"Not rare," was his answer, "but hard to get at through the throngs of Baal-worshipers that have descended upon me and are trying to hedge me in."
"Fortunately, you are free from political and social entanglements," said I, with ironic intent.
He laughed with only a slightly concealed bitterness. "From political entanglements--yes," said he. "But not from social toils. Ever since I have been in national life, my wife and I have held ourselves socially aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably associate would be precisely those who would some day beset me for immunities and favors. And how can one hold to a course of any sort of justice, if doing so means assailing all one's friends and their friends and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And how can one enforce justice against one's dinner companions--and in favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one. Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."
"I should not class you among those likely to yield many inches to the social bribe," said I.
"That is pleasant, but not candid," replied he with his simple directness. "No man of your experience could fail to know that the social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset--and with what devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming, even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in the loathsome attitude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want and need, and must and will have."
"Impossible," said I. "And if you could get at them, and if the Senate would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers, the more assiduous for their long abstinence."