To my mind that is a picture of the world. If you have
lost sight of other interests and do not know the relation of your own
interests to those other interests, then you do not understand your own
interests, and have lost yourself. What you want is orientation,
relationship to the points of the compass; relationship to the other
people in the world; vital connections which you have for the time being
severed.
I am particularly glad to express my admiration for the kind of
organization which you have drawn together. I have attended banquets of
chambers of commerce in various parts of the country and have got the
impression at each of those banquets that there was only one city in the
country. It has seemed to me that those associations were meant in order
to destroy men's perspective, in order to destroy their sense of
relative proportions. Worst of all, if I may be permitted to say so,
they were intended to boost something in particular. Boosting is a very
unhandsome thing. Advancing enterprise is a very handsome thing, but to
exaggerate local merits in order to create disproportion in the general
development is not a particularly handsome thing or a particularly
intelligent thing.
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