The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness, which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large degree unconscious of it.  There are few department stores in England or America that would expect to be called pious, but if one is deeply and obstinately interested in the Golden Rule, and in getting crowds of people to believe in it at a time, it is impossible not to think what sweeps of opportunity department stores would have with it—­with the Golden Rule.  With thousands of people flowing in and out all the week, and with hundreds of clerks to attend to it, eight hours a day, there would hardly seem to be any limit to what such a store could do in making the Golden Rule a direct, a pointed and personal thing, a thing that could not be evaded and could not be forgotten by thousands of people.  The same people all going in and out of department stores, vast congregations of them, eight hours a day, which ministers can only get at in small lots, three hundred or so, twenty minutes a week, and can only get at with words even then—­all of them being convinced in terms they understand, and in terms they keenly feel, convinced in hats that they will see over and over again, convinced in velvets that they are going to put on and off for years, in laces, in waistcoats, shoes, in dining-room chairs, convinced in the very underclothes next to their skins, the clothes they sleep in all night, in the very plates on which they eat, while all the time they keep remembering, or being reminded, just how the things were bought, and just what was claimed for them and what was not claimed for them, and thinking how the claims came true or how they did not.

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I just saw lying on the table as I came through the hall a moment ago a hat which (out of all the long rows of hats I can see faintly reaching across the years) will always be to me a memorable hat.  I am free to say that, after all the ladies it has been taken off to, my great memory of that hat is now and always will be, as long as I live, the department store at which I bought it, and the things the department store, before I got through with it, managed to make the hat say.

I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad daylight, with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat which was a quarter of a size too large.  To clinch the matter, I had ordered four ventilating holes to be punched in it, and had it sent to my rooms to be my hat—­implacably my hat as I supposed, for better for worse, for richer for poorer—­always.  The next morning, after standing before a mirror and trying hopefully for a few minutes to see if I could not look more intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly.  I had made up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that that hat made me look, at any cost.  The store was not responsible according to the letter