The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,--most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped. The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves. When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves. Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.