——, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven cents.
There was not time to say anything. I just thought a minute of how they did it.
Why is it that people—so many good people will speak of oil at eleven cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven?
I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents.
I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents. But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human nature to toss me eighteen cents?
If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?
What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from ourselves or expect anything of anybody else? I submit it to your own common sense, Gentle Reader. Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your business is going to be like?
I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go to their work and as they fall asleep at night.
The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life.
What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man, and gets things done.