ike man I see going by, and saying, "My dear sir, I do wish
that _you_ would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all,
something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but
these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible
mess of it!"

And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day,
and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other
business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more
particular. I went straight to the point. "Here are at least sixteen
valuable efficient brands of goodness in America," I said, "all worth
their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really
using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I
believe with my whole soul in them all, and I believe thousands of other
men do, or are ready to, the moment some one makes a start."

I pulled out a little list of items which I had made out and put down on
a piece of paper, and handed them over to him, and said I wished he
would take a few of them--the first five or six or so--and make them
work.

He already had, I found, made two or three of the harder ones work.

I would not have any one suppose for a moment that I am presenting Lim
as a kind of business angel.

No one who knows Lim thinks of him, or would let anybody else think of
him, as being a Select Person, as being particularly or egregiously what
he ought to be. This is one reason I have picked him out. Being good in
a small private way, just as a small private end in itself, may be
practicable perhaps without dragging in people who are not quite what
they ought to be. But the moment one tries to make goodness work, one
comes to the fact that it must be made to work with what we have. We
have a great crowd of unselected people, people both good and bad, and
the first principle in making goodness work (instead of being merely
good) seems to be to believe that goodness is not too good for anybody.
Anybody who can make it work can have it, and what goodness seems to
need, especially in America and England just now, is people who do not
feel that they must at all hazards look good. Whatever happens, whatever
else we do in any general investment or movement we may be making with
goodness, we must let these people in. If there is one thing rather than
another that those of us who know Lim all rely on and like, it is that
nothing can ever make him slump down in