day, every day, the way the little
humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people
feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in
the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the
nation.

There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay
for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think
and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the
nation--some place where three million people act as one.

It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing
can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great
national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.

And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great
national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought,
holds a meeting once a week together like the _Saturday Evening Post_,
like _Collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere
who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home
and read the _Hampshire County Gazette_.

It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in
the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring
example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end
in the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in
behalf of all of us.

XXII

I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in
self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for
a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with
Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat
for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a
nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us,
I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of
Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a
Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of
thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any
longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal
fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when
we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he
constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the