Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well, what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not? If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why, lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty. If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of justifying dishonesty forever afterwards. We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.