But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do? XXIII SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people. I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this. Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves. Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office. There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves. And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business. I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs. * * * * *