and hereditary tendencies, would there be so many hasty marriages—­slip-knots tied by one justice to be undone by another?  The Drawer did not intend to start such a deep question as this.  Hosts of people are yearly naturalized in this country, not from any love of its institutions, but because they can more easily get a living here, and they really surrender none of their hereditary ideas, and it is only human nature that marriages should be made with like purpose and like reservations.  These reservations do not, however, make the best citizens or the most happy marriages.  Would it be any better if country lines were obliterated, and the great brotherhood of peoples were established, and there was no such thing as patriotism or family, and marriage were as free to make and unmake as some people think it should be?  Very likely, if we could radically change human nature.  But human nature is the most obstinate thing that the International Conventions have to deal with.

ART OF GOVERNING

He was saying, when he awoke one morning, “I wish I were governor of a small island, and had nothing to do but to get up and govern.”  It was an observation quite worthy of him, and one of general application, for there are many men who find it very difficult to get a living on their own resources, to whom it would be comparatively easy to be a very fair sort of governor.  Everybody who has no official position or routine duty on a salary knows that the most trying moment in the twenty-four hours is that in which he emerges from the oblivion of sleep and faces life.  Everything perplexing tumbles in upon him, all the possible vexations of the day rise up before him, and he is little less than a hero if he gets up cheerful.

It is not to be wondered at that people crave office, some salaried position, in order to escape the anxieties, the personal responsibilities, of a single-handed struggle with the world.  It must be much easier to govern an island than to carry on almost any retail business.  When the governor wakes in the morning he thinks first of his salary; he has not the least anxiety about his daily bread or the support of his family.  His business is all laid out for him; he has not to create it.  Business comes to him; he does not have to drum for it.  His day is agreeably, even if sympathetically, occupied with the troubles of other people, and nothing is so easy to bear as the troubles of other people.  After he has had his breakfast, and read over the “Constitution,” he has nothing to do but to “govern” for a few hours, that is, to decide about things on general principles, and with little personal application, and perhaps about large concerns which nobody knows anything about, and which are much easier to dispose of than the perplexing details of private life.  He has to vote several times a day; for giving a decision is really casting a vote; but that is much easier