I believe many more people want to do right than do wrong. They are misty on what constitutes doing right, but generally they and I believe that truth, beauty, justice, and love are to be preferred to falsehood, ugliness, injustice, and hate. This makes our world, for me, worth inhabiting and my life worth living. For if I had no faith in the vast majority of men and in the richness of living, I could not keep at the business of living, would have only to exist, which I despise.
But I also realized that my life is a limited franchise and living it can be dissipated if I try to do everything or too many things at one time. Fooled by the superficial richness of lives led in less specialized eras, I can attempt to do too much and miss doing anything. For that reason I must endeavor to learn what things I do best. In general they are the things I wish to do and enjoy doing either consciously or subconsciously, and when they are discovered I believe in accepting them and doing them wholeheartedly. I believe this is my duty and repayment for the gift of life and its wonder and fullness.
Because people essentially are ethical, I feel no need to appeal to external reasons or creatures, on their behalf or mine, for aid. I believe that I am the master of my own fate and they of theirs. If others have need of extra machinery to support and guide their ideals and existence, that is their concern and no concern of mine. But for them it is a worthy business. I trust my fellow man and oppose too-closely-negotiated bargaining and commercial espionage. As a lawyer I guide myself more by my instinctive feeling for the parties and issues involved than by the ancient rote and the modern augmentation of it.
Because I hold these beliefs, I am sure that our world will eventually be peaceful and that this will come about through the good in most of us. During my own lifetime I had seen unwillingness to act give way to a determination to cooperate to stop aggression. But there is one price of peace which worries me. This is the ascendance of cultural mediocrity. I’m not entirely happy about the fact that through the modernization and facilitation of worldwide transportation, communication, and education, the world is shrinking, talking less languages, supporting less religions, using less diverse shelters, eating the same foods, and in short gradually coming to think along more similar lines.
My experience has taught me that one of the most stimulating things in life is to know different people with different ideas, customs, and ways of life. I value what each of them has contributed to my own outlook. It is therefore one of my fondest hopes that somehow, without sacrificing all this wondrous diversity, eventually there will be achieved a peaceful world, free from jealousies, fears, and hate.