I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers.  I imagine he would point up their sermons a good deal—­if they had his shoes on.

Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual forces of our time.

At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised.

CHAPTER IX

TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS

A man’s success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.

Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching the imagination of crowds.  The reason that preachers in this present generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a class are more close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the imaginations of crowds.

When one considers what it is that touches a crowd’s imagination and how it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a city anywhere which has not hundreds of men in it who could do more to touch the imagination of crowds with goodness than any clergyman could.  A man of very great gifts in the pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal clergyman, could be outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of crowds with goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in any one of several hundred of our modern business occupations.

There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do not like to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults as the rest of us are with ours.  But I do not think it would be too much to say that this particular nation I have in mind—­and I leave the reader to fill in one for himself, has been determined in its national character for hundreds of years, and is being determined to-day—­every day, nearly every minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep—­by a certain personal habit that the people have.  I am persuaded that this habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights—­a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next—­a kind of national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, and talking excitedly and with little flourishes.  It is a nation that is always shrugging its shoulders, that almost never seems to be capable of doing a thing with fine directness, with long rhythms of purpose or sustained feeling; and all because every man, woman, and child in the country—­scores of generations of them for hundreds of years—­has been taught that the