Given all these things you take, it may be, too much
for granted. There is not much to stiffen the mental, moral, and
physical fibers.

Given such good looks, such favor from nature, and an environment
in which the struggle is not sharp and existence is a species of
mildly purposeful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop-shoulderedly
forward to success. There is nothing hard about the President. I
once described him in somewhat this fashion to a banker in New York
who was interested in knowing what kind of a President we had.

"You agree," he said, "with a friend of Harding's who came in to
see me a few days ago. This friend said to me 'Warren is the best
fellow in the world. He has wonderful tact. He knows how to make
men work with him and how to get the best out of them. He is
politically adroit. He is conscientious. He has a keen sense of his
responsibilities. He has unusual common sense.' And he named other
similar virtues, 'Well,' I asked him, 'What is his defect?' 'Oh,'
he replied, 'the only trouble with Warren is that he lacks
mentality.'"

The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The President has the
average man's virtues of common sense and conscientiousness with
rather more than the average man's political skill and the average
man's industry or lack of industry. His mentality is not lacking;
it is undisciplined, especially in its higher ranges, by hard
effort. There is a certain softness about him mentally. It is not
an accident that his favorite companions are the least intellectual
members of that house of average intelligence, the Senate. They
remind him of the mental surroundings of Marion, the pleasant but
unstimulating mental atmosphere of the Marion Club, with its
successful small town business men, its local storekeepers, its
banker whose mental horizon is bounded by Marion County, the value
of whose farm lands for mortgages he knows to a penny, the lumber
dealer whose eye rests on the forests of Kentucky and West
Virginia.

The President has never felt the sharpening of competition. He was
a local pundit because he was the editor. He was the editor because
he owned the Republican paper of Marion. There was no effective
rival. No strong intelligence challenged his and made him fight for
his place. He never studied hard or thought deeply on public
questions. A man who stays where he is put by birth tends to accept
authority, and authority is strong in small places. The acceptance
of authority impl