is very simple rudimentary
whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and
accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to
bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in
four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then
he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and
out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of
other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not."
That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away
absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to
work.

Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like
this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that
cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when
one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the
people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one
to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the
utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's
Employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will
be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has--especially
these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.

The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the
head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special
crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up
to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our
President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and
be President of all of us.

It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on
earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being
President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world
America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our
next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy,
senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy
factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations
abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will
be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand
years--except the one that began in Nazareth--th