A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot
express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who
cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending
everybody to W. J. he can think of.

The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this
themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is
the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me.

This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic
assumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely
to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a
civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day,
in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little
interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are
merely working for money.

If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does
not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and
that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers
and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of
all of us--we would be a new nation in a week.

In a year we would increase production fifty per cent.

This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit
of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has
come in.

Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a
very great business success of running his business on this principle, of
making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at
once than merely making money--running a business like any other big
profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write
something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the
first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of
believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a
profession, any more than they can help.

XVII

THE NEWS-MAN

I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed,
self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very
astonishing and revolutionary fact.

I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two
principles.

1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in
the next few yea