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
Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the
convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in
America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself
points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?
Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our
own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?
Who asked him to?
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do
business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs
them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that
lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars'
worth of one's time.
It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car
Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions
of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save
money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's
money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.
The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he
is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post
Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America.
His mind is jet black about all the rest.
Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is
loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business
into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.
XX
FLAT-THINKING
THINKING IN ME-FLAT
What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do
their thinking in four dimensions.
The thickness is what I think.
The breadth is what other people think.
The length is what God thinks.
Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them
as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I
think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them
together as well as I can, the result is--who I am and what I amount to.
Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the
first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think"
thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think"
breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.
The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to
think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other
people think and skips right past them straight to God.