s just like all the rest. What was true of me was true of them.

And what were we, the crowning achievement of American civilization,
like? I had not thought of it before. Here, then, was a question the
answer to which might benefit others as well as myself. I resolved to
answer it if I could--to write down in plain words and cold figures a
truthful statement of what I was and what they were.

I had been a fairly wide reader in my youth, and yet I did not recall
anywhere precisely this sort of self-analysis. Confessions, so called,
were usually amatory episodes in the lives of the authors, highly spiced
and colored by emotions often not felt at the time, but rather inspired
by memory. Other analyses were the contented, narratives of supposedly
poverty-stricken people who pretended they had no desires in the world
save to milk the cows and watch the grass grow. "Adventures in
contentment" interested me no more than adventures in unbridled passion.

I was going to try and see myself as I was--naked. To be of the
slightest value, everything I set down must be absolutely accurate and
the result of faithful observation. I believed I was a good observer. I
had heard myself described as a "cold proposition," and coldness was a
_sine qua non_ of my enterprise. I must brief my case as if I were an
attorney in an action at law. Or rather, I must make an analytical
statement of fact like that which usually prefaces a judicial opinion. I
must not act as a pleader, but first as a keen and truthful witness and
then as an impartial judge. And at the end I must either declare myself
innocent or guilty of a breach of trust--pronounce myself a faithful or
an unworthy servant.

I must dispassionately examine and set forth the actual conditions of my
home life, my business career, my social pleasures, the motives
animating myself, my family, my professional associates, and my friends
--weigh our comparative influence for good or evil on the community and
diagnose the general mental, moral and physical condition of the class
to which I belonged.

To do this aright, I must see clearly things as they were without regard
to popular approval or prejudice, and must not hesitate to call them by
their right names. I must spare neither myself nor anybody else. It
would not be altogether pleasant. The disclosures of the microscope are
often more terrifying than the amputations of the knife; but by thus
studying both myself and my contemporaries