This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me. He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth. With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world. His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it. His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did. So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together. Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven. Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world. The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them. A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself. Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together. People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want.