The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
John Stuart Mill · en
Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is
not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish
we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to
speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people
who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder
what the hundred million people think.
The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it.
To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make
them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. The
same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in
industry. We will do something that will make them--capital and
labor--say: "What do you mean?"
Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find
out.
BOOK II
WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
I
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are
the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.
In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.
Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may
hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the
very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a
grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what
they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way
telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among
the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody
right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world
gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to
write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything
happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a
trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I put
it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from
this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any
further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part
of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has
been written to express certain things a hundred million people want
during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in
view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have
thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the
hundred million people.