I say high or low, and I mean it literally. There has not been a President of the United States for half a century who did not, at some time or other in his career, perform a complete _volte face_ in order to further his career. There is scarcely a United States Senator who does not flop at least three times within the limits of a single session. The novelists who write about Washington are partly recruited from the ranks of the Washington newspaper correspondents, perhaps the most naïve and unreflective body of literate men in Christendom, and for the rest from the ranks of those who read the dispatches of such correspondents, and take them seriously. The result is a grossly distorted and absurd picture of life in the capital city. One carries off the notion that the essential Washington drama is based on a struggle between a powerful and corrupt Senator and a sterling young uplifter. The Senator is about to sell out the Republic to the Steel Trust, J. P. Morgan or the Japs. The uplifter detects him, exposes him, drives him from public life, and inherits his job. The love interest is supplied by a fair stenographer who steals the damning papers from the Senator’s safe, or by an Ambassador’s wife who goes to the White House at 3 A. M., and, at the peril of her virtue, arouses the President and tells him what is afoot. All this is poppycock. There are no Senators in Washington powerful enough to carry on any such operations single-handed, and very few of them are corrupt: it is too easy to bamboozle them to go to the expense of buying them. The most formidable bribe that the average Senator receives from year’s end to year’s end is a bottle or two of very dubious Scotch, and that is just as likely to come from the agent of the South Central Watermelon Growers’ Association as from John D. Rockefeller or the Mikado of Japan. Nor are there any sterling young uplifters in the town. The last was chased out before the Mexican War. There are to-day only gentlemen looking for something for themselves--publicity, eminence, puissance, jobs--especially jobs. Some take one line and some another. Further than that the difference between them is no greater than the difference between a Prohibition agent and a bootlegger, or tweedledum and tweedledee.