t to lay it down in the night like a great,
soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy,
inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be
done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same
people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith,
Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and
Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.

The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are
Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses,
Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing
that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a
little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had
to begin with ourselves.

We did.

We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to
circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting
people to take up goodness by talking about it.

But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to
people about goodness.

We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some.

Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But the trouble
always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know it, or at least
one does not know which it is. The best we can do with goodness, some of
us, if we want it to show more quickly or to hurry people along in
goodness more, is to show them other people's.

I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know my plumber
or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin slowly but surely to be
a very different place.

My plumber is a genius.

CHAPTER II

IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT?

Perhaps it will seem a pity to spoil a book--one that might have been
really rather interesting--by putting the word "goodness" down flatly in
this way in the middle of it.

And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with business.

I would not yield first place to any one in being tired of the word. I
think, for one, that unless there is something we can do to it, and
something we can do to it now, it had better be dropped.

But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a
word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it.

I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and
sw