The love of the ideal has not in my old age quite deserted me.

But I have seen the claim of it so much abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect his sincerity.
A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there from Rhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the state of man.

"Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species.
You are changing men into women and women into men.

You are teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir?
Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North Pole there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the very least; every giant of them a hundred feet high.

Now about the time you have reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe will break through the thin partition--the mere ice curtain--separating these giants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallow you, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, your boasted literature and science and art!" This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life.
"Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this earth that I despise it is bluster." Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson.