I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people are getting it to be good. What a government thinks about them might possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It.
The first observation is this:
The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not marry.
Possibly it is because many people are following the same principle in trying to be good and in getting other people to be good that they make such poor work of it.
Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of one that they must.
Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to what one really wants to do.
Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not conducive to goodness. The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a contradiction in terms. It is a principle that would make wicked people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never worked with people since.
It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.
All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups or classes of people who are especially not what they should be. The people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in common. There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once more to get them to be good.
They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good and cannot do it.