In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our governments everywhere are groping to find out what business men are really like and what they propose to be like, if a man is good (far more than if he is bad) everybody has a right to know it. The President has a right to know it. The party leaders have a right to know it.
It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness pay, but what is the man's real, deep, happy, creative, achieving motive in making goodness pay? What is it in the man that fills him with this fierce desire, this almost business-fanaticism for making goodness pay?
It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of being in a human world, his passion for human economy, for world efficiency and world-self-respect. This is what it is in him that makes him force goodness to pay.
The business men of the bigger type who let themselves talk in this tone to-day, do not mean it, they are letting themselves be insensibly drawn into the tone of the men around them.
We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying that we have none, that we have believed it. We all know men finer than we are who say they have none. So we have not, probably.
And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year of going about the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse than they are!
It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not deliberately lie about human nature. They merely say pianola-minded things.
One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging like a kind of street piano, through men's minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh, SH-SH! Oh, do not let anybody know I'm being good!"
I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to make me believe they have.