"But you had too full a measure. That was the reason you emptied the cup and turned your back. You wanted hard work—to use your gifts."
"What does it all amount to? Suppose I insidiously work up a reform movement in this State, and am shot into Congress over the head of the machine? Suppose my gifts are as extraordinary as I have been led to suppose—ordinarily a man feels damned commonplace—and by force of those gifts I hold my own against the formidable organizations I shall encounter there at every turn? Suppose this reform spirit in the United States grows and strengthens, and I come along in time to benefit by it, and am landed in Washington—even in the White House? What of it? I had a thousand times rather be prime-minister in England—in other words the real head of eleven million square miles of the earth's surface, dictator to a good part of the world, for that matter. Your public men are servants—or ought to be, according to your Constitution. In England we render service by courtesy, and rule the roost. In this country every man in public life is not only at the mercy of his constituents, but in daily terror of having his head cut off by the man above him. Even the President has to be a politician above all things."
"You used to talk in England—as if you were not wholly swayed by personal ambition."
"It is not so difficult over there to conceive high and mighty ideals—fool yourself, if you like. But I'll be hanged if I can see myself baring my breast for poisoned arrows, with a seraphic smile on my lips, over here! It is all so crude! I want to be a main instrument in reform as much as ever—Oh yes! But I am not sure that one motive is not to make the life and the game more tolerable. And the everlasting machine! There won't be a day, inside or out of it, that I won't run up against every damnable meanness that human nature is capable of. I must handle these men, placate them—or get out. History has not yet failed to repeat itself. If I succeed, in favoring conditions, in forming a new party, I may end as a boss myself! Exalted ideal! Inspiring thought! Better go home and live like a gentleman. I could have some sort of a career, and I have seen enough in this country to drive me towards the conclusion that there are worse things in life than curbing one's youthful ambitions a bit."
He was still striding up and down the room, his expressive hands as restless as his feet. The color was in his face and his eyes were blazing. There was a curious magnetism about him that Isabel had never been sensible of before, although she had heard much of it in England. It was as if his spirit were fully awake; at other times he appeared to live with his cool critical brain only, while his inner self, with its intense slow passions, slept. She wisely made no comment, and after shoving the books violently about the table he went on:
"You may argue that if public men were elected directly by the people and the President held office for one term of ten or fifteen years only, that a long stride would be made towards the millennium. But it is doubtful if even then, forty or fifty different tribes—for that is what your State and territory lines effect—could be managed without machinery, and machinery develops the lowest attributes in human nature. I saw enough of that in the few rotten boroughs we have left in England, but my imagination never worked towards the full and original development in this country. We have other faults; the serenest optimist would never deny them; but, faults or no faults, we crown civilization to-day. The richest man in America has not the least idea what it means to live like a gentleman in our sense. And there is no flaw in my appreciation of your country. In many respects it is the most marvellous the world has known—but—I sometimes wonder if the pioneer blood in my veins is red enough to stand it. No matter what the most successful reformers accomplish, there will be no high civilization here in our time—no background. Unconsciously, or otherwise, I shall always have the goal of England in my mind—and if that is the case, why am I here? Isn't civilization the highest that man is capable of accomplishing, the best that Earth has to offer any of us? What sense is there in going back to the beginnings and plodding or fighting towards a goal you were born to? It's more than once I've felt like Don Quixote. The whole infernal country is a windmill—and a large percentage of its inhabitants are windbags."
"Of course you have a streak of Don Quixote in you. All men of genius have, I suppose. You felt that you had a mission—to pack a great deal into a convenient phrase. You could do nothing in England but sit down and sup with the elect. You would have choked very quickly. And if you went back you would not stay. You would not only be bored, but you know now how badly this country needs one disinterested man of genius."
"I am not disinterested. I never felt more selfish in my life."
"You have an immense capacity for disinterested statesmanship. Of course all motives, especially with the highly gifted, are complex. You have said yourself they would be fanatics otherwise. And you are far more American than you know, although you have just confessed that you do know it well enough at times. All your American ancestors may be living again in you. It was your own instinct, no influence of mine, that sent you out here, filled with mixed but high ambitions. No full-blooded Englishman would ever do what you have done. Insanity and inebriety skip a generation. Why not Americanism? Heaven knows there is nothing American about your mother. And when the political cleanup comes, as it is bound to—"
"Oh, I am sick of this everlasting optimism: 'Everything is bound to come out all right,' 'God's own country,' and all the rest of it. I can understand it well enough out here, though. It is a wonder to me that any Californian has energy enough to care. Life is easy at the worst. The scoundrels batten unnoticed—although they are sending up the price of everything; and the most ungrateful and rapacious labor class on earth never get their deserts. The labor class hasn't a leg to stand on, so far as bare justice goes. Pity they can't have a taste of Eastern factories and wages and climate for a while. If it were not for its bay and the tremendous significance of its position opposite the Orient, California would be what it ought to be, the pleasure gardens of the world. No politics, no labor-unions, merely a succession of estates, big and little, where a man could live a happy animal existence for one-third of the year, after working the other two-thirds—that is a sane division. But if I stay here I work. And for what ultimate object? England, as sure as fate."