we have not, probably.

And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year of going about
the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and
finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over
everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs
of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse
than they are!

It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not deliberately lie
about human nature. They merely say pianola-minded things.

One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or
Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging
like a kind of street piano, through men's minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh,
SH-SH! Oh, do not let anybody know I'm being good!"

=II=

I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up
an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to
make me believe they have.

They have lied long enough.

I have lied long enough.

My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it.

And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got the necessary
brains to go with them) the better they have worked.

Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has been my fault.

Sometimes it is John Doe's fault.

I am going to speak to John Doe about it. I am going to tell him what I
am driving at. I have turned over a new leaf. In the crisis of a great
nation and as an act of last desperate patriotism, I am going to give up
looking modest.

For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and stand up
before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with it and say what I
think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister threats against our
having or getting a real national life in America.

I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always kept him
wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-looking coats and
trousers. Except for a few moments a year he never caught up. Nobody
ever saw that boy and his long shoes when he was not butting bravely
about, stubbing his toes on the world and turning up his sleeves.

It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he grew up.

I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least until our
present national crisis is over in business and in politics, like that
boy.

There are millions of other men in this country who want to be like
that bo