The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.
In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.
Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book—in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom—wherever I am, I put it down—put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people.