e, for a
certain temperament. And Mr. Harding stayed in Marion all his life
until force--a vis exterior; there is nothing inside Mr. Harding
that urges him on and on--until force of circumstances, of
politics, of other men's ambitions, took him out of Marion and set
him down in Washington, in the Senate.

The process of uprooting him from the pleasant place of Marion is
reported to have been thus described by his political transplanter,
the present Attorney General, Mr. Daugherty: "When it came to
running for the Senate I found him, sunning himself in Florida,
like a turtle on a log and I had to push him into the water and
make him swim."

And a similar thing happened when it came to running for the
Presidency. It is a definite type of man who suns himself on a log,
who is seduced by pleasant places like Marion, Ohio, whom the big
town does not draw into its magnetic field, whose heart is not
excited by the larger chances of life. Is he lazy? Is he lacking in
imagination? Does he hate to lose? Does he want self-confidence? Is
he over modest? Has he no love for life, life as a great adventure?
Whatever he is, Mr. Harding is that kind of man, that kind of man
to start out with.

But this is only the point of departure, that choice to remain in a
pleasant place like Marion, not to risk what you have, your sure
place in society as the son of one of the better families, the
reasonable prospect that the growth of your small town will bring
some accretion to your own fortunes, the decision not to hazard
greatly in New York or Chicago or on the frontier. Life asks little
of you in those pleasant places like Marion and in return for that
little gives generously, especially if you are, to begin with, well
placed, if you are ingratiatingly handsome, if your personality is
agreeable--"The best fellow in the world to play poker with all
Saturday night," as a Marionite feelingly described the President
to me, and if you have a gift of words as handsome and abundant as
your looks.

Mr. Harding is a handsome man, endowed with the gifts that
reinforce the charm of his exterior, a fine voice, a winning smile,
a fluency of which his inaugural is the best instance; an ample
man, you might say. But he is too handsome, too endowed, for his
own good, his own spiritual good. The slight stoop of his
shoulders, the soft figure, the heaviness under the eyes betray in
some measure perhaps the consequences of nature's excessive
generosity.