the ideal. The love of the ideal has
not in my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it
so much abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to
suspect his sincerity.

A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there
from Rhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is
the state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I
were personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species.
You are changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching
everybody to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end,
sir? Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North
Pole there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at
the very least; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the
time you have reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool
with a pick-axe will break through the thin partition--the mere ice
curtain--separating these giants from us, and then they will sweep
through and swoop down and swallow you, sir, and the likes of you, with
your topsy-turvy civilization, your boasted literature and science and
art!"

This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life.
"Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming
yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end
by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming
inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this
earth that I despise it is bluster."

Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in
his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual
integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and
illustrations, but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson
would have had him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will
walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our
own minds?"

II

In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite
made up my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life,
construing public life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may
exist in art and letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it
exists in very young women. But here we must draw the line. As society
is constituted the ideal has no place, not even standing room, in the
arena o