fighters and the cowboys; he hurled epithets at Byzantine logothetes and college professors: so that one almost forgets that he began his career distinctly on the "high-brow" side as a "silk-stocking" reformer, supported by the vote of the "brownstone fronts," foremost of the pure-principled purposeful young "college men in politics" in an era of sordid greed and corruption. But in the days when he was assemblyman at Albany, police commissioner, and civil service reformer, men did not speak of him nor did he speak of himself as a "practical politician." In those days there was a certain bloom on the fruit that he reached for; and he did not disdain to speak of himself as a "practical idealist." In that rôle he delighted even fastidious disciples of Charles Eliot Norton's fastidious school; and he exercised a wonderfully tonic influence upon well-bred young men of his generation.
His first great service was to his own prosperous class, to young men of means in college, to the "intellectuals" generally. He did not preach against wealth. He held, like the philosopher Frank Crane, that "men who get $20,000 a year and up are the most valuable citizens of the nation." On the other hand, he maintained, like that journalistic sage, that the man who inherits a million and spends his days playing bridge and changing his trousers is "a cootie on the body politic." To fortune's favored sons he declared the responsibilities of wealth and he taught the right uses of leisure. In the vein of
