with marked and embarrassing
idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever
put up with, from any other employer in the world.

Absent-mindedness.

Non-committalness.

Halfness, or double personality.

Bodilessness.

Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.

Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.

General Irresponsibleness.

And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million
people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the
Employer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a
fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by
unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.

The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose
immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in
the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.

Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert,
as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the
storm is highest, that he must not butt in.

The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that
one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being
responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically
expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and
one's own employer.

But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the
President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous
ones for the country.

I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about
them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the
moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are
making it for the President to do anything for him.

Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are
giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is
not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so
large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart
he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.

Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a
trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with
a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the
People.

It is this bodilessness in the Employer--th