For three years, at irregular intervals, it reflected my concern about various other matters. When I got incensed over the sufferings of what is called the proletariat I preached profound platitudes about justice and freedom. I had always had the sense to know that all people can be put into two classes: the exceptional and the average. But when I decided that the only way to prevent the exceptional from being sacrificed to the average was for everybody to become anarchists, I preached the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of anarchism. I have long given them up. I still grow violent with rage about the things that are “wrong”, and probably always shall. But I know that anarchism won’t help them. I have known good anarchists who are as dull as any other good laymen. And I have no interest in laymen. Only sensibility matters. I had always known that education doesn’t produce sensibility, but I came to think that _something_ could produce it. Now I know that nothing under the heavens will make any one sensitive if he is not born that way. I had always known that people didn’t want Art, but I imagined that they would be glad to be made to want it. Now I know that they are “not merely indifferent to it: they hate it malignantly”. Therefore, to sum up: all these ideas were not interesting enough to have bothered about. But the curious thing about America is that while she thinks such insipid and pleasant and harmless ideas are abominable and dangerous, she also thinks they are interesting! Any magazine that concerns itself with such ideas is sure to get an audience. Your audience will think that you are crazy or that you want a sensation, or, what is worse, that you are a sort of “Pollyanna” throwing sunshine and optimism into dark places in order to help the world. But it will be interested in reading you for one reason or another.