Yet this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.
Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to Franklin's mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him would not always serve to satisfy him.

Losing no touch of the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man.

The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature.

He found no solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which was careless of humanity's joys or sorrowings.

Longing for the satisfying, for the noble things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ignoble and not uncomforting.