Like the rest of us, Mr. Harding perhaps has none of these pictures so firmly in his head as before the war; but the damage to the pictures only makes him more vacillating. I am assuming in all this that Mr. Hamilton has a free mind, which he had, relatively, when he operated a century and a half ago. At that time he had not to think much of Public Opinion or of parties. And the mechanistic theory of Progress, that things come out all right with the least possible human intervention or only the intervention of the business man, had not then assumed its present importance. "Mind," says a nameless writer in the _London Nation_, "is incorrigibly creative." It has created so many vast illusions like those above in the last century and a half that like the American spirit in Kipling's poem: "Elbowed out by sloven friends, It camps, at sufferance, on the stoop." Where our actual Secretary's mind falls short of our supposititious Secretary's mind is in the valuable quality of common sense. I am even prepared to maintain that as a measure of reality Mr. Hughes's mind is distinctly inferior to Mr. Harding's, which is one reason why he never did become President and Mr. Harding did. I can not better explain what I mean than on the basis of this quotation from a recent book of Mr. Orage, the British critic: "Common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion and all the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality." Mr. Hughes has only one criterion of reality, his mind, which has been developed at the expense of all his other means of approach to the truth. He lives in a region of facts, principles, and logical deductions. He does not sense anything. And only men who sense reality have common sense. For Mr. Hughes facts are solid; you can make two nice, orderly little piles of them and build a logical bridge over the interval between them. A true statesman builds a bridge resting on nothing palpable, and nevertheless he crosses over it. Mr. Hughes's mind operates in a region of perfect demonstration; he even demonstrates things to himself. A true statesman never succeeds in demonstrating anything to himself; he uses demonstration only in dealing with others. Yet he arrives in other than logical ways at a sureness for himself which is never Mr. Hughes's. For the Secretary of State statesmanship is an intellectual exercise, for the true statesman it is the exercise of a dozen other faculties. An extraordinary but limited mind, Mr. Hughes impresses us as the boy lightning calculator does, and leaves us unsatisfied.