When a man lies or does any other wrong thing, his real failure consists not in the wrongdoing itself, but in his failure to take pains to focus his mind on the facts in himself, and in the people about him, and see what it really is that he would wish he had done, say in twenty years.  It seems to be possible, after a clumsy fashion, to find out by a study of ourselves, and of our own lives and of other men’s lives, what we would wish we had done afterward.  Everything we have learned so far we have learned by guessing wrong on what we have thought we would want afterward.  We have gradually guessed what we wanted better.  We began our lives as children with all sorts of interesting sins or moral guesses and experiments.  We find there are certain sins or moral experiments we almost never use any more because we found that they never worked.  We had been deceived about them.  Most of us have tried lying.  Since we were very small we have tried in every possible fashion—­now in one way, now in another—­to see if lying could not be made to work.  By far the majority of us, and all of us who are the most intelligent, are not deceived now by our desire to tell lies.  Perhaps we have not learned that all lies do not pay.  A child tells a lie at first as if a lie had never been thought of before.  It is as if lying had just been invented, and he had just thought what a great convenience it was, and how many things there were that he could do in that way.  He discovers that the particular thing he wants at the moment, he gets very often by lying.  But the next time he lies, he cannot get anything.  If he keeps on lying for a long time, he learns that while, after a fashion, he is getting things, he is losing people.  Finally, he finds he cannot even get things.  Nobody believes in him or trusts him.  He cannot be efficient.  He then decides that being trusted, and having people who feel safe to associate with him and to do business with him, is the thing he really wants most; and that he must have first, even if it is only a way to get the other things he wants.  It need not be wondered that the Trusts, those huge raw youngsters of the modern spirit, have had to go through with most of the things other boys have.  The Trusts have had to go through, one after the other, all their children’s diseases, and try their funny little moral experiments on the world.  They thought they could lie at first.  They thought it would be cunning, and that it would work.  They did not realize at once that the bigger a boy you were, even if you were anonymous, the more your lie showed and the more people there were who suffered from it who would be bound sooner or later to call you to account for it.

The Trusts have been guessing wrong on what they would wish they had done in twenty years, and the best of them now are trying to guess better.  They are trying to acquire prestige by being far-sighted for themselves and far-sighted for the people who deal with them, and are resting their policy on winning confidence and on keeping faith with the people.