sins of all of us.

We are all concerned. We all want to know.

It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the
reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people
so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and
night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.

But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look
up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves,
when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change
our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?

XXIII

SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY

My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see
them in other people.

I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million
people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few
scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may
have moments of being like me in this.

Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a
rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how
unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining
our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then
before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other
people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in
ourselves.

Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any
good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article,
but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so
perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase
them back to their own homes from the Post Office.

There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and
certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled
about ourselves.

And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance,
when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand
wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled
about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little
personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better
business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete
exhibit of what is the matter with American business.

I leave with the reader t