population, but we have not a large enough one, by several
millions, to furnish that man. He has not yet been begotten, and in fact
he is not begettable.

You may take any of the printed groups, and there isn't a person in the
dim background who isn't visibly trying to be vivid; if it is a crowd of
ten thousand--ten thousand proud, untamed democrats, horny-handed sons
of toil and of politics, and fliers of the eagle--there isn't one who
is trying to keep out of range, there isn't one who isn't plainly
meditating a purchase of the paper in the morning, with the intention of
hunting himself out in the picture and of framing and keeping it if he
shall find so much of his person in it as his starboard ear.

We all love to get some of the drippings of Conspicuousness, and we
will put up with a single, humble drip, if we can't get any more. We may
pretend otherwise, in conversation; but we can't pretend it to ourselves
privately--and we don't. We do confess in public that we are the
noblest work of God, being moved to it by long habit, and teaching,
and superstition; but deep down in the secret places of our souls we
recognize that, if we ARE the noblest work, the less said about it the
better.

We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles--a
fondness for titles pure and simple, regardless of whether they are
genuine or pinchbeck. We forget that whatever a Southerner likes the
rest of the human race likes, and that there is no law of predilection
lodged in one people that is absent from another people. There is no
variety in the human race. We are all children, all children of the one
Adam, and we love toys. We can soon acquire that Southern disease if
some one will give it a start. It already has a start, in fact. I have
been personally acquainted with over eighty-four thousand persons who,
at one time or another in their lives, have served for a year or two
on the staffs of our multitudinous governors, and through that
fatality have been generals temporarily, and colonels temporarily, and
judge-advocates temporarily; but I have known only nine among them who
could be hired to let the title go when it ceased to be legitimate. I
know thousands and thousands of governors who ceased to be governors
away back in the last century; but I am acquainted with only three who
would answer your letter if you failed to call them "Governor" in it.
I know acres and acres of men who have done time in a legislature in