The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-04-17
A Heart to Heart Talk
 About the Presidency

where you want to go, be sure you have motive power enough to get there anu then turn on the current. But put the Presidency out of your mind once ana for all."
 The Presidency-I am not talking to my son now, but just to you. dear reader the son escaped after all. hypotneticai though he was-the sPresidency IS, as general rule. equivalent to a life sen
 tence. Few there be who survive it's terms of office many years. There have been solid exceptions, but as a general thing when a man has passed through
 four years of hand shaking and politician
 shaking he is wiilnig to wrap the drapcry of his couch around him as Bryan dio nit the age of nineteen. Bryant lived Tor some seventy years after, but no former
 President ever did. Not one.
 And on the other hand Bryant never
 became President. There's Bryant who could and who did write Thanatopsis
 at the age of IS and he's the only man
 in the history of the United States who
 ever. wrote 1t, and he never became
 President Of course its lottery, ana
 I'm opposed to lotteries on principle
 There came day in nny own life when I gave up all thought of being President
 I satd to myself: Ut will be hard work
 to get the attention of fhe public in this
 thing. Many will not know who I am
 or where came from, and perhaps 1T I do get the nomination on the indepen.
 dent prohibition of labor ticket l w'll
 wage up the day after election and ma
 that some totally different person has won the priza and I'll he extremely nor tified and absolutely put to 1t to pay
 my legitimate election expenses-to say
 nothing of the iilegitimate ones"
 So I put this possible honor from
 me. Heaven! 1t wasn't that did not appreciate the honor. A man has right
 to feel proud when millions of his fel- low citizen many of them unable to read
 or write or think elect him to the proud
 est position in the gift of any nation. ]
 weighed the whole thing pro and con Hno then I said deliberately and firmly, No sir, am going to lead Wagner's simple life. Pm going to get simpler and
 simpler and perhaps I'ils die contented"
 Fellow citizens. there comes a time to all of us who have an eye on the Presi- dency when we must make up our mind to give upp the contest or else accept the inevitable with calm steadfastnese. simply couldn't bear to be defeated for the Presidency. Do you suppose that could read in the papers that I was showed under in every State in the Union, and then calmly take poem and try to sell it to an editor? No. sir! I'd use back streets for the rest of my life and write under a pen name. Cincinnatus hadn't been defeated for Senator when he went back to the plough. The honor of election-is great. but the mortifca- ton of defeat Is greater.
 Look at Horace Greeley. He wasn't content to be the Nestor of American journalism; he must try to be President. Said he'd rather be President than write. The result was too lamentablc to jest | about I was a mere boy at the time but | it saved me from the Presidency. It was the turning of the ways. Like Rutherford B. Hayes went into the egg | business; but unlike minor maybe 1t would be more accurate to say that like him--I never was President de jure. But l that Is a bygone. Twenty years ago if l I had said that many people would have