o do because they would not have
understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight
necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in
human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and
go ahead.

What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the
penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives--his vision
of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge
his unselfishness gives--his imagination about what he wants for others,
and pours the two visions together.

The law of business is the law of biology--action--reaction--interaction.
I + You = We.

It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit
around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish.
It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is--and for
labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor
union.

There are far worse things than selfishness in people.

Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get
at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others.

* * * * *

This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while
inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty
other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I
was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off
with me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this
chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and
then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me.

He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is,
the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the
earth.

With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a
world.

His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg,
made him see that he wanted salt in it.

His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt
in an egg as much as he did.

So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his
unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the
salt together.

Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was
wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to
express in i