And I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet life and dealing with affairs in corner-grocery retail, the stupendous facts of accumulations of wealth and wholesale, far-and-wide purchases of the politicians, the vast system of bribery, with bribes adapted to every taste and conscience, seem impossibilities, romancings of partizanship and envy and sensationalism. Nor can he understand the way superior men play the great games, the heartlessness of ambition, the cynicism of political and commercial prostitution, the sense of superiority to the legal and moral codes which comes to most men with success.
Your average citizen is a hero-worshiper too. He knows his own and his neighbor's weaknesses, but he gapes up at the great with glamoured eyes, and listens to their smooth plausibilities as to the reading of the Gospel from the pulpit. He belongs to the large mass of those who believe, not to the small class of those who question. But for the rivalries and jealousies of superior men which have kept them always divided into two parties, the ins and the outs, I imagine the masses would have remained for ever sunk in the most hopeless, if the most delightful, slavery—that in which the slave accepts his lowliness as a divine ordinance and looks up to his oppressors and plunderers as hero-leaders. And no doubt, so long as the exuberant riches of our country enable the triumphant class to "take care of" all the hungry who have intellect enough to make themselves dangerous, we shall have no change—except occasional spasms whenever a large number of unplaced intelligent hungry are forcing the full and fat to make room for them. How long will this be?
If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as wicked and as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium, I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human nature—instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the alternating winds of rapacity and resentment.
But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which was how slight and even flimsy a pretense of fairness will shelter a man in high place—and therefore a Burbank. "He will fool the people as easily as he fools himself," said I. And more than ever it seemed to me that I must keep out of the game of his administration. My necessity of party regularity made it impossible for me to oppose him; my equal necessity of not outraging my sense of the wise, not to speak of the decent, made it impossible for me to abet him.
At last Woodruff came in person. When his name was brought to me, I regretted that I could not follow my strong impulse to refuse to see him. But at sight of his big strong body and big strong face, with its typically American careless good humor—the cool head, the warm heart, the amused eyes and lips that could also harden into sternness of resolution—at sight of this old friend and companion-in-arms, my mood began to lift and I felt him stirring in it like sunshine attacking a fog. "I know what you've come to say," I began, "but don't say it. I shall keep to my tent for the present."
"Then you won't have a tent to keep to," retorted he.
"Very well," said I. "My private affairs will give me all the occupation I need."
He laughed. "The general resigns from the command of the army to play with a box of lead soldiers."
"That sounds well," said I. "But the better the analogy, the worse the logic. I am going out of the business of making and working off gold bricks and green goods—and that's no analogy."
"Then you must be going to kill yourself," he replied. "For that's life."