In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged about with the secrecy of business. He is to be seen only through the golden aura of a great fortune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, the product of forces and personalities which can only be guessed at. He was the son of a banker and inherited a considerable fortune. He operated in a city which expanded fabulously in the course of his lifetime. If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a brother who has that force of personality which we usually associate with fitness for life. His bank was the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the pioneer demigods, who could make the business reputations of men who proved adaptable to his uses. Thus into the result there enters the power of Frick, the thrust upward of Pittsburg, an industrial volcano, the associated personality of the other Mellon. You have to give a name to all this combination of favoring circumstances and favoring personalities and names are usually given arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew W. Mellon. But how much of it is Andrew W. Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how much of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an electorate seeking a business man for office can not stop to inquire and can not learn if it does inquire. If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to office they do not enlist in the public service the combination of persons and forces which is known by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, measured by his great fortune, perhaps they get him after he has spent his force or after his head is turned by success, or at any rate they put him into an unfamiliar milieu and subject him to that corrupting temptation, the desire for a second term or for a higher office. And to go back to what I have said before, they make self-government go into bankruptcy and ask for a receiver. The great business-man President is just a romantic development of the great business-man illusion. CHAPTER VII THE BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET, AND WHAT IS IN THE BOTTLE Mr. Mellon's associates in the Cabinet were most of them chosen on substantially the same principles as he was, namely, that success in business or professional life implies fitness for public life. We have no other standard. The present Cabinet is an "exceptionally good" Cabinet. Many of its members are millionaires. Some of them owe their place to the rule that those who help elect a President are entitled to the honor, the advertising, or the "vindication," of high public office.