When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.
And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.
Three per cent of the conveniences—the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.
The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.
It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.
There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton—twenty-five thousand people, to have—if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.
Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him?
No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself.
The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.
People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right.