It is true that other readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled. I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism. 1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself. 2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him. 3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration. XVI THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down--if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson? The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night. I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter. Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce. Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself.