英语励志美文精华 49

Diogenes Didn't Need a Lamp

BY DAVID LOTH

I BELIEVE in people. However much of a mess we seem to make of

the world, it is people who have brought about all the progress we

know, and I don't mean just material progress. All have been for-

mulated and expressed by men and women. Even when people make

mistakes it seems to me they usually make them from right motives 1.

Most of us want to do good.

I believe in people because I have seen a great many of them in dif-

ferent parts of the world. I would rather trust my own experience and

observation than the cynical 2 remarks of unhappy men. My belief not

only has given me a happy life but has made possible any really useful

work I have done.

Of course I like people, too. As a newspaperman for twenty years

in this country, Europe and Australia, I met all kinds of men and

women and saw them under both favorable and adverse 3 conditions.

As a biographer, I learned that the people of other days were not

much different than we are today. The lesson of history, both the

history of the past and the history we are making on this particular

day of today, is that the people's instincts are almost always right.

You can trust them. Their information may be wrong and their

thinking muddled 4, but their feelings are sound, and progress stems

from this fact.

I lived in Spain at the time of the overthrow 5 of the monarchy 6 in

1931, and first heard of the establishment of a new republic when

our cook came from the market, breathless with the news. Her very

first comment, expressing what was uppermost in her mind, was

given with an almost exalted 7 look: "Seiior, now our children will

learn to read and write."

It was a wonderful thing to see people animated 8 by these ideals,

carrying out a bloodless revolution. I remember a dance at which

the lights were turned out during the playing of the new republican

anthem 9 "because," as one republic leader told me 7 "this is a social

affair and we don't want to see who won't stand up!' That the

counterrevolution was cruel and bitter does not change the fact that

the people themselves in those years of progress were gentle and

tolerant.

I know nothing that proves the spirit of divinity in human beings

more than the press's preoccupation with evil. As a newspaperman

myself, I always preferred digging into stories of violence or crime or

betrayal because they were so unusual. I once wrote a history of po-

litical corruption 10 in America, and after years of research I had to

base it on fewer than one per cent of our public servants. Search-

ing for crooks 11 brought me into contact historically speaking with

many more honest men. I hardly mentioned them in the book, but

they are much more important to me than the grafters. On the day

that I find myself being surprised by evidences of loyalty 12 and In-

tegrity and tolerance 13 in my fellow men, then I will have lost my

faith.