Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting.
We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people
who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would
make it hum!
I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been
sitting (in some churches), or associating, owing to circumstances, with
very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the
street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk,
businesslike man I see going by, and saying, "My dear sir, I do wish
that _you_ would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all,
something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but
these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible
mess of it!"
And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day,
and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other
business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more
particular. I went straight to the point. "Here are at least sixteen
valuable efficient brands of goodness in America," I said, "all worth
their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really
using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I
believe with my whole soul in them all, and I believe thousands of other
men do, or are ready to, the moment some one makes a start."
I pulled out a little list of items which I had made out and put down on
a piece of paper, and handed them over to him, and said I wished he
would take a few of them--the first five or six or so--and make them
work.
He already had, I found, made two or three of the harder ones work.
I would not have any one suppose for a moment that I am presenting Lim
as a kind of business angel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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