t know
what they want and that do not know what they are doing, the government
will just step in, of course, and investigate them until they find out.

A specific government will not need to be specific many times.

It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly,
empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This
particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it
found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust
whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they
thought that they thought that they wanted....

"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and
thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative,
successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby
beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that
they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their
business says or seems to say they wanted.

"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to
refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it
all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their
natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which
we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their
business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and
they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and
forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.

"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men
they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that
they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake
up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really
is that has been happening to them all their lives, _viz._: for forty,
fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and
overlooked what they were like.

"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines
to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associating almost
exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers,
hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have
grown into them.

"This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful to them,'
the government will then say, and dismiss the subject."

* *