he pages and began to read. The language was simple
and direct, an appeal to common sense, yet the words strangely seemed
charged with an emotional power that I found myself resisting. When at
length I laid down the sheets I wondered whether it were imagination,
or the uncomfortable result of memories of conversations I had had with
him.

I was, however, confronted with the task of refuting his arguments: but
with exasperating ingenuity, he seemed to have taken the wind out of our
sails. It is difficult to answer a man who denies the cardinal principle
of American democracy,--that a good mayor or a governor may be made
out of a dog-catcher. He called this the Cincinnatus theory: that any
American, because he was an American, was fit for any job in the gift
of state or city or government, from sheriff to Ambassador to Great
Britain. Krebs substituted for this fallacy what may be called the
doctrine of potentiality. If we inaugurated and developed a system of
democratic education, based on scientific principles, and caught the
dog-catcher, young enough, he might become a statesman or thinker or
scientist and make his contribution to the welfare and progress of the
nation: again, he might not; but he would have had his chance, he would
not be in a position to complain.

Here was a doctrine, I immediately perceived, which it would be suicidal
to attempt to refute. It ought, indeed, to have been my line. With a
growing distaste I began to realize that all there was left for me was
to flatter a populace that Krebs, paradoxically, belaboured. Never in
the history of American "uplift" had an electorate been in this manner
wooed! upbraided for expediency, a proneness to demand immediate
results, an unwillingness to think, yes, and an inability to think
straight. Such an electorate deserved to be led around by the nose by
the Jasons and Dickinsons, the Gorses and the Griersons and the Parets.

Yes, he had mentioned me. That gave me a queer sensation. How is one
to handle an opponent who praises one with a delightful irony? We, the
Dickinsons, Griersons, Parets, Jasons, etc., had this virtue at least,
and it was by no means the least of the virtues,--that we did think.
We had a plan, a theory of government, and we carried it out. He was
inclined to believe that morality consisted largely, if not wholly, in
clear thinking, and not in the precepts of the Sunday-school. That was
the trouble with the so-called "reform" campaigns, th