of it—­he would be good.

When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically.  Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the right is.

A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs.  A letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do it.  He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been the regular and conventional thing to do under the circumstances.  But it occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind, that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant.  He thought he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself more fully and adequately.  He took for it this second time a box seven feet long.  The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph—­a long panorama of the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of yellowness trailing through the city.  The box containing the rolls was sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the bottom of the pictures.

A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at once.

If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just the right slide or possibly try three or four up there on his canvas a second, no one would ever have any trouble in doing right.

* * * * *