What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values.
The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation.
I am not writing to people—to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club—to ask them whether they think this idea of mine—of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not.
I am writing them and asking them if—if it is going through—they want to belong to it.
Very few men can speak with authority—even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass.
I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants—we will all get what we want.
The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is,
"If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business—especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?"
It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things.
The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself.