We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and new sizes of men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some of them will be poor, and no one will care. We will simply look at the man and at what size he is.
If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will. Sometimes one suspects that the reason goodness is not more popular in modern life is that it has been taken hold of the wrong way. Perhaps when we stop teasing people, and take goodness seriously and calmly, and see that goodness is essentially imagination, that it is brains, that it is thinking down through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or imagination at all, it will be popular.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood. But I can only hope that these objections that people make will turn out like mine. I have been making objections all my life, as all idealists must—only to watch with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of going by.
People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto! The automobile becomes silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty.
Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the balloon succeeds," we said, "there will be no way of going just where and when you want to." And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the balloon goes on.
"Aeroplanes," we said, "may be successful, but the more successful they are, the more dangerous, and the more danger there will be of collisions—collisions in the dark and up in the great sky at night." And, presto! man invents the wireless telegraph, and the entire sky can be full of whispers telling every airship where all the other airships are.
Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to do with monopoly. Presto! there is suddenly evolved an entirely new type of monopolist—the man who can be rich and good; the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that serves the owners, the producers and employees, the distributors and the consumers alike. An American railway President has been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat in 2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. Some one, almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York—who knows?—shall be carried around in one railway President's vest pocket.