Diogenes Didn't Need a Lamp 无需苦苦寻找诚实的人

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 motives¹. Most of us want to do good.

I believe in people because I have seen a great many of them in different parts of the world. I would rather trust my own experience and observation than the cynical² 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 adverse³ 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 muddled⁴, but their feelings are sound, and progress stems from this fact.

I lived in Spain at the time of the overthrow⁵ of the monarchy⁶ 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 exalted⁷ look: "Seiior, now our children will learn to read and write."

It was a wonderful thing to see people animated⁸ 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 anthem⁹ "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 political corruption¹⁰ in America, and after years of research I had to base it on fewer than one per cent of our public servants. Searching for crooks¹¹ 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 loyalty¹² and Integrity and tolerance¹³ in my fellow men, then I will have lost my faith.