great many times. I will
use it again, because it is the most serviceable to my own mind. We
often speak of a man who cannot find his way in some jungle or some
desert as having "lost himself." Did you never reflect that that is the
only thing he has not lost? _He_ is _there_. He has lost the rest of the
world. He has no fixed point by which to steer. He does not know which
is north, which is south, which is east, which is west; and if he did
know, he is so confused that he would not know in which of those
directions his goal lay. Therefore, following his heart, he walks in a
great circle from right to left and comes back to where he started--to
himself again. To my mind that is a picture of the world. If you have
lost sight of other interests and do not know the relation of your own
interests to those other interests, then you do not understand your own
interests, and have lost yourself. What you want is orientation,
relationship to the points of the compass; relationship to the other
people in the world; vital connections which you have for the time being
severed.

I am particularly glad to express my admiration for the kind of
organization which you have drawn together. I have attended banquets of
chambers of commerce in various parts of the country and have got the
impression at each of those banquets that there was only one city in the
country. It has seemed to me that those associations were meant in order
to destroy men's perspective, in order to destroy their sense of
relative proportions. Worst of all, if I may be permitted to say so,
they were intended to boost something in particular. Boosting is a very
unhandsome thing. Advancing enterprise is a very handsome thing, but to
exaggerate local merits in order to create disproportion in the general
development is not a particularly handsome thing or a particularly
intelligent thing. A city cannot grow on the face of a great state like
a mushroom on that one spot. Its roots are throughout the state, and
unless the state it is in, or the region it draws from, can itself
thrive and pulse with life as a whole, the city can have no healthy
growth. You forget the wide rootages of everything when you boost some
particular region. There are dangers which probably you all understand
in the mere practice of advertisement. When a man begins to advertise
himself there are certain points that are somewhat exaggerated, and I
have noticed that men who exaggerate most, most qui