He married my mother when he was still strong and full of hope. He must have been so much kindlier then and brighter, more human to live with. They bought that pleasant house of ours with its hospitable front door. My father's doddering Brooklynites seemed wonderful neighbors to his young wife. And so that front door waited for friends. As the years dragged on and they did not come, she blamed it all on the harbor. She saw what it was making him, jealous of every dollar and every hour spent at home. He worked all day and half the night. It took him into politics, on countless trips to Washington, and she knew he spent thousands of dollars there in ways that were by no means "fine." It made him morose and gloomy, a man of one idea, to be shunned. And she no more saw behind all this than I did when I was a boy. For his vision was neither of pirates nor of bringing the heathen to Christ, but of imports and of exports. He dreamed in terms of battleships and of a mercantile marine. Each year he watched the chances grow, vast continents opening up to commerce with hints of such riches as staggered the mind. He saw the ocean world an arena into which rushed all nations but ours. "Everyone but us," he said, "had learned the big lesson--that you can get nothing on land or sea unless you're ready to fight for it hard!" He saw other nations get ready to fight. He watched them build huge navies and grant heavy subsidies to their fast growing merchant fleets, send vessels by thousands over the seas. He saw their shipowners draw swiftly together in great corporations. Here was an age for immense adventures in this growing trade of the world. To wait, to hold on grimly, to keep up the fight at Washington for that miracle, Protection, which would start the boom. To see the shipping yards teeming again with the building of ships by the hundreds and thousands, to see them go out again over the seas with our flag at the mast and our sailors below. To feel the new call go over the nation--"Young men, come east and west, come out! The first place on the oceans can still be yours!" This was my father's great idea. Ship subsidies and battleships, discriminating tariffs. What a religion. But it was his. Of the miracles these things would work my father was more sure than of a god in heaven. For he had thought very little about a god, and all his life he had thought about this. For this he had spent at least half his wealth on the congressmen that he despised. Bribery? Yes. But for a religion.