common people, friend of the farmer and the laboring man, and the rest.
But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the "asininities" to which he has been constrained by various public considerations to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—"a tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European diplomacy"; "a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac." I insist that there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values his caddies.
In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: "The only trouble with you professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life"—a charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information. He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many Eastern statesmen,
