The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-07-03
The rre.ldeut at Home.

| The President ct Home.
 A president may do almost anything without attracting general attention or exciting more than casual gossip if he does 1t habitually. President Grant used to take frequent walks on Penn sylyania avenue. for example. and in time people would betray as iit- tie curiosity on meeting him as if he were no more than the rare congressman who has enough respect for his physical weli-being to walk to and from the capitol. Il Mir, Cleveland should take 1t into his head to stroll on the avenue. the newspapers from the Atlantic to the Pacific would comment on the extraordinary fact for days. In other words a president is ex- pected to keep on doing what he has al- ways done. and if he does not begin to walk on the avenue on March after his first inauguration. he must not ex- pect to be able to do so in the middle of his second term without exciting conn ment, and a certain amount of distrust The American citizen has an uncon- scious belief that all other American citizens, including presidents, govern ors, senators, mayors,all that kind of people, live about the same as he does The standard of each American citizen Is the perfect standard, and if his eve ming meal Is tea, he would be slightly surprised to learn that the presidents Is dinner, and the infprmation that the dinner hour was at 5 o'clock would give him a topic of converse ton with his sympathetic family fog a whole evening.
 So 1t Is that when the president has a tooth pulled. or goes away on sudden vacation or on business. the American people become intensely interested; and the president has very unhappy time while he Is in the public eye. un- less he happens to lack sensitiveness. or unless he has q, store of vanity which is pleased by the evidsDce that he Is an attraction" within the mean ing of the snowman. If the president and his family should live in glass house and be continually on exhibition, the chroniclers. of the, period would doubtless find matter of moment in every act of the unhappy people, who would be thereby serving the connrry at an immense cost. We should know when the baby had a new rattle, and remote citizen. unfamiliar with the social progress of our great cities, would be scandalized on learning that the president employed a valet who brushed his clothes and cleaned his boots every morning. It is quite pos sible, if the country knew all about the life of a. president, that no one would ever again endure the pains and penal ties of a second term.
 It is well for the president personally and officially, that his ceuntrymen as- sume that his domestic life Is very much like their own. How far this as- sumption is correct was attested un- consciously by a prominent member of the fraternity called raconteurs in Paris and Washington, but story:tel- lels elsewhere. This narrator of strange atales used, in telling. a bout a president whom he did not like, and who had come from hsrural commun-
 
 ity, to describe the evening .fireside at the White house in the nSrary, the family and their friends sitting about the hearth. in jslippered ease. the head of the nation clad in smoking jacket, the motherly wife knitting in rocking chair,S the children on hasspcks, apples baking at the fire, and a. generous pitcher of cider siplIinering on the I hearth. It was a pleasant picture and while this particular story-te1ler was moved by malice in giving local color to his tale.. there was good deal of truth in it. When 8 citizen of the re- public attains the presidency he is like ly to have reached the age, when his habits, domestic, social and otherwise, are settled for life, and the American citizen is right in. his supposition that the president and his family are pos sessed of the same habits in the white house that they acquired in their hum bier sphere.-Harper's.