t in this book, and in a
grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what
they ought to do.

A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way
telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.

I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among
the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody
right.

During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world
gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to
write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.

I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything
happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a
trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I put
it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.

As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from
this book to myself.

On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any
further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part
of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has
been written to express certain things a hundred million people want
during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in
view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have
thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the
hundred million people.

I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if
the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I
really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it,
like mine.

Nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call
helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready,
except in his own strike, to write a book like this.

I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can
prove it and do something that will prove it.

And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or
both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to
try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with
people.

And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me.
I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world.
It is easy and light-heart