me of
us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the main common fund of
motives for living together, for growing up into a world together, the
desires, motives, and intentions in men's hearts, their desires toward
us and ours toward them, we are going to know and compel to be made
known. We will fight men to the death to know them.

Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each man of us,
all our years, all our days, to drive through to some sort of mutual
understanding with our own selves? Now we will fight through to some
mutual understanding with one another and with the world.

We will knock on every door, make a house to house canvass of the souls
of the world, pursue every man, sing under his windows. We will
undergird his consciousness and his dreams. We will make the birds sing
to him in the morning, "_Where are you going_?" We will put up a sign at
the foot of his bed for his eyes to fall on when he awakes, "_Where are
you going_?"

Whatever it is that works best, if we blow it out of you with dynamite
or love or fear or draw it out of you with some mighty singing going
past--ah, brother, we will have it out of you! You shall be our brother!
We will be your brother though we die!

We will live together or we will die together.

What do you really want? What do you really like? _Who are you_?

We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dreadnoughts, our
stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what are they? And what do
they amount to and what can they do, as compared with truth, the real
news about what people want in this world, and about where we are going?

I say--they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory to tear
down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth, with the news
about us, that shall come out at last (God hasten the day!) from the
open--the pried-open hearts of men! And I have seen that men shall go
forth with shouts in that day and with glad and solemn silence, to build
a world!

* * * * *

I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo.

I speak for five million men.

We have got this book written between us (under the name of one of us),
because we want our own way. We are not improving people. We are not
even trying to improve ourselves. Many of us started in on it once and
the first improvement we thought of was not to try any more.

It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people wan