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Though in the ice-box, fresh and newly laid,

The rude forefathers of the omelet sleep,
No eggs for breakfast till the bill is paid:
We cannot cook again till coal is cheap.
Can Morris-chair or papier-mâché bust
Revivify the failing pressure-gage?
Chop up the grand piano if you must,
And burn the East Aurora parrot-cage!

Full many a can of purest kerosene

The dark unfathomed tanks of Standard Oil
Shall furnish me, and with their aid I mean

To bring my morning coffee to a boil.

The village collier (flinty-hearted beast)
Who tried to hold me up in such a pinch

May soon be numbered with the dear deceased:
I give him to the mercy of Judge Lynch.

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FIRST CLASSMATE:

What has reduced you to these straits? Not drink, I hope!" SECOND CLASSMATE: "No; faith in providence, high ideals, and trust in my fellow-men."

THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW YORK

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Vol. 93

MARCH, 1917

No. 5

The President and his Day's Work

By DAVID LAWRENCE

HAT a President of the United

WHAT

States can do is prescribed by the Constitution and innumerable statutes derived therefrom; what a President cannot do is a proscription imposed by society. The one defines his legal powers, the other limits his personal liberty. To survey not alone what the President must do to discharge the manifold duties of his office, but what he is by convention, custom, or other cause prevented from doing, one must observe from day to day his trials and tribulations, his vexations, his tangled problems, his unremitting labors, his opportunities for error, and understand something of his public and private worries and apprehensions. These constitute These constitute an unalluring, though fascinating, side of the Presidency of which the general public gets only an occasional glimpse. For while the office is the most powerful in the world, the paradox of it is that the President is at the same time the most restricted person in the country—restricted as to personal liberty, and the exercise of that degree of selfishness or desire for self-enjoyment, however small, with which every man is by nature endowed.

Few people ever stop to think what a captive of convention and dignity a President really is. The city of Washington is not his accustomed residence; it is, in

fact, the home town of few, being simply a house of transients, and in the later years of life intimate friends are not easily made. Therefore, unless the new President has previously lived amid Washington's migratory population and is acclimated to the city's periodic changes, he finds himself alone in a strange environment, a cold atmosphere depressing to the new-comer. Even after he has made friends he cannot call upon them casually or at random. Form, that ancient regulator of Washington life, is the immediate barrier. Discretion is another. The President may drop in on his friends now and then, but not too frequently. Such visits, unless distributed with calculating foresight, are apt to be misunderstood, and it is difficult to discriminate. So the new President must at once detach himself from private life, primarily because disinterested men are few. Somebody is always wanting something from the President.

Mr. Taft went about Washington freely, for he had lived there several years before being elected to the Presidency; but the general criticism of him was that he spent too much time socially, and his defense, it will be remembered, was that the White House was a lonesome place. Mr. Roosevelt provided his own recreation,-boxers, wrestlers, and rough-riders,

Copyright, 1917, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

-but these were exceptional diversions, revealing, indeed, the artificiality of a President's position.

Though before his election to the Presidency a President may have been a sociable fellow, may have liked upon occasion to drop in at a club, lounge in the reading-room, or recline in an easy-chair enveloped in smoke-rings and gossip, he cannot now be a clubman in that sense. Even if he so desired, he would not find time for it and do his work conscientiously. Mr. Wilson plays golf, for instance, but rarely if ever stays longer at the clubhouse than is necessary to pass through it to a waiting automobile. He used to be

fond of the University Club of New York, and frequently, as President-elect, went there to write personal letters or to read magazines. Doubtless he would now like to lose himself for hours in the retreat of a library, but he cannot; he is never completely alone. He is like one under arrest, always guarded, always protected, always awkwardly aware of his own troublesome presence.

But if the President's hours of play are confining, it is easy enough to imagine what must be his periods of work. The

office of chief executive of the United States combines nowadays the tasks of the railroad president, the department-store manager, the financier, the pastor, the theorist, the academician, the philosopher, and the politician. He must know a great deal about a great many subjects; he must be instinctively omniscient and apperceptive. His is a task with almost as many phases to it as there are special problems in our over-complicated national life.

The American people, moreover, demand efficiency. They elect a human being, but they really need a superman to do their work. Happily some of our Presidents virtually become supermen; they rise to great emergencies. It is the essence of American vitality, this power of integration, this energizing of a personality, this development of an aptitude for the new problems of the day as well as the chronic ills of a nation. And there is no preparatory school for the Presidency except the school of life, the daily contacts of men with men, and a contemporaneous use of those interpretative powers commonly assembled in the single phrase, understanding human nature.

In these extraordinary times an abstract

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Joseph P. Tumulty, who stands between the President and the public

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