His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly country woman grown dull in the monotony of village life or worn with the task of pushing an unambitious husband forward to power, looking her most natural when in the frankness of early morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron across the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, becomes to the awed eyes of Washington women, quite "beautiful." You hear them say it of every--let us quote the illuminating phrase--every "first lady of the land." When Burke said that aristocracy was the most natural thing in the world he did not go half far enough. The most natural thing in the world, the thing which is always repeating itself under no matter whatever form of government exists, is an autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as in the late war when Mr. Wilson was made by common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar of all the Russias. The herd instinctively follows one authority. The mob is single-headed. All the traditions of the race lead back toward despotism and it is easier to revert toward something primitive than to go forward toward something higher in the scale of development. And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives are with authority imposed from above. Our childhood is controlled by the autocracy of the family. Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclinations, represses our individuality, and turns us out stamped with a uniform mark, the finished product of its unvarying course. The single head of the classroom is the teacher. The single head of the school is the principal, of all the schools the Superintendent. More important still, our economic lives are at the disposal of autocracy. We earn our livings under foremen and managers. Everywhere is the boss who says to us "Do this or starve." He represents to us not only authority but wisdom. The organization out of which proceeds to us the beneficent results of food and clothing operates because he is endowed with a knowledge which we have not. "He knows about it all, he knows, he knows." In all the essential everyday relations of life we have never been able to evolve any higher organization than that of the chieftain and his tribe. We read about democracy in the newspapers; once every two years or every four years we go through certain motions which vaguely relate to democracy, and which are not convincing motions. Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a society which is in all other than its political aspects entirely primitive. All our direct experiences are of one man power. It is the only organization we actually know at first hand. We trust to it for the means to live. We revert to it politically whenever it becomes an issue of life and death, and even in lesser emergencies.