That is the question; whether it is better to be the “influenced” or the “influencer.”
The above query may be awkward, or even an uncouth way to state the question, but in evidence that it is a question with thoughtful people—informed people. I desire here to quote some statements written by [1]Samuel G. Blythe. With no thought of discriminating praise I can positively say that Samuel G. Blythe stands with the best of you boys who are doing so much for our enlightenment—FOR OUR EDUCATION—IN MATTERS RELATING TO OUR NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.
Is not that right, boys?
I hear a unanimous “aye.”
In this connection, however, I wish to remind you boys that many of you—most of you, probably—have done as much to help the people of the country in your local fields of interest and activity as you have done to enlighten us as to Washington’s politics, policies and tangential peculiarities.
With this explanation for my taking our “Sam” instead of you other boys for quotation, maybe mutilation, just here in the context of this book, I may add that his article in the Saturday Evening Post of date, April 15, 1911, is before me. It so fits the point I am now considering—whether Postmaster General Hitchcock was “influenced” or “influencing”—that I am going to quote, and, possibly, take all sorts of liberties with Mr. Blythe’s splendid presentation of Mr. Hitchcock’s attitude, action and animus.
Mr. Blythe, in his article in the Saturday Evening Post, (published by the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, and, by the way, one of the most educative weekly periodicals the world has ever known), tells us something of Postmaster General Hitchcock’s procedure since in office.
I am here going to appropriate some of the information furnished in Mr. Blythe’s article. Whether I use quotation marks or not, I want the reader to know that Samuel G. Blythe has “wised me up a heap” regarding our Postmaster General’s peculiar official gyrations since the latter arrived on his present job.
First, it would appear that Mr. Hitchcock arrived with the “deficit” in his brain. I mean, of course, the Postoffice Department deficit was on his mind, and being fresh from that state of splendid attainments and beans—Massachusetts—Mr. Hitchcock came to his job brimful of nerve, purpose and postal service deficits. He was determined to do things, especially to that deficit. Well, he has been doing things, but scarcely in a way that one would expect from a man coming from the people who grow up there. The writer cannot say whether or not Mr. Hitchcock “growed up there.” If he did, some cog must have slipped or “jammed” in his raising. Most born Plymouth rock men whom I have met, and I have had the pleasure of meeting many, start out, and live, on life lines which clearly and cleanly recognize the fact that the end is on its way, and that they are going to meet it—meet it with a brave, honest face and a moral courage that will answer “Here” at the final round-up.
I presume, however, there are a few Easterners who grow haughty, supercilious and dictatorial in proportion to the square of the distance they are removed (by fortuitous circumstance, political preferment or other means), from the “down-row” in the fall husking, the spring plowing, the free lunch and other symptoms of human industry or need.