The competition in your line of business is fierce.  You try to hold the reader’s attention to the states of mind of a few futile persons who never did anything in particular that would make people want to know them exhaustively.  And then along comes the historian who tells all about some one who does things they are interested in.

You can’t wonder at the result.  People who ought to be interested in fiction are carried away by biography, and the chances are that some of them will never come back.  When they once get a taste for highly spiced intellectual victuals, you can’t get them to relish the breakfast food you set before them.  It seems to them insipid.

I know what you will say about Garibaldi.  He was not your kind.  You wouldn’t touch such a character if it was offered to you at a bargain.  After looking over that expedition to Sicily you would say that there was nothing in it for you.  The motives weren’t complicated enough.  It was just plain heroics.  You don’t care so much for passions as for problems.  You want something to analyze.

Well, what do you say to Cavour?  When I was deep in Garibaldi I found I couldn’t understand what he was driving at without knowing something about Cavour who was always mixed up with what was going on in that section of the world.

So I took up a Life of Cavour by a man named Thayer.  It’s the way I have; one thing suggests another.  Once I went up to Duluth and invested in some corner lots on Superior Street.  That suggested Superior City, just across the river.  The two towns were running each other down at a great rate just then, so I stopped at West Superior to see what it had to say for itself.  The upshot of the matter was that I sized up the situation about like this.  A big city has got to grow up at the head of Lake Superior.  If Duluth grows as much as it thinks it will, it’s bound to take in Superior.  And if Superior grows as much as it thinks it will, it can’t help taking in Duluth.  So I concluded that the best thing for me was to take a flier in both.

When I saw what a big proposition the Unification of Italy was, I knew that there was room for the development of some mighty interesting characters before they got through with the business.  So I plunged into the Life of Cavour, and I’ve never regretted it.

Talk about problems!  That hero of yours in your last book—­I know you don’t believe in heroes,—­at any rate, the leading man—­was an innocent child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with Cavour.  Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were insoluble to every one except himself.

His project, as I have just told you, was the unification of Italy.  But he hadn’t any regulated monopoly in the business.  A whole bunch of unifiers were ahead of him; each one of them was trying to unify Italy in his own way.  They were all working at cross-purposes.