I forced upon Goodrich my place as chairman of the national committee
and went abroad with my daughters. We stayed there until Scarborough was
inaugurated. He had got his nomination from a convention of men who
hated and feared him, but who dared not flout the people and fling away
victory; he had got his election because the defections from our ranks
in the doubtful states far outbalanced Goodrich's extensive purchases
there with the huge campaign-fund of the interests. The wheel-horse,
Partizanship, had broken down, and the leader, Plutocracy, could not
draw the chariot to victory alone.
As soon as the election was over, our people began to cable me to come
home and take charge. But I waited until Woodruff and my other faithful
lieutenants had thoroughly convinced all the officers of the machine how
desperate its plight was, and that I alone could repair and restore,
and that I could do it only if absolute control were given me. When the
ship reached quarantine Woodruff came aboard; and, not having seen him
in many months, I was able to see, and was startled by, the contrast
between the Doc Woodruff I had met on the train more years before than I
cared to cast up, and the United States Senator Woodruff, high in the
councils of the party and high in the esteem of its partizans among the
people. He was saying: "You can have anything you want, Senator," and so
on. But I was thinking of him, of the vicissitudes of politics, of the
unending struggle of the foul stream to purify itself, to sink or to
saturate its mud. For we ought not to forget that if the clear water is
saturated with mud, also the mud is saturated with clear water.
A week or so after I resumed the chairmanship, Scarborough invited me to
lunch alone with him at the White House. When I had seen him, four years
before, just after his defeat, he was in high spirits and looked a
youth. Now it depressed me, but gave me no surprise, to find him worn,
and overcast by that tragic sadness which canopies every one of the
seats of the mighty. "I fear, Mr. President," said I, "you are finding
the men who will help you to carry out your ideas as rare as I once
warned you they were."
"Not rare," was his answer, "but hard to get at through the throngs of
Baal-worshipers that have descended upon me and are trying to hedge me
in."
"Fortunately, you are free from political and social entanglements,"
said I, with ironic intent.
He laughed with only a slightly concealed bitterness. "From political
entanglements--yes," said he. "But not from social toils. Ever since I
have been in national life, my wife and I have held ourselves socially
aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably
associate would be precisely those who would some day beset me for
immunities and favors. And how can one hold to a course of any sort of
justice, if doing so means assailing all one's friends and their friends
and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the
successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And
how can one enforce justice against one's dinner companions--and in
favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one.
Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."
"I should not class you among those likely to yield many inches to the
social bribe," said I.
"That is pleasant, but not candid," replied he with his simple
directness. "No man of your experience could fail to know that the
social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in
human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite
of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset--and with what
devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from
flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming,
even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in
the loathsome attitude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence
of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest
hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want
and need, and must and will have."
"Impossible," said I. "And if you could get at them, and if the Senate
would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation
would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers,
the more assiduous for their long abstinence."
"Some," he admitted, "perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the
test--and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the
search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our
ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal.
So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a
tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we
are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so
far--so far _up_. I know you and I have in the main the same
purpose--where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse
for his having lived? But we work by different means. You believe the
best results can be got through that in man which he has inherited from
the past--by balancing passion against passion, by offsetting appetite
with appetite. I hope for results from that in the man of to-day which
is the seed, the prophecy, of the man who is to be."
"Your method has had one recent and very striking _apparent_ success,"
said I. "But--the spasm of virtue will pass."
"Certainly," he replied, "and so too will the succeeding spasm of
reaction. Also, your party must improve itself--and mine too--as the
result of this spasm of virtue."
"For a time," I admitted. "I envy you your courage and hope. But I can't
share in them. You will serve four stormy years; you will retire with
friends less devoted and enemies more bitter; you will be misunderstood,
maligned; and there's only a remote possibility that your vindication
will come before you are too old to be offered a second term. And the
harvest from the best you sow will be ruined in some flood of reaction."
"No," he answered. "It will be reaped. The evil I do, all evil, passes.
The good will be reaped. Nothing good is lost."
"And if it is reaped," I rejoined, "the reaping will not come until
long, long after you are a mere name in history."
Even as I spoke my doubts I was wishing I had kept them to myself; for,
thought I, there's no poorer business than shooting at the beautiful
soaring bird of illusion. But he was looking at me without seeing me.
His expression suggested the throwing open of the blinds hiding a man's
inmost self.
"If a man," said he absently, "fixes his mind not on making friends or
defeating enemies, not on elections or on history, but just on avoiding
from day to day, from act to act, the condemnation of his own
self-respect--" The blinds closed as suddenly as they had opened--he had
become conscious that some one was looking in. And I was wishing again
that I had kept my doubts to myself; for I now saw that what I had
thought a bright bird of illusion was in fact the lost star which
lighted my own youth.
Happy the man who, through strength or through luck, guides his whole
life by the star of his youth. Happy, but how rare!