Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/176

 nor the Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana."

His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.

"Well, we are waiting," someone prompted, after duly respecting his technique.

"Mes enfants," he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. "My children, let me disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street. I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic, reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any public consequence, is ever accomplished