This smile, as if everybody were looking at
him, makes him remind one as he comes out of a Cabinet meeting of a
small boy in a classroom carrying a bouquet of flowers up to his
teacher. He has, moreover, a strain of pessimism in his nature,
which may account for his indecision. You catch him in moods of
profound depression. He was in one just before his appointment to
the Cabinet, when his European relief work was not going to his
liking, and when the politicians, he felt, were forcing him into a
position of little scope and opportunity.
In politics, he has enough vanity and self-consciousness to be
aware constantly of forces opposed to him, covert, hostile,
unscrupulous, personal forces--forces that he does not understand.
Give him a mining problem, he can reckon with the forces of nature
that have to be overcome. Give him a problem of finance, he knows
the enmities of finance. He is in his element. In politics he is
not. He is baffled.
An illustrative incident occurred in the spring of 1920, when both
parties were talking of him as their candidate for President and he
was uncertain whether he was a Republican or not. Mr. Hearst, in
his newspapers, published an attack upon him, saying that he was
more Briton than American, and to prove it printed a list of
British corporations of which he was a director.
All his suspicions were aroused over this everyday occurrence of
politics.
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