I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr. Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about us in every essential. Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells’s writing, because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just then discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery. It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship, the other a bark--dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since out of commission.... “You go down to the wharves along the East River,” Steffens was saying, “and you’ll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and lean over the taffrail; he’ll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his eye roving calmly about here and there, you’ll look at him, and say to yourself, ‘Those eyes have seen everything in this world!’” It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it. “He’s seen everything in the world,” Steffens went on, “but he can’t tell what he’s seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything, and he can tell it.”