The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.
It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism?
If the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they—the readers of the Saturday Evening Post can do, and do now to acquire a technique—a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea—I feel it at this moment floating about my head—a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far—in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself—some one man all our people have a perfect passion,—almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him.
Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.
It is true that other readers of the Saturday Evening Post besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office—everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled.
I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism.
1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.
2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him.
3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.