* *

It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news
about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is
there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table,
to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a
people?

One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the
presidents, but where is the portrait of the people? The portrait of the
people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture. Each
man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South
Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine. This picture or vision of a
nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes
in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House.

A literature is the expression on the face of a nation. A literature is
the eyes of a great people looking at one.

It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the
future.

A newspaper can set a nation's focus for a morning, adjusting it one way
or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a
book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can
act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and
morning to morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast,
stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone
with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the
perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent
self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. At
last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its
daily life lying out before it, threading its way to God!

CHAPTER XIII

NEWS-PAPERS

I went one day six months ago to the Mansion House and heard Lord Grey,
and Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. T.C. Taylor and others address the annual
meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association.

I found myself in the presence of a body of men who believe that
Englishmen are capable of bigger and better things than many men believe
they are capable of. They refuse to evade the issue of the coal strike
and to agree with the socialists who have given up believing that
English employers can be competent and who merely believe that we will
have to rely on our governments now to be employers, and they refuse to
agree with the syndicalists, who believe in huma