Love & Passion Quote by Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes doesn’t sound like a commander-in-chief here so much as an overworked civil servant with a title too big for the job. Calling himself an “errand boy” is a deliberately deflating metaphor: the presidency, in his telling, isn’t a throne but a perpetual to-do list drafted by everyone else. That’s not just self-pity. It’s a sly critique of democratic expectation, the way a mass public can recast leadership as customer service. One hundred and fifty thousand people (likely the scale of Washington’s daily machinery and its orbit of petitioners, office-seekers, veterans, reformers, and lobbyists) becomes a crowd with a thousand hands tugging at the same sleeve.

The line works because it turns glamour into fatigue. The punch isn’t the exhaustion; it’s the contrast between “bed” and “soirees,” a social world traditionally used to display power. Hayes frames withdrawal from elite ritual not as aloofness but as depletion. Subtext: the president isn’t refusing society; society is consuming him. That matters in the Hayes era, when the post-Civil War state was expanding and patronage politics made personal access feel like a right. Behind the joke is a warning: a government run on favors and constant audience is a government that burns through its administrators.

There’s also a small, almost modern note of boundary-setting. Hayes implies he’d rather be effective than performative, sleep over spectacle. The wistfulness lands because it punctures the fantasy that power is leisure. Here, power is errands, and the bill comes due at night.