The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it.
This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts—facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.
Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?
IX
TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY
The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on—the people from whom nobody expects it.
In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.
My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.
Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything—I would look into, a whole nation would look into it—the moment they heard of it—at once.