On your honour, Gentle Reader—you who have been with me five hundred pages!
You say "Yes"?
Then I appeal to your sense of fairness. If you truly feel I have been trying to improve you in this book, turn this leaf down here and stop. It is only fair to me. Close the book with your improved and being improved feeling and never open it again until it passes over. You have no right to go on page after page calling me names, as it were, right in the middle of my own book in this way behind my back, you!—hundreds and thousands of miles away from me, by your own lamp, by your own window—you come to me here between these two helpless pasteboard covers where I cannot get out at you, where I cannot answer back, and you say that I am trying to improve you!
Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me! God forgive me! Believe me, I never meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve you! If you insist on it and keep saying that I have been improving you, all I can say is that I was merely looking as if I were improving you. You did it. I did not. God help me if I am trying to improve you! I am trying to find out in this book who I am. If, incidentally, while I am quietly working away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are yourself, and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling all by yourself, do not mix me up in it. I deny that I have tried to improve you or anybody. I have written this book to get my own way, to express my America. I have written it to say "i," to say "I," to say (the first minute you let me), "you and I," to say we, WE about America—to drive the news through to a President of what America is like.
I am not improving you. I am telling you what may or may not be news about you.
Take it or leave it.
V
I want to be good.
I do not feel superior to other men.
And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it, to be compelled to feel superior.