L.P.M. : The End of the Great War

CONTENTS


The Secretary of State, although he sought to maintain an air of official reserve, showed that he was deeply impressed by what he had just heard.
“Well, young man, you are certainly offering to undertake a pretty large contract.”
He smiled, and continued in a slightly rhetorical vein—the Secretary was above all things first, last, and always an orator.
“In my many years of public life,” he said, “I have often had occasion to admire the dauntless spirit of our young men. But you have forced me to the conclusion that even I, with all my confidence in their power, have failed to realize how inevitably American initiative and independence will demand recognition. It is a quality which our form of government seems especially to foster and develop, and I glory in it as perhaps the chief factor in our national greatness and pre-eminence.
“In what other country, I ask you,” he flung out an arm across the great, flat-topped desk of state, “would a mere boy like yourself ever conceive such a scheme, or have the incentive or opportunity to bring it to perfection? And, having conceived and perfected it, in what other country would he find the very heads of his Government so accessible and ready to help him?”
The young man leaned forward. “Then am I to understand, Mr. Secretary, that you are ready to help me?”
“Yes.” He faced about and looked at his visitor in a glow of enthusiasm. “Not only will I help you, but I will, so far as is practicable, put behind you the power of this Administration.
“Doubtless the newspapers,” his tone took on a tinge of ironic resentment, “when they learn the broad character of the credentials that I shall give you in order that you may meet the crowned heads of Europe, will say that I am again lowering the dignity of my office. But I consider, Mr. Edestone, that I am, in reality, giving more dignity to my office by bringing it closer to and by placing it at the services of, those from whose hands it first received its dignity, the sovereign people. ‘The master is greater than the servant’; and to my mind you as a citizen are even more entitled to the aid and co-operation of this Department than are its accredited envoys, our ministers and ambassadors, who, like myself, are but your hired men.”