In a year we would increase production fifty per cent. This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in. Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money--running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a profession, any more than they can help. XVII THE NEWS-MAN I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very astonishing and revolutionary fact. I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles. 1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in the next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen. 2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular. Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles. When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this. A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up. I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a fact. Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know? Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching? Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose I begin with W. J.? What does anyone suppose would happen? XVIII