Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.
Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People.
It is this bodilessness in the Employer--this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work.
Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has--especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.
The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us.