elves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter
of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.

It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of
self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret
of increased production in factories, or power over others in business,
and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I
say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having
or exercising this power of self-criticism?

If the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ were to come to me in a
body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything,
they--the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ can do, and do now to
acquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not being
fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding
back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at
all, I have a faint hopeful idea--I feel it at this moment floating about
my head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought
to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing
off. I cannot believe that only this far--in a few pages or so about it,
I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to
them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this
country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves,
the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country
everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being
fooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfect
passion,--almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make
my idea alluring with him.

Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of
Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.

It is true that other readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ besides
Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr.
Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily
common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people.
Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody who
waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with
them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin,
Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other
people do not want to hav