for some one--some one
who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless
laugh.

To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or
not, would be practical.

Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between
Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.

And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous
in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever
had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation
Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic
humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time,
in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.

I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on
the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice
cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as Mr.
Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they
would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went
home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr.
Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep
lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's
Conference might have been saved.

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 l