ow and that
can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees
who devote their time to it.

If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and
watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day
and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we
put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps
I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that
it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in
prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and
easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I
demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get
things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other
sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a
right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do
it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect
intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and
through and trust.

The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a
week from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into an
expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had
time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so
arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose
business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't
take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads
and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any
Government.

But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having
a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the
Government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to
the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be
jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter.
Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell
everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for
instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday
trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's
job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent
railroads--with all