Richard not only considered the politics of men, but he studied men themselves. The narrowest of these came from parts of the country where region was important, and where you would have been more thought of for the deeds of your grandfather than for anything that you yourself might do. This was peculiarly true of men from New England, whose intelligence as well as interest seemed continually walking a tight-rope. The New Englander was always and ever the sublimation of a blind, ineffable vanity that went about proposing him as an example to the race. And so consciously self-perfect was he that, while coming to opinions touching others, generally to their disadvantage, he never once bethought him that others might be forming opinions of him. Another New England weakness was to believe in the measure more than in the man, and there was not one from that section who did not think that if you but introduced among negroes or Indians the New England town meeting, those negroes or Indians, thus blessed, would all and instantly become Yankees. Another sublime provincial whom Richard uncovered was the Southern man. He, like the New Englander, was so busy thinking on and revering a past that was dead, that he owned little space for anything else. There was, however, one characteristic, common to Southern men, which was wanting in folk from other corners of the country. Richard never met a Southern man who remembered, assuming such to be his official station, that he was in Cabinet or Congress, while he never met a Northern or a Western or a New England man who for a moment forgot it. This amiable democracy on the Southern part, like other good things, has its explanation. Your Southern man, like a squab pigeon, is biggest when he is born. The one first great fact of his nativity is an honor beyond any other which the world can confer. It is as though he were cradled on a peak; and thereafter, wherever his wanderings may take him, and whether into Congress, Cabinet, or White House, he travels always downhill. It is this to account for that benignant urbanity, the inevitable mark of a Southern man, which teaches him faith in you as corollary of completest confidence in himself. It is a beautiful, even though an unreasonable trait, and as such the admiration of Richard recorded it. Those others, not Southern, educated to a notion of office as a pedestal, were inclined to play the turkey cock and spread their tails a trifle. Since that sort of self-conceit never fails to transact itself at the expense of the spectator, Richard looked upon it with no favor, and it drew from him opinions, not of compliment, concerning those by whom it was exhibited. It set him to comparisons which ran much in Southern favor.