ken up every time--I do not deny it--on the same
monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same
monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would
stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my
pocket ... I would stand and watch him,--watch him walking through the
lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John
Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes
etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!

The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature
is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can
do about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of the
thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are
going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working
difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves
in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more
desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular
arrangements, perhaps,--when something in us starts us up into being
Lodges,--for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves
in time.

Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born
hates a Socialist from afar off,--a man who never had in his younger days
perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing
Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very
first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused
to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are
Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national
jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half
waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act
of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last
man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the
narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with
propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber
in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the
room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back
to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved
individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit
there as a