“You’ve never regretted going into law?” he asked suddenly, to my surprise.

“Why, no, sir,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear that.  I feel, to a considerable extent, responsible for your choice of a profession.”

“My father intended me to be a lawyer,” I told him.  “But it’s true that you gave me my—­my first enthusiasm.”

He looked up at me at the word.

“I admired your father.  He seemed to me to be everything that a lawyer should be.  And years ago, when I came to this city a raw country boy from upstate, he represented and embodied for me all the fine traditions of the profession.  But the practice of law isn’t what it was in his day, Hugh.”

“No,” I agreed, “that could scarcely be expected.”

“Yes, I believe you realize that,” he said.  “I’ve watched you, I’ve taken a personal pride in you, and I have an idea that eventually you will succeed me here—­neither Fowndes nor Ripon have the peculiar ability you have shown.  You and I are alike in a great many respects, and I am inclined to think we are rather rare, as men go.  We are able to keep one object vividly in view, so vividly as to be able to work for it day and night.  I could mention dozens who had and have more natural talent for the law than I, more talent for politics than I. The same thing may be said about you.  I don’t regard either of us as natural lawyers, such as your father was.  He couldn’t help being a lawyer.”

Here was new evidence of his perspicacity.

“But surely,” I ventured, “you don’t feel any regrets concerning your career, Mr. Watling?”

“No,” he said, “that’s just the point.  But no two of us are made wholly alike.  I hadn’t practised law very long before I began to realize that conditions were changing, that the new forces at work in our industrial life made the older legal ideals impracticable.  It was a case of choosing between efficiency and inefficiency, and I chose efficiency.  Well, that was my own affair, but when it comes to influencing others—­” He paused.  “I want you to see this as I do, not for the sake of justifying myself, but because I honestly believe there is more to it than expediency,—­a good deal more.  There’s a weak way of looking at it, and a strong way.  And if I feel sure you understand it, I shall be satisfied.

“Because things are going to change in this country, Hugh.  They are changing, but they are going to change more.  A man has got to make up his mind what he believes in, and be ready to fight for it.  We’ll have to fight for it, sooner perhaps than we realize.  We are a nation divided against ourselves; democracy—­Jacksonian democracy, at all events, is a flat failure, and we may as well acknowledge it.  We have a political system we have outgrown, and which, therefore, we have had to nullify.  There are certain needs, certain tendencies of development in nations as well as in individuals,—­needs stronger than the state,