r for a capital or labor group to
see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main
thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it
will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.

And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them
that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.

Three per cent of the conveniences--the public X-ray machines for keeping
people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.

The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it
modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.

It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline.
What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.

There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like
Northampton--twenty-five thousand people, to have--if it once gets
started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is
easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town
disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be
easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.

Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself
is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry
for him?

No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur
Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective
like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the
way he steals a march on himself.

The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a
discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he
keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks
back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.

People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does
this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right.

It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when
they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in
the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of
self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful
idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over
the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a
substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of
ori