t. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I
call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at
all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven.

Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one
wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the
world.

The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a
rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they
really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them,
no one can compete with them.

A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere
giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating,
self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and an
unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in
which he chooses to mix himself.

Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day
is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into
the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized
persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the
passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the
selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other
antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together.

People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in
theirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The
fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that
makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose,
in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them
what they want.

It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump
down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be
a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist--if
he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has
and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love
of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give
something to and leave alone.

This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship.

I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers
in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.

The way for America to