rs--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to
know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain
things will happen.

2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a
generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive
one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular.

Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles.

When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make
everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this.

A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or
dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that
everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up.

I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a
fact.

Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to
advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of
profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make
a new nation for a hundred people to know?

Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally
invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind
of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off
ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on
making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in
ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?

Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a
man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of
increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose I
begin with W. J.?

What does anyone suppose would happen?

XVIII

W. J.

If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In
bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and
practical of W. J. to die.

If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story
of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would
be to write an article about him in some national weekly, _Saturday
Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, which would be read by four million people.

But the _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_ has no use for W. J. until
he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to
the business men who are p