Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. - Charles Dudley Warner

The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages — sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and — a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world — that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk. This life — for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life — is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the word Barnum — for our crude young nation has

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!