self-denial, submission to external authority, carried as far as it can be carried; and the result is that in England, where military service is voluntary, the common soldier is less respected than any other serviceable worker in the community. The police constable, who is a civilian and has to use his own judgment and act on his own responsibility in innumerable petty emergencies, is by comparison a popular and esteemed citizen. The Roman Catholic peasant who consults his parish priest instead of his conscience, and submits wholly to the authority of his Church, is mastered and governed either by statesmen and cardinals who despise his superstition, or by Protestants who are at least allowed to persuade themselves that they have arrived at their religious opinions through the exercise of their private judgment. The moral evolution of the social individual is from submission and obedience as economizers of effort and responsibility, and safeguards against panic and incontinence, to willfulness and self-assertion made safe by reason and self-control, just as plainly as his physical growth leads him from the perambulator and the nurse's apron strings to the power of walking alone, and from the tutelage of the boy to the responsibility of the man. But it is useless for impatient spirits (like you and I, for instance) to call on people to walk before they can stand. Without high gifts of reason and self-control: that is, without strong common-sense, no man yet dares trust himself out of the school of authority. What he does is to claim gradual relaxations of the discipline, so as to have as much liberty as he thinks is good for him, and as much government as he thinks he needs to keep him straight. If he goes too fast he soon finds himself asking helplessly, "What ought I to do?" and so, after running to the doctor, the lawyer, the expert, the old friend, and all the other quacks for advice, he runs back to the law again to save him from all these and from himself. The law may be wrong; but anyhow it spares him the responsibility of choosing, and will either punish those who make him look ridiculous by exposing its folly, or, when the constitution is too democratic for this, at least guarantee that the majority is on his side.1

1 George Bernard Shaw: The Sanity of Art. By courtesy of the publishers, Boni & Liveright.

CHAPTER V

MECHANISMS, PROCESSES, AND ORGANIZATIONS

THE problem of giving directions for making or doing something, or of explaining the working of an organization, is not always easy to solve. Most difficulties, however, occur through lack of considering just what the problem involves, and through lack of sufficiently simplifying the material. Thus, when you ask an old man in a strange city where the post-office is, he is likely to reply somewhat as follows: "You keep on just as you are going for a little ways, and then turn down a narrow street on the right and go along for four blocks, and then turn to your left and go until you come to a square, and then go across it and down a side street and through an office building, and then it's the stone building on the corner of the second street to your right.” You stroke your chin, meditate a bit, and, if you are polite, thank your informant for his kind intentions. Then you ask the next person whom you meet to tell you where the post-office is. The old man meant well, of course, but he failed to simplify. So did the author of the little book that Johnny received for Christmas mean well when he explained how to make a beautiful chemical effect. But Johnny, who was a fairly impetuous youth, did not stop to read the footnote at the end which warned against working near a fire. When he was seraphically pouring his chemicals together near the old oil lamp in the "shop" there came a flash, a deafening roar and little Johnny had no time either to examine footnotes or, after the smoke had cleared, for postmortem complaints. The trouble lay in the fact that the author did not give Johnny the necessary information at the essential time.

It seems that neither piety nor wit will suffice to locate post-offices or direct experiments or explain machines. Better than either of these is the ability to make the mechanism, the process, the organization transparently clear, with each bit of information given at exactly the proper moment. For, since the object of such explanation as attempts to make clear is primarily information, the main quality of the writing should be clearness. Everything that stands in the way of this quality should be made to surrender to explanation. If the subject is itself interesting or remarkable, the facts may speak for themselves, as in an account of the nebular hypothesis; if the subject is merely common, as for example the force pump, the primary aim should be clearness. Pleasing presentation, however desirable, is secondary. No amount of pleasant reading on the subject of making photographs, the working of periscopes, the organization of literary societies will be of value if at the end the reader has not a well-ordered idea of how to go to work or of how the thing of which you treat is operated.

General Cautions

For these reasons certain principles of caution can be laid down. The first caution is, do not take too much for granted on the reader's part. First of all take stock of your reader and his knowledge of the subject and then write in accordance with your discoveries. If, in explaining the bicycle to a Fiji Islander, you fail to note that the two wheels are placed tandem rather than parallel, he may form a thoroughly queer notion of the machine. And your protest, "Why, I supposed he would know that!" is in vain. This caution does not mean that you must adopt a tone of condescension, must say, "Now children," and patter on, but that you will not omit any important part of the explanation unless you are sure that your reader is acquainted with it. The second caution, which is corollary with the first, is

that you do not substitute for the gaps in the written information the silent knowledge that is in your own mind. The danger here lies in the fact that, knowing your subject well, you will write part of it and think the rest. Having for a long time practiced the high hurdles, for example, when you come to explain them you will run the paradoxical risk of being so thoroughly acquainted with the subject that you will actually omit much vital information and thus make your treatment thin. And the third caution is, avoid being over technical. An expert can always understand plain English; a layman, on the other hand, can soon become hopelessly bewildered in a sea of technicalities. Treatment of technicalities demands sense, therefore; when a term is reasonably common its presence can do no harm, but when a term is known only to the few, substitute for it, when writing for the many, plain English, or define your terms.

Centralization

Perhaps the greatest lack in expositions of this type is centralization. A reader rises from the account of a cream separator or a suspension bridge or the feudal system with the feeling that many cogs and wires and wheels and spouts and lords and vassals are involved, but without a clear correlation of all these elements into a clear and simple whole. Now a suspension bridge is much more organic than a scrap heap, and the feudal system than a city directory. It is for you as the writer to make this clear, to show that all the things are related, that they affect each other and interact. For this purpose you will find the greatest help in the device of ascertaining what the root principle is, the fundamental notion or purpose of the subject that you are explaining. For example, to make your reader see the relation of the various parts of the tachometer you should discover and present the fact that the machine relies primarily on the principle of centrifugal force as affecting the mercury that

whirls as the automobile moves. Once this principle is grasped by the reader, the various parts of the mechanism assume their proper places and relations and become clear. Now obviously this root principle is to be sought in the subject itself; here is no place for an author to let his fancy roam where it will without keeping an eye steadily upon the machine or process. You are trying to explain the machine, not some vague or fanciful idea of what the machine might be if it were like what your fancy says; therefore, in the words of the good old advice, which comes handy in most writing, "keep your eye on the object," which in this case will be the machine or the process or the organization. And the more complicated the mechanism or process, the more necessary will be the discovery of the root principle — a printing machine, for instance, with its amazing complexity, will be helped wonderfully by such a device, and the reader will welcome the device even more than he would in an explanation of how, for example, a fountain pen works though he will be glad for it in any case.

This root principle, nucleus, core, kernel can often be stated in one sentence. You can say, for instance, in speaking of bridges like those across the East River, “A suspension bridge consists of a roadway hung by wires from huge cables which are anchored at the ends and are looped up over one or more high supports in the stream." This sentence may not be immediately and entirely clear, but it serves to show quickly what relations parts have to each other, and to it the reader may refer in his mind when detailed treatment of the maze of wires and bolts becomes bewildering. Often this sentence need not be expressed alone; it should always be thought out in the writer's mind.

If it is expressed, such a sentence may stand at the beginning as a sort of quick picture, or it may come at the end as a collecting statement of what has preceded, or at any point where it seems to be of the most value to the reader. It may