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Bernard M. Baruch: Lloyd

Perhaps he is like Lloyd George, who is not logical but achieves his successes through two or three senses which ordinary men have not; however, unlike Lloyd George, he cannot simulate logic and, after jumping to his conclusions, reduce them to the understanding of the three-dimensional mind. It is a grief to him that he cannot; for if he could make a speech, that is to say, translate himself, that figure of Disraeli would, he thinks, be less remote. But when your mental operations are a succession of miracles, you may have brilliant intuitions and extraordinary prevision about the mineral supplies necessary to win the war,--which he had--you may have wonder, like the naive and the poets, about that extraordinary thing yourself, or about that still more extraordinary thing which is life or destiny, but you cannot move the masses. Still there are compensations. A perfectly logical mind would have explained all the wonder away, reduced the miracle of personality to a stolid operation of cause and effect, quite self-approbatively no doubt, and made Mr. Baruch talk of himself as the rest of the great do, modestly, after this fashion: "Behold me! I am what I am because when I was nine years old I saved nine cents and resolved then and there always to save as many cents each year as I was years old. Young man, save!"