their worst,
and watches the game with a careless indifference. Even if he loves
his country, his love does not persuade him to self-sacrifice. You
may measure his patriotism by the fact that, if he does venture upon a
political career, his friends know not which they should do--praise him
or condole with him. "Isn't it good of So-and-so?" we constantly hear;
"he has gone into politics." And with the approval is mixed a kindly,
if contemptuous, sorrow. The truth is, that the young American of gentle
birth and leisured ease hates to soil his hands with public affairs.
His ambition does not drive him, as it drives his English cousin, into
Parliament. He prefers to pursue culture in the capitals of Europe,
or to urge an automobile at a furious pace across the sands. And the
inaction of the real American is America's heaviest misfortune. So long
as politics are left to the amateurs of graft, so long will Freedom be
a fiction and Patriotism a piece of mere lip-service. Wealth is not
wanting; brains are not wanting; energy is not wanting. Nothing is
wanting save the inclination to snatch the control of the country
from the hands of professional politicians. And until this control be
snatched, it is idle to speak of reform. The Constitution of the United
States is, we are told, a perfect Constitution. Its perfection is
immaterial so long as Tammany on the one hand and the Trusts on the
other conspire to keep it of no effect--a mere paper thing in a museum.
The one thing needful is for men with clean hands and wise heads to
govern their States, to stand for Congress, to enter the Senate, to
defend the municipalities against corruption. And when this is done,
the Declaration of Independence may safely be forgotten, in the
calm assurance that it is better to spend one day in the service of
patriotism than to fire off a thousand crackers and to dazzle the air
with stars and stripes innumerable.

THE MILLIONAIRE.

The millionaire, or the multi-millionaire, if the plainer term be
inadequate to express his lofty condition, is the hero of democratic
America. He has won the allegiance and captured the imagination of the
people. His antics are watched with envy, and described with a faithful
realism of which statesmen are thought unworthy. He is hourly exposed to
the camera; he marches through life attended by a bodyguard of faithful
reporters. The trappings of his magnificent, if vulgar, existence are
familiar to all the reade