My dear G. W.,—­I have your good letter.  By ‘good’ I mean many things—­well done as a bit of sketchy composition, a welcome letter, kindly also in spirit, cheering, timely, telling of things that interest the receiver, one, too, having the flavor of the household whence it comes, altogether a good letter.  I had one also from Her; which I brutally answered with a preachment—­in pencil, too, for I can’t write with comfort at a desk and, after all, what have white paper and ink in common with these woods?  I am for harmony—­a reconciler, like Harding. ...

Root, as you say, would give a good smack to the meal.  The country would at once say Harding knows how to set a good table.  But tell me—­will he be a Taft? a McKinley? a Hayes? or a Grant?  Pshaw! why should I ask such a question?  Who knows what a man will turn out to be!  Events may make him greater than any, or less.  A war, a bullet, a timely word of warning to a foreign power, a fierce fight with some unliked home group, the right sort of a deal on postal rates with newspapers and magazines—­any one of these might lift him into a national hero; while a sneaking act revealed, a little too much caution, a period of business depression, would send him tumbling out of the skies.

These be indeed no days for prophesying—­Wilson gone, Clemenceau gone, Venizelos gone,—­Lloyd George alone left!  The wise boy had his election at the right moment, didn’t he?  Surely statesmanship is four-fifths politics.  Harding’s danger, as I see it, will lie in his timidity.  He fears; and fear is the poison gas which comes from the Devil’s factory.  Courage is oxygen, and Fear is carbon monoxide.  One comes from Heaven—­so you find Wells says,—­and the other would turn the universe back into primeval chaos.  Wilson, be it said to his eternal glory, did not fear.  They send word to me from the inside that he believed in Cox’s election up to the last minute, although the whole Cabinet told him defeat was sure.  He “was right, and right would prevail”—­surely such faith, even in oneself, is almost genius!

I am glad you put Lincoln first in your list of great Americans.  I decided that question for myself when I came to hang some pictures in my library.  Washington or Lincoln on top?  And Lincoln got it.  I have recently read all his speeches and papers, and the man is true from the first day to the last.  The same philosophy and the same reasoning were good in 1861 as in 1841.  He was large enough for a great day—­could any more be said of any one?

Lincoln made Seward and Chase and Stanton and Blair his mates.  He did not fear them.  He wished to walk with the greatest, not with trucklers and fawners, court satellites and panderers.  His great soul was not warm enough to fuse them—­they were rebellious ore—­ but his simplicities were not to be mastered by their elaborate cogencies.

McKinley was simple in his nature, at bottom a dear boy of kind heart, who put his hand into the big fist of Mark Hanna and was led to glory.