In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say “Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,” and he came--after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or leave it undone. Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and partaking of its mysteries. I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned over and whispered---- But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence. And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult, since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch their own replies. I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which, at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration and reverence for that---- But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered: “It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work. That’s all there is to executive ability.” I looked at him in amazement. He had grown quite serious.