t to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by
gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?

What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy
oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care
whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from
ourselves or expect anything of anybody else? I submit it to your own
common sense, Gentle Reader. Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a
room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see
anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you
do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your
business is going to be like?

I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have
come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are
passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go
to their work and as they fall asleep at night.

The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is
raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life.

What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what
he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is
about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man,
and gets things done.

A nation that does not know itself shall not be itself.

A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say
nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a
beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great,
eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is
for--a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that
cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be
unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and
everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up
in the morning and work for it--work for the vision of what it wants to
be--cannot be a great nation.

A masterpiece is a book that has a thousand years in it. No man has a
right to say where these thousand years in it shall lie, whether in the
past or in the future. It is the thousand years' worth in it that makes
a masterpiece a masterpiece. In America we may not have the literature
of what we are or of what we have been, but the literature of what we
are bound to be, the literature of what WE WILL, we will have, an