analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and
have it too.

A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He
hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely
belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been
singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of
fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village.
Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty
den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his
influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the
weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen
and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he
holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the
other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate
and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to
outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective
novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in
ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which
in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What
justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own
sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric
rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of
the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures.

The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a
serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists
in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader
established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of
sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with