ht we would want
afterward. We have gradually guessed what we wanted better. We began our
lives as children with all sorts of interesting sins or moral guesses
and experiments. We find there are certain sins or moral experiments we
almost never use any more because we found that they never worked. We
had been deceived about them. Most of us have tried lying. Since we were
very small we have tried in every possible fashion--now in one way, now
in another--to see if lying could not be made to work. By far the
majority of us, and all of us who are the most intelligent, are not
deceived now by our desire to tell lies. Perhaps we have not learned
that all lies do not pay. A child tells a lie at first as if a lie had
never been thought of before. It is as if lying had just been invented,
and he had just thought what a great convenience it was, and how many
things there were that he could do in that way. He discovers that the
particular thing he wants at the moment, he gets very often by lying.
But the next time he lies, he cannot get anything. If he keeps on lying
for a long time, he learns that while, after a fashion, he is getting
things, he is losing people. Finally, he finds he cannot even get
things. Nobody believes in him or trusts him. He cannot be efficient. He
then decides that being trusted, and having people who feel safe to
associate with him and to do business with him, is the thing he really
wants most; and that he must have first, even if it is only a way to get
the other things he wants. It need not be wondered that the Trusts,
those huge raw youngsters of the modern spirit, have had to go through
with most of the things other boys have. The Trusts have had to go
through, one after the other, all their children's diseases, and try
their funny little moral experiments on the world. They thought they
could lie at first. They thought it would be cunning, and that it would
work. They did not realize at once that the bigger a boy you were, even
if you were anonymous, the more your lie showed and the more people
there were who suffered from it who would be bound sooner or later to
call you to account for it.

The Trusts have been guessing wrong on what they would wish they had
done in twenty years, and the best of them now are trying to guess
better. They are trying to acquire prestige by being far-sighted for
themselves and far-sighted for the people who deal with them, and are
resting their policy on winning confi