Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.
The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.
The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it.
This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts--facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.
Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?
The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on--the people from whom nobody expects it.
In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.
My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.