in the middle of
some of us, than it is in others. Taking a life-average in any moral or
social engineering feat, in any correct calculation of structural
strain, how far over this line cuts through in a man, has to be reckoned
with.

The president by appointing certain men to office, saying "I will" and
"I won't" to certain types of men, in saying who shall be studied by the
people, who shall be read as documents of our national life, puts, if
not the most important, at least the most lively and telling news about
his administration into print.

We watch our President acting for us, telling us news about what we are
like, sorting men out around him the way ninety million people would
sort them out if they were there to do it.

The President's appointments may be said to be in a way the breath of
the nation.

A nation has to breathe, and the plain fact seems to be that certain
kinds of people have to be breathed out of a nation and other kinds of
people have to be breathed in. The way a President appoints men to
office is his way of letting a nation breathe.

With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr. Taft did
not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it a little that there
came such an outbreak at the end. Perhaps it is because Mr. Taft looked
at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the
country all the while looking on, and said, "Ballinger is the kind of
man our people prefer, and Pinchot is not," that the people broke out so
amazingly, so incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that
a man who could pick out men for them like this would not do--as things
are just now anyway--for a President of the United States.

CHAPTER VIII

NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT

A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its
work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE!"

The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday
acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.

The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is
intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, butting, good-natured
familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless,
relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to
be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, "Here we are! What are you
believing this morning? Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as
if you believed in us? Did you get