“Poverty is a bitter thing, but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all pursuits, the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.”
—Theodore Roosevelt.
Chapter Seven
THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
Sometimes an honest man of my class, reading the news of the day, awakes to a sudden realization of the grim political truth. During the time of the public discussion over the late tariff readjustment I remember such an incident. We were three men, sitting together in the smoking-room of an up-town club. One of us had brought in a copy of a sane and honest afternoon paper, containing a quiet, dignified, careful but powerful analysis of the results brought about under the tariff reform measure. He had been struck by the article. He called it to the attention of the third member of the group, who sat down to read it.
He read it through, while my friend and I talked about trivial things. After quite a long period of silence he handed the paper back to the giver.
“What do you think of it?” he was asked.
His cigar had gone out. He lit it before he replied. Then he said, gravely:
“America needs a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel. Before long it must get one or all of them, or it will surely breed a Danton and a Robespierre.”
It may have been mere epigram, but the two of us who heard it were startled. For the man who said it was a leader of the world of fashion, powerful in the world of business, and descended from four generations of the purest-blooded aristocracy this country owns.