The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

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XXI

LOST-MINDEDNESS

OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS

I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.

To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.

I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.

It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.

Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country—like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.

As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.