eing merely the impression that a
piece of news or an editorial has made upon him. He cannot be said to be
participating in public opinion at all until he has laid his mind
alongside the minds of his neighbors and discussed with them the incidents
of the day and the tendencies of the time.

Where I got into trouble was, that I ventured on a comparison. I said that
public opinion was not typified on the streets of a busy city, but was
typified around the stove in a country store where men sat and probably
chewed tobacco and spat into a sawdust box, and made up, before they got
through, what was the neighborhood opinion both about persons and events;
and then, inadvertently, I added this philosophical reflection, that,
whatever might be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least could
be said for it: that it gave a man time to think between sentences. Ever
since then I have been represented, particularly in the advertisements of
tobacco firms, as in favor of the use of chewing tobacco!

The reason that some city men are not more catholic in their ideas is that
they do not share the opinion of the country, and the reason that some
countrymen are rustic is that they do not know the opinion of the city;
they are both hampered by their limitations. I heard the other day of a
woman who had lived all her life in a city and in an hotel. She made a
first visit to the country last summer, and spent a week in a farmhouse.
Asked afterward what had interested her most about her experience, she
replied that it was hearing the farmer "page his cows!"

A very urban point of view with regard to a common rustic occurrence, and
yet that language showed the sharp, the inelastic limits of her thought.
She was provincial in the extreme; she thought even more narrowly than in
the terms of a city; she thought in the terms of an hotel. In proportion
as we are confined within the walls of one hostelry or one city or one
state, we are provincial. We can do nothing more to advance our country's
welfare than to bring the various communities within the counsels of the
nation. The real difficulty of our nation has been that not enough of us
realized that the matters we discussed were matters of common concern. We
have talked as if we had to serve now this part of the country and again
that part, now this interest and again that interest; as if all interests
were not linked together, provided we understood them and knew how they
were related t