n a modern saint--to have ruddy cheeks.

I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York _Sun_, that
vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park
Row--that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting
fact in our modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will
have to face.

I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable,
imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as
catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.

He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.

He is successful because he is good.

Only religion works.

I am aware that the New York _Sun_ might quarrel with just exactly this
way of putting it.

I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again after saying
something else first. _Viz._: The man who is successful in business is
the man who can get people to do as much as they can do and a great deal
more than they think they can do.

Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can do this. He
has to have something in him very like the power of inventing people or
of making people over.

To be specific: In some big department stores, as one goes down the
aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks making fun of
customers.

One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent ones, those
who would keep coming and who have the best trade, go to other stores.

How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by a practical
employer? Can he stop it successfully by turning on his politeness?

Of course he can make his clerks polite-looking by turning on his
politeness. But politeness in a department store does not consist in
being polite-looking. Being polite-looking does not work, does not grip
the customer or strike in and do things and make the customer do things.

A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five hundred human
beings, which is carving out its will, its nature, stamping its pattern
on a city, on a million men, or on a nation, cannot be made to work
without religion. If the clerks are making fun of people, only religion
can stop it.

Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader? You have
observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people (making fun of you, for
instance), the assumption almost always is, that you are trying t