-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless
drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient
little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the
imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of
publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians
tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate
the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their
perceptions are few and their thinking crude.

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first
emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But
even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace
reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform,
closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in
short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable.
When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him
to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything.

If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in
newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important
sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life,
then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed.
Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When
they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians
they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we
overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and
office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its
instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment
for the real political life of the country.

For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as
nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our
impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be
accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social
life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in
the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecr