ternal spring of refreshment.
It does not leave him when he is angry, if he is ever angry; the
romance of Baruch diverts him. Though always there, it is not a
fixed smile, a mask, something worn for the undoing of Wall Street;
it is a real smile. Somewhere subconsciously there abides the
picture of the poor clerk become amazingly rich, of power in
Washington, of a beckoning future with possibilities as
extraordinary as the wonders of the past. Life is not logical,
dull, commonplace, a tissue of cause and effect; it proceeds
delightfully by daily miracles. The American Disraeli is no further
away to-day than was the Baruch of to-day from the Baruch of
yesterday. Enough to account for a smile in marble, bronze, or in
whatever metal the human face is made of.

Take the miracle of the War Administration. It was not vanity but
humility, the kind of humility that would have saved Wilson, that
served Mr. Baruch there. He came to Washington out of Wall Street
and Wall Street is always anathema. More than that he came out of
that part of Wall Street which is beyond the pale; he did not
belong to the right monied set there; which is to be anathema with
that part of the community to which Wall Street itself is not
anathema; moreover he had been unjustly accused in connection with
the famous Wall Street "leak." And he entered an administration
which was the center of much prejudice and hatred. Yet he was
modest enough, however, to assume that his personality did not
count, that it was the work to be done which mattered, and that he
could depend upon the friendliness both of the Republicans and of
the great industrial interests of the country to that work if it
should be properly done.

The belief Mr. Wilson has and a much lesser man, Hiram Johnson,
has, that men are thinking exclusively about them personally and
not about the causes they advocate or the measures they propose is
a more dangerous form of vanity than the habit of admiring oneself
audibly. It requires colossal egotism to imagine the existence of
many enemies and Mr. Baruch is genuinely humble in the matter of
enmity. After watching him during the war, in an administration
which was enemy mad, I fancy he counts his genuine foes on the
fingers of one hand. Moreover he was quite impersonal about his
task. He did not do everything himself on the theory that no one
else was quite big enough to do it. There is no practical snobbism
about him. His knowledge of the industr