"I guess it's up to us to track this straight line down in its application to ethics. That buzzy-headed discoverer also says a line is length without breadth. Consequently, I argue that a straight line is just 'nothing,' anyway. Then when a mush-headed dreamer starts right out to walk the straight line of life it's a million to one chance he'll break his fool neck, or do some other positively ridiculous stunt that's liable to terminate what ought to have been a promising career. I submit, from the foregoing arguments, the straight line of ethical virtue is just a vision, a dream, an hallucination, a nightmare. It's one of those things the whole world loves to sit around on Sundays and yarn about, and just as many folks would hate to practice, anyway. And this is as sure as you'll find the only bit of glass on the road when you're automobiling if you don't just happen to be toting a spare tyre.
"Seeing that you can't everlastingly keep trying to walk on 'nothing' without disastrous consequences, and, further, seeing the days of miracles have died with many other privileges which our ancestors enjoyed, such as being burned at the stake and painting up our bodies in fancy colors, it is natural, even a necessity, that 'crookedness' should have come into its own.
"Let's start right in at the first chapter of a man's life. It'll point the whole argument without anything else. It's ingrained even in the youngest kid to resort to subterfuge. Subterfuge is merely the most innocent form in a crook's thesis. Maybe a kid, lying in its cradle, with only a few days of knowledge to work on, don't know the finer points he'll learn later. But he knows what he wants, and is going to get it. He's going to get the other feller where he wants him, and then force him to do his bidding. It's his first effort in 'crookedness' when he finds the straight line of virtue is just a most uncomfortable nightmare. How does he do it?
"I guess it's this way. He needs his food. He guesses his gasoline tank needs filling. He don't guess he's going to lie around with a sort of mean draught blowing pneumonia through his vitals. He just waits around awhile to see if any one's yearning to pump up his infantile tyre, and when he finds there's nothing doing, why, he starts right in to make his first fall off the straight line of virtue. You see, the straight line says that kid's tank needs filling only at stated intervals. The said kid don't see it that way, so he turns himself into a human megaphone, scares the household cat into a dozen fits, starts up a canine chorus in the neighboring backyards, makes his father yearn to shoot up the feller that wrote the marriage service, sets the local police officer tracking down a murder that was never committed, and maybe, if he only keeps things humming long enough, sets all the State legal machinery working overtime to have his parents incarcerated for keeping an insanitary nuisance on the premises.
"See the crookedness of that kid? The moment he finds himself duly inflated with milk he lies low. Do you get the lesson of it? It's plumb simple. That kid wanted something. He didn't care a cuss for regulations. He just laid right there and said, 'Away with 'em!' He was thirsty, or hungry, or greedy. Maybe he was all three. Anyway, he wanted, and set about getting what he wanted the only way he knew. All of which illustrates the fact that when human nature demands satisfaction no laws or regulations are going to stand in the way. And that's just life from the day we're born.
"From the foregoing remarks you may incline to the belief that I have set out willfully to outrage every moral and human law. This is not quite the case. I am merely giving you the benefit of my observations, and also, since I am merely another human unit in the perfectly ridiculous collection of bipeds which go to make up the alleged superior races of this world, I must fall into line with the rest.
"If Abel gets in my way I must 'out' him. If I can manufacture a down cushion out of old Samson's hair to make my lot more comfortable, I'm just going to get the best pair of shears and get busy. If I'm going to collect amusement from studding that chump Sisera's head with tacks, why, it's up to me to avoid delay that way. And as for Ananias, he seems to me to have been a long way ahead of his time. They'd have had his monument set up in every public office in the country to-day. He'd have been the emblem of every trading corporation I know, and his effigy would have served as the coat-of-arms for the whole of the present-day creation.
"I trust you are keeping well, and the responsibility of guiding the development of our Gracie is showing no sign of undermining your constitution. Gracie is really a good girl, if a little impetuous. I notice, however, that impetuosity gives way before the responsibilities of life. So far she is quite young. I'm hoping good results when she gets responsibility.
"Give my best love to the old Dad, and tell him that he must be careful of his health in such a desperate heat as New York provides in summer time. I think a month's vacation in the hills would be excellent for him at this time of year. I am looking forward to the time when I shall see him again.
"You might tell him I hope to fulfill my mission under schedule time. If you do not hear from me again you will know I am working overtime on the interests in which I left New York.