The provincial American and other papers

by Meredith Nicholson

III

Is it possible that tired men really wield a considerable power and influence in these American States so lately wrested from savagery? Confirmation of this reaches us through many channels. In politics we are assured that the tired business man is a serious obstructionist in the path of his less prosperous and less weary brethren engaged upon the pursuit of happiness and capable of enjoying it in successes that would seem contemptibly meagre to Smith. Thousands of Smiths who have not yet ripened for the German specialists are nevertheless tired enough to add to the difficulty of securing so simple a thing as reputable municipal government. It is because of Smith’s weariness and apathy that we are obliged to confess that no decent man will accept the office of mayor in our American cities.

In my early acquaintance with Smith—in those simple days when he had time to loaf in my office and talk politics—an ardent patriotism burned in him. He was proud of his ancestors who had not withheld their hand all the way from Lexington to Yorktown, and he used to speak with emotion of that dark winter at Valley Forge. He would look out of the window upon Washington Street and declare, with a fine sweep of the hand, that “We’ve got to keep all this; we’ve got to keep it for these people and for our children.” He had not been above sitting as delegate in city and state conventions, and he had once narrowly escaped a nomination for the legislature. The industry he owned and managed was a small affair and he knew all the employees by name. His lucky purchase of a patent that had been kicked all over the United States before the desperate inventor offered it to him had sent his fortunes spinning into millions within ten years. Our cautious banker who had vouchsafed Smith a reasonable guarded credit in the old days had watched, with the mild cynical smile peculiar to conservative bank presidents, the rapid enrollment of Smith’s name in the lists of directors of some of the solidest corporations known to Wall Street. It is a long way from Washington Street to Wall Street, and men who began life with more capital than Smith never cease marveling at the ease with which he effected the transition. Some who continue where he left them in the hot furrows stare gloomily after him and exclaim upon the good luck that some men have. Smith’s abrupt taking-off would cause at least a momentary chill in a thousand safety-vault boxes. Smith’s patriotism, which in the old days, when he liked to speak of America as the republic of the poor, and when he knew most of the “Commemoration Ode” and all of the “Gettysburg Address” by heart, is far more concrete than it used to be. When Smith visits Washington during the sessions of Congress the country is informed of it. It is he who scrutinizes new senators and passes upon their trustworthiness. And it was Smith who, after one of these inspections, said of a member of our upper chamber that, “He’s all right; he speaks our language,” meaning not the language of the “Commemoration Ode” or the “Gettysburg Address,” but a recondite dialect understood only at the inner gate of the money-changers.