Precisely the way I feel about an article in the _Saturday Evening Post_ so fortunate as to be by me--or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I know very well--W. J. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created by W. J. ----. But if W. J., a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing--if W. J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched. And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought. The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work. A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it. A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to W. J. he can think of. The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me. This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money. If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us--we would be a new nation in a week.