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 than to scratch around in all the
anxieties of a retail business. Many men who would make very respectable
Presidents of the United States could not successfully run a retail
grocery store. The anxieties of the grocery would wear them out. For
consider the varied ability that the grocery requires-the foresight about
the markets, to take advantage of an eighth per cent. off or on here and
there; the vigilance required to keep a "full line" and not overstock, to
dispose of goods before they spoil or the popular taste changes; the
suavity and integrity and duplicity and fairness and adaptability needed
to get customers and keep them; the power to bear the daily and hourly
worry; the courage to face the ever-present spectre of "failure," which
is said to come upon ninety merchants in a hundred; the tact needed to
meet the whims and the complaints of patrons, and the difficulty of
g