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
Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical,
self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and
self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and
winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as
if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate
business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing
anything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson would
stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand
Post Offices think.
There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger
Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post
Office like this:
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U.S. ME The
P.O. People]
XXI
LOST-MINDEDNESS
OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS
I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about
themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end
in the means.
To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea
once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us
which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things
together.
I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down
seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.
It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about
the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like
this, a two-cent stamp means.
Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at
it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp
believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my
country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of
the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.
As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first
one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country,
so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well
located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.