Cumber, Senator Smoot, Representative Fordney, and
others who would be responsible for financial legislation, "Have
you worked out the larger details of your taxation policy?"

"Naturally not!" was his reply. That "naturally" sprang I suppose
from his habit of believing that somewhere there is authority.
Somewhere there would be authority to determine what the larger
details of the party's financial policy should be.

Now, this authority is not going to be any one man or any two men.
The President, his friends tell us, is jealous of any assumption of
power by any of his advisers. He is unwilling to have the public
think that any other than himself is President. A man as handsome
as Harding, as vain of his literary style as he is, has an ego that
is not capable of total self-effacement. He will bow to impersonal
authority like that of the party, or invoke the anonymous
governance of "best minds," calling rather often on God as a well
established authority, but he will not let authority be personal
and be called Daugherty, or Lodge or Knox or whomever you will.

The President's attitude is rather like that of the average man
during the campaign. If you said to a voter on a Pullman, "Mr.
Harding is a man of small public experience, not known by any large
political accomplishment," he would always answer optimistically,
"Well, they will see to it that he makes good." Asked who "They"
were he was always vague and elusive, gods on the mountain perhaps.
There is an American religion, the average man's faith: it is
"Them." "They" are the fountain of authority.

As Mr. Harding knew little competition in Marion so he has known
little competition in public life which in this country is not
genuinely competitive. Mr. Lloyd George is at the head of the
British government because he is the greatest master of the House
of Commons in a generation and he is chosen by the men who know him
for what he is, his fellow members of the House of Commons. An
American President is selected by the newspapers, which know little
about him, by the politicians, who do not want a master but a
slave, by the delegates to a national convention, tired, with hotel
bills mounting, ready to name anybody in order to go home. The
presidency, the one great prize in American public life, is
attained by no known rules and under conditions which have nothing
in them to make a man work hard or think hard, especially one
endowed with a handsome face and figure,