Reed and Borah are privileged characters each in his own way. The privilege of being "queer" is as old as the herd itself. The harmless insane man was almost sacred in primitive society. The "fool" was the only man whose disrespect did not amount to _lese majeste_. The wisdom of the "fool" was regarded with a certain awe and admiration. But the death rate among those who sought this franchise must have been high. It must be personality which decides who survives and achieves this license and who does not, a nice capacity for adjustment, a rare sense of what the crowd will endure. Borah and Reed have it, LaFollette has not or has not chosen to exercise it. George Moore somewhere says that if you can convince a woman that it is all play, all Pan and nymph, between you and her, you have the perfect way of a man with a maid, when his aim is something short of matrimony. But if you are too serious about it--! LaFollette is perhaps too serious about it. If he could have said what he had to say with a laugh and so as to raise a laugh he might have been privileged like Reed, or, if he had to be serious, he should have been serious like Borah, in a detached and impersonal fashion; then perhaps he might still have been something less than the public enemy that he is. But LaFollette is serious, terribly serious, terribly in earnest. He has had convictions, clung to them, and probably suffered more for them than any man in Washington. The Wisconsin Senator is one of the least understood men in public life. In the Senate he speaks violently, with a harsh voice and an excess of manner. He is small and some of this loudness and emphasis is no doubt that compensation for lack of stature and presence to which men unconsciously resort; some of it is an exterior which has been cultivated to cover up an unusually shy and sensitive heart. The character in history and fiction which most intrigues him is Hamlet, that gentle soul unfit for life. He has spent years studying the shy Dane. He himself is a Hamlet who has taken up arms against a sea of troubles. The "queer" man who would gain a franchise for his "queerness" must not be sensitive. The crowd likes better to persecute than to tolerate.