One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the presidents, but where is the portrait of the people?  The portrait of the people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture.  Each man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine.  This picture or vision of a nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House.

A literature is the expression on the face of a nation.  A literature is the eyes of a great people looking at one.

It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the future.

A newspaper can set a nation’s focus for a morning, adjusting it one way or the other.  A President can set the focus for four years.  But only a book can set the focus for a nation’s next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and morning to morning.  Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast, stage-setting for a nation.  Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man.  At last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its daily life lying out before it, threading its way to God!

CHAPTER XIII

NEWS-PAPERS

I went one day six months ago to the Mansion House and heard Lord Grey, and Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. T.C.  Taylor and others address the annual meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association.

I found myself in the presence of a body of men who believe that Englishmen are capable of bigger and better things than many men believe they are capable of.  They refuse to evade the issue of the coal strike and to agree with the socialists who have given up believing that English employers can be competent and who merely believe that we will have to rely on our governments now to be employers, and they refuse to agree with the syndicalists, who believe in human nature still less and have given up on employers and on governments both.

I have retained three impressions as a result of the meeting.

The first was that it was the most significant and impressive event since the coal strike, that it brought the whole industrial issue to a point and summed the coal strike up.

The second impression was one of surprise that the hall was not full.

The third impression came the next day when I looked through the papers for accounts of what had been said and of what it stood for.

It was noted pleasantly and hurriedly as one of the day’s events.  It was just one more of those shadowy things that flicker on the big foolish, drifting, rolling attention of a world a second and are gone.