hip is often perverted
and used to evil ends. Neither leaders nor followers seem to
understand. In its essence politics is merely a mode of expressing human
sympathy. In the country many and many a leader like Baxter works
faithfully year in and year out, posting notices of caucuses, school
meetings and elections, opening cold schoolhouses, talking to
candidates, prodding selfish voters--and mostly without reward.
Occasionally they are elected to petty offices where they do far more
work than they are paid for (we have our eyes on 'em); often they are
rewarded by the power and place which leadership gives them among their
neighbours, and sometimes--and that is Charles Baxter's case--they
simply like it! Baxter is of the social temperament: it is the natural
expression of his personality. As for thinking of himself as a patriot,
he would never dream of it. Work with the hands, close touch with the
common life of the soil, has given him much of the true wisdom of
experience. He knows us and we know him; he carries the banner, holds it
as high as he knows how, and we follow.

Whether there can be a real democracy (as in a city) where there is not
that elbow knowledge, that close neighbourhood sympathy, that conscious
surrender of little personal goods for bigger public ones, I don't know.

We haven't many foreigners in our district, but all three were there on
the night we voted for the addition. They are Polish. Each has a farm
where the whole family works--and puts on a little more Americanism each
year. They're good people. It is surprising how much all these Poles,
Italians, Germans and others, are like us, how perfectly human they are,
when we know them personally! One Pole here, named Kausky, I have come
to know pretty well, and I declare I have forgotten that he _is_ a Pole.
There's nothing like the rub of democracy! The reason why we are so
suspicious of the foreigners in our cities is that they are crowded
together in such vast, unknown, undigested masses. We have swallowed
them too fast, and we suffer from a sort of national dyspepsia.

Here in the country we promptly digest our foreigners and they make as
good Americans as anybody.

"Catch a foreigner when he first comes here," says Charles Baxter, "and
he takes to our politics like a fish to water."

The Scotch Preacher says they "gape for education," And when I see
Kausky's six children going by in the morning to school, all their
round, sleepy, fat faces