“What do you expect?” he once said to me, after I had made a very careful study of his career for a current magazine, which, curiously, was never published.  I was trying to get him to admit that he believed that his example might be fruitful of results agreeable to him in the future.  I could not conclude that he really agreed with me.  “People do not remember; they forget.  They remember so long as you are directly before them with something that interests them.  That may be a lower gas-rate, or a band that plays good music.  People like strong people, and only strong people, characters of that sort—­good, bad or indifferent—­I’ve found that out.  If a man or a corporation is stronger than I am, comes along and denounces me, or spends more money than I do (or can), buys more beers, makes larger promises, it is ‘all day’ for me.  What has happened in my case is that, for the present, anyhow, I have come up against a strong corporation, stronger than I am.  What I now need to do is to go out somewhere and get some more strength in some way, it doesn’t matter much how.  People are not so much interested in me or you, or your or my ideals in their behalf, as they are in strength, an interesting spectacle.  And they are easily deceived.  These big fighting corporations with their attorneys and politicians and newspapers make me look weak—­puny.  So the people forget me.  If I could get out, raise one million or five hundred thousand dollars and give the corporations a good drubbing, they would adore me—­for awhile.  Then I would have to go out and get another five hundred thousand somewhere, or do something else.”

“Quite so,” I replied.  “Yet Vox populi, vox dei.”

Sitting upon his own doorstep one evening, in a very modest quarter of the city, I said: 

“Were you very much depressed by your defeat the last time?”

“Not at all,” he replied.  “Action, reaction, that’s the law.  All these things right themselves in time, I suppose, or, anyhow, they ought to.  Maybe they don’t.  Some man who can hand the people what they really need or ought to have will triumph, I suppose, some time.  I don’t know, I’m sure.  I hope so.  I think the world is moving on, all right.”

In his serene and youthful face, the pale blue, philosophical eyes, was no evidence of dissatisfaction with the strange experiences through which he had passed.

“You’re entirely philosophical, are you?”

“As much as any one can be, I suppose.  They seem to think that all my work was an evidence of my worthlessness,” he said.  “Well, maybe it was.  Self-interest may be the true law, and the best force.  I haven’t quite made up my mind yet.  My sympathies of course are all the other way.  ’He ought to be sewing shoes in the penitentiary,’ one paper once said of me.  Another advised me to try something that was not above my intelligence, such as breaking rock or shoveling dirt.  Most of them agreed, however,” he added with a humorous twitch of his large, expressive mouth, “that I’ll do very well if I will only stay where I am, or, better yet, get out of here.  They want me to leave.  That’s the best solution for them.”