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U.S. ME The
P.O. People]

XXI

LOST-MINDEDNESS

OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS

I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about
themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end
in the means.

To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea
once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us
which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things
together.

I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down
seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.

It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about
the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like
this, a two-cent stamp means.

Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at
it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp
believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my
country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of
the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.

As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first
one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country,
so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well
located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.

In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has
to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from
New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is
concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to
think three. The country pays for it for him.

America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that
it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every
man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight
for his body has to be sent to hi