This power buoyed them and brought a stern light into their eyes. They believed in the People, and therefore in themselves as Spokesmen. Ten shrewd, wire-pulling politicians whose careers were identically darkened with chicanery and crude cynicism, they were able by the magic of faith to rise above themselves. They were able to feel the nobility of the phrases which they had so often utilized as cloaks for their private greeds and private spites. These were the phrases of Democracy which proclaimed to an awed populace that it, the populace, was Master and that its will was a holy and unassailable force for progress and piety. As spokesmen of the people these commissioners were concerned with furthering the great idealization of themselves which the people worshipped as their god. Reason was at war with this idealization. Reason was the species of morbid and inverted vanity which inspired man to disembowel himself as proof of his stupidity. It grappled with his illusions, crawled through his soul, hamstringing his complacency. It raised insidious voices around him, wooing him. To denude himself of hope, faith and charity--in short to become intolerable to himself. The commissioners, as spokesmen, turned their back upon it. There was a happier outlet for the energies of man than the repudiation of himself as the glory of God. There was the unreasoning struggle for idealization--the miracle by which man, seizing hold of his boot straps, hoisted himself into Heaven. This struggle, arousing the guffaws and sneers of reason, was its own reward. It was the virtue that rewarded itself. The perspiring little scene in the hotel ball room was a startling visualization of this happier struggle. Regardless of their sins, their greeds, hypocrisies, idiocies, the people desired to see themselves as incarnations of an ideal. This ideal had been carefully elaborated. Of late it had taken on a life of its own. It had grown like a fungus feeding upon itself. Man staring at the heaven he had created was becoming awed by its magnificence and extent. More than that this heaven was threatening to escape him, to become incongruous by its very vastness. There was danger that his idealization, fattening upon a logic of its own, would become a bit too preposterous even for worship. Already this idealization proclaimed him as an apostle of virtue, as a moralist first and a biological product afterward; as believing in the credo of right over might, in the equality of blacks, whites, poor and rich; as a sort of animated sermon from the triple pen of a martyr president, martyr husband and martyr Messiah. Lost in a difficult admiration of this heaven, the people struggled in the double task of keeping the idealization of themselves from becoming too preposterous and of persuasively identifying themselves with their image.