een with them since the day he saw the light
first in the old Dominion of Virginia. And the men who came after him,
men, some of whom had drunk deep at the sources of philosophy and of
study, were, nevertheless, also men who on this side of the water knew
no complicated life but the simple life of primitive neighborhoods. Our
task is very much more difficult. That sympathy which alone interprets
public duty is more difficult for a public man to acquire now than it
was then, because we live in the midst of circumstances and conditions
infinitely complex.

No man can boast that he understands America. No man can boast that he
has lived the life of America, as almost every man who sat in this hall
in those days could boast. No man can pretend that except by common
counsel he can gather into his consciousness what the varied life of
this people is. The duty that we have to keep open eyes and open hearts
and accessible understandings is a very much more difficult duty to
perform than it was in their day. Yet how much more important that it
should be performed, for fear we make infinite and irreparable blunders.
The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is
easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking
about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows
of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that
stretch to the banks of the Potomac and then out into Virginia and on to
the heavens themselves, and that as I sit there I can constantly forget
Washington and remember the United States. Not that I would intimate
that all of the United States lies south of Washington, but there is a
serious thing back of my thought. If you think too much about being
reelected, it is very difficult to be worth reelecting. You are so apt
to forget that the comparatively small number of persons, numerous as
they seem to be when they swarm, who come to Washington to ask for
things, do not constitute an important proportion of the population of
the country, that it is constantly necessary to come away from
Washington and renew one's contact with the people who do not swarm
there, who do not ask for anything, but who do trust you without their
personal counsel to do your duty. Unless a man gets these contacts he
grows weaker and weaker. He needs them as Hercules needed the touch of
mother earth. If you lift him up too high or he lifts himself too high,
he loses the con