most
colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced. To
point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would
seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has
not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly
two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow
for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one thing that the world could accept
gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a
great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in
time how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller leads in
this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly
being the world's most lonely man.

Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human
beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation--eighty million people; to
feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly
wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money,
peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral
curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the
most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he
really looked in all the world--this has been Mr. Rockefeller's
experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty
years.

Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as boning down
to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to
do. Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable
times for getting his own attention will be good. Any one else from
outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of
expression or--of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will
make him good.

CHAPTER XI

DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS

If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the
World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them
and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people
could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they
were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be
good in the morning.

It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked.
Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people,
when a vice tempted them would be