All this becomes the more remarkable when one considers the peculiar richness of the American scene in sharply-outlined and racy characters. Our national ideas, indeed, are mainly third-rate, and some of them are almost idiotic, but taking one year with another we probably produce more lively and diverting people than all the rest of the world taken together. More, these lively and diverting people tend to cluster into types. Mark Twain put half a dozen of them into “Huckleberry Finn” and as many more into “Roughing It,” a novel disguised as history. Montague Glass collared a whole flock for his Potash and Perlmutter stories, and Ring Lardner has got another flock into his studies of the American bounder. But the younger novelists, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, stick to their sticks. Thus even the most salient and arresting of American types still lack historians, and seem doomed to perish and be forgotten with the Bill of Rights. Babbitt stood around for a dozen years, waiting for Lewis; the rest of the novelists of the land gaped at him without seeing him. How long will they gape at the American politician? At the American university president? At the American policeman? At the American lawyer? At the American insurance man? At the Prohibition fanatic? At the revival evangelist? At the bootlegger? At the Y. M. C. A. secretary? At the butter-and-egg man? At the journalist? 2 I have put the politician at the top of my list. He probably embodies more typical American traits than any other; he is, within his limits, the arch-Americano. Yet how seldom he gets into a novel! And how seldom, having got there, is he real! I can recall, indeed, but one American political novel of any value whatever as a study of character, and that is Harvey Fergusson’s story of Washington, “Capitol Hill”--a series of casual sketches, but all of them vivid and true. Fergusson really understands the American politician. There is, in “Capitol Hill,” no division of the _dramatis personæ_ between Democrats and Republicans, progressives and reactionaries, materialists and idealists, patriots and traitors; the only division is between men and women who have something, and men and women who want it. In that simple fact lies most of the book’s curious reality. For the truth about Washington is that it is not a town of politics, in the conventional and romantic sense; it is, if anything, a town almost devoid of politics. The people in the industrial cities and out on the farms take political ideas seriously; what they cherish in that department they refuse passionately to surrender. But so far as I know there are not a dozen professional politicians in Washington, high or low, who would not throw overboard, instantly and gladly, every political idea they are assumed to be devoted to, including especially every political idea that has helped them into public office, if throwing it overboard would help them to higher and gaudier and more lucrative office.