no man to follow my news but I will pursue him with my
news until he gives me his!

* * * * *

This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about you.

If it is not true news, say so. Say what is. We all have a right to
know. The one compulsion of modern life is our right to know, our right
to compel people who live on the same continent or who live in the same
country with us, to open up their hearts, to furnish us with their share
of the materials for a mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual
misunderstanding, on which to live.

It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty. All liberty is in
it. These people who have to live with us and that we have to live with,
these people who breathe the same moral air with us, drink the same
water with us, these people who have their moral dumps, who throw away
their moral garbage with us--these people who will not help provide some
daily, mutual understanding for these common decencies for our souls to
live together these people we defy and challenge! We will compel them to
reveal themselves. We will drive them away, or we will drive them into
driving us away, if they will not yield to us what is in their
hearts--Mars, hell, anywhere we go, it matters not to us where we go,
except that we cannot and we will not live with men about us who thrust
down their true feelings and their real desires into a kind of manhole
under them, and sit on the lid and smile. Some seem to have manholes and
some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others who have
convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide their feelings in.
But whatever their real feelings are, and wherever they keep them, they
belong to us.

We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to have, if we live
in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit system for getting our
minds through to one another. We demand a system for having the streets
of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air
or atmosphere--and all the common conveniences for having decent and
self-respecting souls in crowds--all the intelligence-machines, the
love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the
crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living
with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of
one another's lives!

We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need them, so