Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/139

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THOMAS WALES WARREN


nomination. I'll do it. Politics in this state are small and corrupt. We'll escape from them into the national field and the larger issues. You'll come with me to Washington, and if you never reign like another Dolly Madison in the White House, at least you'll be the friend of the Dolly Madison who does. And you'll never be ashamed of your old dad."

"I'm not ashamed of him," she sobbed.

"No," he said, "but you might have been if I'd stayed here. Come along now. I'm as hungry as if I'd been to a funeral."


12

And that was why Warren resigned from the control of his native state and went to his career in Washington. Moreover, it is why his career in Washington followed the lines that it did. Warren never philosophized; he handled facts as an artisan handles his tools; but if he had philosophized, his theory of life would probably have been something like this: "There is no justice, there is no morality, in nature or in natural laws; justice and morality are laws only of human society. But society, national life, and all civilization are subject in their larger aspects to natural laws—which contradict morality——and outrage justice—and the statesman has to move with those laws and direct his people in accordance with them, despite the lesser by-laws of morality and justice."

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