No one ever thought of putting the stone into it until the Senate did so two years ago, by discussing the Versailles treaty in the open, right before the public. The people got into the scale, and Mr. Wilson hit the sky.

Mr. Hughes observed what happened. He is determined that the stone this time shall go in on his end of the balance. He talks to the country daily. He takes the people into his confidence, telling all that can be told and as soon as it can be told. He makes foreign relations hold front pages with the Stillman divorce case. He makes no step without carrying the country with him. He comes as near conducting a daily referendum on what we shall do for our "interests" as in a country so big as ours can be done; and that is democratic control of foreign relations, initiated by the Senate, for its own undoing.

Into that balance where he is placing the stone, he will put more of mankind's destinies than any other man on earth holds in his hands to-day. His has been a long way up from the shy, sensitive youth that one who knew him when he was beginning the law describes to me. He was then unimaginably awkward, incapable of unbending, a wet blanket socially. An immense effort of will has gone into fashioning the agreeable and habitual diner-out of to-day, into profiting by the mistakes of the New York governorship, of the campaign of 1916.

One sees still the traces of the early stiffness; the face is sensitive; the eyes drop, seldom meeting yours squarely; when they do, they are the mild eyes of the Church! I suppose the early experiences of the Church help him.

His attitude toward Colonel Harvey's and other of the President's diplomatic appointments takes its color from his good father's attitude toward the problem of evil. God put evil in the world, and it is not for man to question. The President sends the Harveys abroad; they are not Mr. Hughes', but his own personal representatives. It is not for Mr. Hughes to question.

He grows a better Republican every day. And the Republicans of the Senate are not reconciled. They feel like the man who saw the hippopotamus:

If he should stay to tea, I thought, There won't be much for us.

There won't be much for them. Enthusiasm grows among them over his admirable fitness for reinterment on the Supreme Bench.



EDWARD M. HOUSE

The nature of Colonel Edward M. House was fully revealed by a story of his youth, which he told me at Paris in the concluding moments of the Peace Conference. He was elated and confident. The compromises in which he delighted had been made. The gifts had all been bestowed—of territory which men will have to fight for to keep, of reparations which will never be paid, of alliances which will never be carried out, of a League of Nations which the Colonel's own Nation will never enter.

Looking the work over with that blindness with which men are struck who are under the dominion of another and stronger man's mind, his gentle soul was flooded with happiness. He was as near boasting as one of his modest habits could be, as his mind turned to the wisdom of his youth which had brought forth this excellent fruit.

"I got my first real sight of politics," he said, "when I was a boy in Cornell University. My great chum there was young Morton, a son of the Republican war governor of Indiana. The Hayes-Tilden contest over the Presidency was being decided. Morton and I used to run away from Ithaca to Washington during that absorbing fight. By reason of his father's position in the Democratic party, he could get in behind the scenes as few young men could; and he took me with him. I saw the whole amazing thing. I made up my mind then and there that only three or four men in this country counted, and that there was little chance of rising to be one of those three or four by the ordinary methods."

He was, when he said this, at the apex of his career, behind the scenes of the greatest World Congress ever held, following the greatest War the world had ever known. And he had been behind the scenes as had no other man, in Europe as a privileged onlooker with both belligerents, and in America as the confidant of tremendous events.

He was there, as in his college days, at the Hayes-Tilden contest, by grace of a friend whose influence had been sufficient to secure him his opportunities. The parallel was in his mind, and he regarded it with self-approval. He had chosen his course and chosen it wisely. It had led him to the greatest peace-making in history.

There was a little more self-revelation. He and Morton had prepared for college with Yale in view. But Morton had flunked his entrance examinations at Yale and afterward succeeded in passing the Cornell tests. House had gone to Cornell to be with his friend, an early indication of a capacity for self-effacement, for attachment to the nearest great man at hand who could take him behind the scenes.

The mystery of Colonel House is that he has been possessed all his life, almost passionately, with that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its object riches or power or influence. It was merely desire to see for the pure love of seeing.

His is a boundless curiosity about both men and events. His eyes are the clue to his character. Boardman Robinson, with the caricaturist's gift for catching that feature which exhibits character, said to me one day during the War, "I just passed Colonel House on the street. The most wonderful seeing eyes I ever saw!"

Nature had made Colonel House all eyes—trivial in figure, undistinguished, slightly ludicrous, almost shambling, shrinking under observation so that he gained a reputation for mystery, with only one feature to catch your attention, a most amazingly fine pair of eyes. It was as if nature had concentrated on those eyes, treating all the puny rest of him with careless indifference. They are eyes that delight in seeing, eyes to seek a place in the first row of the grand stand of world events, eyes that turn steadily outward upon objective reality. Not the eyes of a visionary—House got his visions of the brotherhood of man and the rest of it at second-hand from Wilson—eyes that glow not with the internal fires of a great soul, but with the intoxication of the spectacle.

And with the eyes nature had given House an unerring instinct for getting where, with his small figure, he could see. The ego of the passionate spectator is as peculiar as that of the book collector or the curiosity hunter. Given a shoulder tall enough the diminutive House perches upon it, like a small boy watching a circus parade from his father's broad back, whether the shoulder be Morton's in his youth, or Wilson's in his maturity.

Some have tried to explain House by saying that he had the vanity of loving familiarity with the great; but I doubt if House cared for kings, as kings, any more than a bibliomaniac cares for jade. He wanted to see; and kings were merely tall objects on which to perch and regard the spectacle.

He remained simple and unaffected by his contacts with Europe, did none of the vulgar aping of the toady, coming away from the Peace Conference an unconscious provincial, who said "Eye-talian" in the comic-paper way, and Fiume pronouncing the first syllable as if he were exclaiming "Fie! for shame!"—an unspoiled Texan who must have cared as little what kings and potentates thought of him as a newsboy watching a baseball game cares for the accidental company of a bank president.

The world has been good to Colonel House, according to his standards. He has realized his ambition to the fullest. Life has given him all he wanted, the privilege of seeing, more abundantly than to any other in his generation, perhaps in all time; for he is history's greatest spectator.

He is glad. His heart is full. He wishes to give in return. He is the kindest-hearted man who has ever had empires at his disposal. He wants to give, give, give. He wants to make happy. He was the fairy godmother of Europe, the diplomatic Carnegie, who thought it a disgrace to die diplomatically rich.

For many months I saw him almost daily at Paris. His was a heart of gold, whether in personal or international relations; but a heart of gold does not make a great negotiator. Perverse and nationalistic races of men, incredulous of the millenium, keep their hearts of gold at home when they go out to deal with their neighbors.

It was difficult for Colonel House to say no. He might go so far as to utter the first letter of that indispensable monosyllable; but before he accomplished the vowel, his mind would turn to some happy "formula" passing midway between no and yes. He was fertile in these expedients. Daily he would talk of some new "formula," for Fiume, for Dantzig, for the Saar Valley, for the occupation of the Rhine, for Shantung, always happily, always hopefully. The amiable William Allen White hit off his disposition perfectly when he said House's daily prayer was, "Give us this day our daily compromise."

When he split a hair between the south and southwest side, it was not for logistic pleasure; it was to divide it with splendid justice and send each of two rival claimants away happy in the possession of exactly half of the slender filament, so that neither would be empty handed. I never saw a man so overjoyed as he was one day late in April or early in May when M. Clemenceau had left his rooms in the Hotel Crillon with the promise of Franco-American defensive alliance.

"The old man," he said, "is very happy. He has got what he has been after. I can't tell you just now what it is. But he has got it at last."

He had been the donor, for Mr. Wilson, of the exact southwest side of a hair, the promise to submit, without recommendations, an alliance to the United States Senate, which had little prospect of ever being accepted by this country. The sight of the French Premier's happiness made him radiant.

It was not merely because representatives of foreign governments found Colonel House easy to see when they could not gain access to President Wilson that kept a throng running to his quarters in the Crillon; it was because there they found the line of least resistance. There was the readiest sympathy. There was the greatest desire to accommodate. He sought always for a formula that would satisfy the claims of all.

A man so ready to compromise is actuated by no guiding principle. Mr. Scott, the editor of the "Manchester Guardian", said when President Wilson was in England; "Yes, Lloyd George is honestly for the League of Nations. But that won't prevent him from doing things at Paris which will be utterly inconsistent with the principle of such a league. It isn't intellectual dishonesty; but Lloyd George hasn't a logical mind. He doesn't understand the implications of his own position."

Neither did Colonel House at Paris. The League of Nations was an emotion with him, not a principle. It was a tremendous emotion. He spoke of it in a voice that almost broke. I remember his glowing eyes and the little catch in his throat as he said, at Paris, "The politicians don't like the League of Nations. And if they really knew what it would do to them, they would like it still less."

But, for all that naive faith in the wonders it would do, Colonel House had not thought out the League of Nations, and was quite incapable of thinking it out, for he is not a man of analytical mind; and what mental power he had was inhibited by the glow of his feelings. His temperature was above the thinking point. Thus, like Mr. Lloyd George, he could make compromises that played ducks and drakes with his general position, since he had no real understanding of the League, which was not an intellectual conviction with him, arduously arrived at, but which possessed his soul as by an act of grace, like an old-fashioned religious conversion.

He was loyal at heart to Mr. Wilson and to everything that was Mr. Wilson's, his mind being absorbed into Mr. Wilson's, and having no independent existence. There are natures which demand an utter and unquestioning loyalty in those to whom they yield their confidence, and Mr. Wilson's was of that sort, as a remark of his about Secretary Colby will indicate.

When Mr. Lansing was removed from office, the country was astounded to learn that he was to be succeeded by Bainbridge Colby. The President communicated his decision first to one of the few who then had access to his sick room. This adviser ventured to expostulate.

"Mr. Colby," he said, "is brilliant, but he is uncertain. His whole career has lacked stability. He is not known to have the qualities which the Nation has been taught to expect in a Secretary of State."

"At any rate," replied the President sharply, "he is loyal."

At any rate, Colonel House was loyal.

The ego of Mr. Wilson demanded and received utter loyalty from him, a loyalty that forbade thinking, forbade criticism, forbade independence of any sort. Moreover, Colonel House was in contact with a mind much stronger than his, with a personality much more powerful than his. He was caught into the Wilson orbit. He revolved about Mr. Wilson. He got his light from Mr. Wilson, who had that power, which Colonel Roosevelt had, of irradiating minor personalities. Colonel House was nothing until he gravitated to Mr. Wilson. He is going back to be nothing to-day, nothing but a kind, lovable man, a gentle soul rather unfitted for the world, with an extraordinary capacity for friendship and sympathy, and that fine pair of eyes.

I remember at Paris the affecting evidences of the little man's loyalty to his great friend, of whom he could not speak without emotion. He was never tired of dilating upon the wonder of President Wilson's mind:

"I never saw," he would say, "so quick a mind, with such a capacity for instant understanding. The President can go to the bottom of the most difficult question as no one else in the world can."

House's endless "formulae" always bore the self-effacing condition, "if Mr. Wilson approves." "If Mr. Wilson approves" was the D. V. of Colonel House's religion. Too much awe of another mind is not good for your own, or carries with it certain implications about your own.

Colonel House's loyalty to Mr. Wilson did not, however, make him hate the men at Paris who stood across the President's path. The personal representative's heart was too catholic for that. He—

Liked what e're he looked on And his looks went everywhere.

He had a kindly feeling for the "old man," Clemenceau. He was a warm friend of Orlando, with whom Mr. Wilson had his quarrel over Fiume. He though well of Lloyd George, whom Mr. Wilson went abroad hating.

The Peace Conference was to him a personal problem. Peace was peace between Wilson and Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando. Compromises were an accommodation among friends.

I never saw a man so utterly distressed as he was when President Wilson threatened to break up the Peace Conference and sent for the George Washington to take him home from Brest. It was as if his own dearest friends had become involved in a violent quarrel. He did not see the incident in terms of the principles involved, but only as the painful interruption of kindly personal relations. Men speak of him sometimes as the one of our commissioners who knew Europe; and Europeans, appreciating his sympathy, have fostered this idea by referring to his understanding of European problems.

But the Europe Colonel House knew was a personal Europe. The countries on his map were Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. The problems of his Europe were Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. He knew what Lloyd George wanted. He knew what Clemenceau wanted. He knew what Orlando wanted. That was enough.

His kindness of heart, his desire for pleasant personal relations, his incapacity to think in terms of principles, whether of the League of Nations or not, betrayed him in the matter of Shantung. Whether the Peace Conference should return Shantung to China, or leave it to Japan to return to China was to him, he often said, "only a question of method. There is no principle involved." The Japanese were a sensitive people, why should a kind heart question the excellence of their intentions with respect to China? Shantung would of course be returned. It was only a question of how.

The simple heart of Colonel House did not save him, either as a diplomat or as a friend. The failures at Paris plunged Mr. Wilson into depression in which he went as far down into the valley as he had been up on the heights during his vision—of a world made better by his hand. In his darker moments he saw nothing but enmity and disloyalty about him—even, a little later, "usurpation" in the case of the timorous and circumspect Mr. Lansing.

Colonel House says that he does not yet know what caused the breach between the President and himself. Relations stopped; that was all.

This is what occurred: Shortly after Colonel House had convinced the President that the disposal of Shantung was only a question of method he disappeared from Paris "to take a rest"; and it became known that after all he was not to sit in the Council of the League of Nations representing America, as Mr. Wilson had originally intended.

At this time, a close friend of President Wilson and one of his most intimate advisers, said to me, "The most insidious influence here is the social influence."

British entertainment of members of the House family had been marked and assiduous, and the flattery had had its effect, though not probably upon the Colonel, who remained unspoiled by social contacts to the last. Nevertheless, a member of Mr. Wilson's family had called the President's attention to the social forces that the British were bringing to bear. The President by this time was in a mood to be made angry and suspicious. Doubt was lodged in his mind. And when he found this country critical of the Shantung settlement, that doubt became a conviction; the British through social attentions, had wheedled House into a position favorable to their allies, the Japanese. The loyal House was convicted of the one unforgivable offense, disloyalty.

When the casting off of House became, later, in this country unmistakable, I inquired regarding it of the friend and adviser of the President whom I have just mentioned, and he repeated to me, forgetting that he used them before, the exact words he had said at Paris, "The most insidious influence at the Peace Conference was the social influence."

The most insidious influence with Colonel House was the kindness of his own heart. He had too many friends. His view of international relations was too personal. Principles will make a man hard, cold, and unyielding, and Colonel House had no principles, or had them only parrot-like from Mr. Wilson. He was the human side of the President, who for those contacts which his office demanded had found a human side necessary and accordingly annexed the amiable Texan.

Wilson's human side had offended him, and he cut it off, accordingly to the scriptural injunction against the offending right hand. The act was cruel, but it was just, as just as the dismissal of Mr. Lansing; for House failed Wilson at Paris, being one of Wilson's greatest sources of weakness there. His excessive optimism, his kindheartedness, his credulity, his lack of independence of mind, his surrender of his imagination to a stronger imagination, his conception of politics not as morals but as the adjustment of personal differences, left Wilson without a capable critical adviser at the Conference.

When House talked to Wilson, it was a weaker Wilson talking to the real Wilson. Colonel House in retirement and since the breach, is still Colonel House, kindhearted and unobtrusive. He has seen, and he is satisfied. He has a fine and perhaps half-unconscious loyalty to the great man from whose shoulders he surveyed the world. His is an ego that brushes itself off readily after a fall and asks for no alms of sympathy.

He does not, like Mr. Lansing, fill five hundred octavo pages with "I told you so," and you can not conceive of his using that form of self-justification.

I hope to see him some day playing Santa Claus in a children's Christmas celebration at a village church!



HERBERT HOOVER

One reads in the press daily of Hughes and Hoover, or Mellen and Hoover, or Davis and Hoover, or Wallace and Hoover. If it is a question of foreign relations, it is the Secretary of State and Hoover. If it has to do with using our power as a creditor nation to compel the needy foreigners to buy here, in spite of the tariff wall we are going to erect against their selling here, it is the Secretary of the Treasury and Hoover. If strikes threaten, it is the Secretary of Labor and Hoover. If the farmers seek more direct access to the markets, it is the Secretary of Agriculture and Hoover.

It is always "and Hoover." What Mr. Hughes does not know about international affairs—and that is considerable—Mr. Hoover does. What Mr. Mellen does not know about foreign finance—and that is less—Mr. Hoover does. What Mr. Davis does not know about labor—and that is everything—Mr. Hoover does. What Mr. Wallace does not know about farm marketing—and that is nothing—Mr. Hoover does.

Herbert Hoover is the most useful supplement of the administration. He possesses a variety of experiences, gained in making money abroad, in administering the Belgian relief, in husbanding the world's food supply after our entrance into the War, in helping write the peace treaty, which no one else equals. He is as handy as a dictionary of dates or a cyclopedia of useful information, invaluable books, which never obtain their just due; for no one ever signs his masterpiece with the name of its coauthor, thus, by "John Smith and the Cyclopedia of Useful Information."

A bad particle to ride into fame behind, that word "and," begetter of much oblivion! Who can say what goes after the "and" which follows the name McKinley, or Hayes, or Cleveland, or even Roosevelt? Who has sufficient "faith in Massachusetts" to remember long the decorous dissyllable connected by "and" with the name Harding? The link, "and," is not strong enough to hold. You recall the "and"; that is all; as in the case of that article of food, origin of many "calories," to use Mr. Hoover's favorite word, in the quick-serve resorts of the humble, where it supplements ably and usefully, but without honorable mention, slender portions of beef, pork, and ham.

To describe briefly, in a phrase, what has happened to Hoover; two years ago, it was "Hoover"; to-day, it is "and Hoover."

Why the connective? Because, to put it bluntly, however great his other gifts are—and they are remarkable—he lacks political intelligence. He reminds one now of a great insect caught in the meshes of a silken web. He struggles this way and that. He flutters his wings, and the web of politics fastens itself to him with a hundred new contacts.

Facing possible elimination from public life, he accepted a dull and unromantic department under President Harding. He was told that he could "make something of it." Modern Greeks bearing gifts always bring you an opportunity which "you, and you alone, can make something of." He is trying to make something of it, something more than Mr. Harding and the party advisers intended when they gave him the Secretaryship of Commerce. He is trying to dramatize some turn of fate and be once more a "big figure." He is tireless. He arrives at his office fabulously early. Clerks drop in their tracks before he leaves at night. He has time to see everyone who would see him; for he can never tell when "the man with the idea" will knock at his door. Unlike the British naval officer charged with the duty of examining inventions to win the War, who is described by Guedalla as sitting like an inverted Micawber "waiting for something to turn down," he is waiting for something to turn up. He does more than wait; he works twenty hours a day trying to turn something up.

And he will turn something up. The chances are that he will do as much for the infant foreign trade of this country as Alexander Hamilton did for the infant finances of this country. He promises to be the most useful cabinet officer in a generation. But this is less than his ambition. If he were an unknown man, it would be enough; but you measure him by the stature of Hoover of the Belgian Relief. Like the issue of great fathers, he is eclipsed by a preceding fame. As well be the son of William Shakespeare as the political progeny of Hoover, The Food Administrator!

The War spoiled life for many men; for Wilson, for Baruch, for Hoover. After its magnificent amplifications of personality, it is hard to descend to every day, and be not a tremendous figure, but a successful secretary of an unromantic department.

He might concentrate with advantage to his future fame. A brief absence from front pages, under the connective "and," would cause the public heart to grow fonder when he did "make something" of his own department.

But two disqualifications stand in his way;—his lack of political intelligence, and his consequent inability to make quick decisions in a political atmosphere. His present diffusion of his energies springs, I think, from indecision; for in politics he can not make up his mind, as he can in business, where the greatest profit lies.

I first heard of this weakness of his when he was Food Administrator in Washington, and when other members of the Wilson War Administration, equal in rank with him and having to cooperate with him, complained frequently of his slowness. He had able subordinates, they said, the leading men in the various food industries, and they had to make up his mind for him. I set this charge down, at the time, to jealousy and prejudice, Mr. Hoover being always an outsider in the Wilson administration; but the long delay and immense difficulty he made over deciding, although all his life a Republican, whether he was or was not a Republican in the campaign of 1920, seemed all the proof of indecision that was needed.

It sounds like heresy about one who has been advertised as he has; but remember that we know little about him except what the best press agents in history have said of him. He achieved his professional success in the Orient, far from observation, and his financial success far from American eyes. His public career in the relief of Belgium and in the administration of food was the object of world-wide good will. And, moreover, indecision in politics is common enough among men who are strong and able in other activities. Mr. Taft was a great judge but wrecked his administration as President by inability to make up his mind. Senator Kellogg was a brilliantly successful lawyer; but in public life he is so hesitant that Minnesota politicians speak of him as "Nervous Nelly," and even Mr. Taft, during the Treaty fight, rebuked him to his face for lack of courage.

Mr. Hoover's face is not that of a decisive character. The brow is ample and dominant; there is vision and keen intelligence; but the rest of the face is not strong, and it wears habitually a wavering self-conscious smile. This smile, as if everybody were looking at him, makes him remind one as he comes out of a Cabinet meeting of a small boy in a classroom carrying a bouquet of flowers up to his teacher. He has, moreover, a strain of pessimism in his nature, which may account for his indecision. You catch him in moods of profound depression. He was in one just before his appointment to the Cabinet, when his European relief work was not going to his liking, and when the politicians, he felt, were forcing him into a position of little scope and opportunity.

In politics, he has enough vanity and self-consciousness to be aware constantly of forces opposed to him, covert, hostile, unscrupulous, personal forces—forces that he does not understand. Give him a mining problem, he can reckon with the forces of nature that have to be overcome. Give him a problem of finance, he knows the enmities of finance. He is in his element. In politics he is not. He is baffled.

An illustrative incident occurred in the spring of 1920, when both parties were talking of him as their candidate for President and he was uncertain whether he was a Republican or not. Mr. Hearst, in his newspapers, published an attack upon him, saying that he was more Briton than American, and to prove it printed a list of British corporations of which he was a director.

All his suspicions were aroused over this everyday occurrence of politics. Where had Mr. Hearst obtained the unfortunate information? He saw plots and treachery. Someone in his confidence must have betrayed him for money. A careful investigation was made, and it was discovered that the editor had drawn upon "Who's Who," to which Mr. Hoover himself had furnished the information before he began thinking of the Presidency.

The politicians tricked him so completely in the preconvention campaign of 1920 that he has the best reasons for distrusting himself. He was always, during that campaign, a candidate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. At the very time when his spokesman, Julius Barnes, was saying for him that he could not choose between the two parties until he had seen their candidates and read their platforms, and when the Democrats were most seriously impressed with his availability, the manager of his paper in Washington said to me, "This talk of Hoover for the Democratic nomination is moonshine. He won't take it."

"Why not," I asked him.

"Because," he replied, "he does not think it is worth having," a quite practical reason which differed wholly from the official explanation that Mr. Hoover was waiting to see which party was progressive so that he might oppose reaction.

His subsequent support of the more conservative candidate and the more conservative party bore out the truth of what his newspaper manager had said. And in reality, Mr. Hoover is as conservative as Mr. Harding himself, being a large capitalist with all the conservatism of the capitalist class.

A little while ago, Mr. Roosevelt had made it unfashionable to admit that you were conservative. You wished it to be understood that you were open-minded—"forward looking," as Mr. Wilson, who turned reactionary at the test, called it; that you were broad, sympathetic, free from mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our very best reactionaries of to-day all used to call themselves progressive. Some still do.

The young editor of a metropolitan newspaper, born to great wealth, and imbibing all the narrowness of the second generation, once asked me in those bright days when everybody was thrilling over his "liberality," "Would you call me a radical, or just a progressive?" He was "just a progressive." In a somewhat similar sense, Mr. Hoover was quite unconsciously "just a progressive"—a belated follower of a pleasant fashion, having lived abroad too long when he made his announcement to note the subtle changes that had taken place in our thinking—the rude shock that Russia had given to our "liberality."

But living abroad, it is only fair to add, has created a difference between his conservatism and that, let us say, of Judge Gary. He has grown used to labor unions and even to labor parties, so that they do not frighten him. His is conservatism, none the less, definite conservatism, if more enlightened than the obscurant American variety.

His hesitation and indecision in the spring of 1920 thus did not spring from doubt of the Republican party's progressiveness. He always desired the Republican nomination; but his vanity would suffer by the open seeking of it and the defeat which seemed likely; and his sensitiveness would suffer from the attacks, like that of Mr. Hearst, which an open candidacy would entail; for he is at once vain and thin-skinned.

Springing thus from reluctance to make up his mind, the announcement was received as the evidence of a very large mind. Among the public, Mr. Hoover was taken for a man who cared more for principle than for party or for politics. Among the politicians, he assumed the proportions of a portent, with a genius for politics second only to that of Roosevelt himself, who in a difficult situation could take the one position and say the one thing that might force his nomination.

The Democrats pricked up their ears. Mr. Wilson, sick and discouraged, began to entertain hopes of a candidate who would save the Democracy from ruin. Homer Cummings, National Chairman of Mr. Wilson's party, began to regard Mr. Hoover's possible nomination favorably. The Republican managers became alarmed. They knew from Mr. Hoover's friends that he, as his Washington newspaper manager had said, thought the Democratic nomination not worth having; but they feared lest by the course he was pursuing he might make it worth having, might take it, and might rob them of the election which they felt safely theirs. If they could induce him to declare his Republicanism, the Democrats would drop him, the public would cease to be interested in him as a dramatic personality too big for party trammels, and they themselves could ignore him.

It was decided to have him read out of the Republican party as a warning to him of how he was imperiling his hopes of the only nomination he valued, and at the same time have Republican leaders go to him or his friends and advise him and them that if he would only declare his Republicanism, a popular demand would force his nomination at Chicago.

Senator Penrose was chosen as the Republican whose pontifical damnation would most impress Mr. Hoover. The late W. Murray Crane, whom I have heard described at Mr. Roosevelt's dinner table as "the Uriah Heap of the Republican party," was the emissary who would advise Mr. Hoover to confess the error of his ways and seek the absolution of Penrose. A diary kept at Republican National Headquarters in New York reveals the visits there at the time the plan was made of Mr. Crane and others who took part in the enterprise. Mr. Penrose got up from a sick bed and thundered: under no circumstances would he permit the nomination of Mr. Hoover.

The plot succeeded. In a few days, Mr. Hoover declared that he would not take the Democratic nomination. The Democrats dropped him. The public was bewildered by his finding out that he was a Republican after saying that he could not tell whether he was one or not until he had seen the Republican candidate and the platform.

At the Chicago Convention he received the support of Mr. Crane, Governor Miller, of New York, and, on the last ballot, of William Allen White, who having voted for Harding on the just previous ballot, said he wanted to "leave the bandwagon and ride with the undertaker."

This guilelessness of Mr. Hoover in politics will prevent him from realizing his larger ambitions; but is a source of strength to him in his present position, with American business men who have learned to distrust politicians. At any rate, he is no politician; he thinks as business men think; his interests are their interests; and when he comes to them bearing gifts,—the aid and cooperation of the United States Government in their efforts to win foreign trade,—they do not take him for a Greek.

He possesses great special knowledge which they desire: he knows much about economics and enjoys the advantage of believing that he knows all; he has immense prestige, as a result of all the advertising he received during the War; they come to Washington and sit at his feet like children; he gives them fatherly lectures, even upon the morals of their business, which must be clean, to enter this foreign trade of his, with the Government behind it. They make mental resolutions of reform. To no politician, to no one, even with an instinct for politics, would they listen as they listen to him. He speaks to American business with immense authority. His selection is an example of that unusual instinct for putting the right man in the right place which President Harding has, when he chooses to exercise it.

The post was disappointing to Mr. Hoover; but it was the one in which he will be most useful. Not a lawyer, he would hardly have done for Secretary of State, in spite of his exceptional knowledge of foreign conditions. Not a banker, he lacked the technical equipment for Secretary of the Treasury. Not a politician, he should have, and he has a place in which there are the least possible politics. Mr. Harding denatured him politically by giving him the one business department in the Cabinet. Even Hiram Johnson may come no longer to hate him.

For his present task, besides his special knowledge, his remarkable industry, his tireless application to details, he has one great gift, his extraordinary talent for publicity. There is no one in Washington, not even Mr. Hughes, who knows so well as he does how to advertise what he is doing.

As business recovers and foreign trade develops, the magazine pages will blossom with articles about what American enterprise is achieving in foreign lands, about the cooperation between American business and the American government, and, once more, about Mr. Hoover. Finding markets for American wares all over the earth will be made a romance only second in interest to the feeding of Belgium.

It was not an accident that he was better advertised than any general, admiral, or statesman of the War. It was not all due to the good will of the public, to the work which he did in Belgium and in this country, nor to the extraordinary press agents whose services he was able to command because of that good will. Back of it all was his own instinct for publicity, his sense of what interests the people, his assiduous cultivation of editors and reporters. He has magazine and newspaper contacts only exceeded by those of Roosevelt in his time, and a sense of the power of publicity only exceeded by Roosevelt's.

When he was threatening to win the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in spite of the fact that he was not a Democrat, a supporter of McAdoo complained bitterly to me, "Confound him! He has a genius for self-advertising. He is not half the man McAdoo is. He hasn't McAdoo's courage, optimism, force, or general statesmanship; but he has this infernal talent for getting himself in the papers. There is not much to him but press agenting; but how can you beat that?"

But though his own name has come to count for more than the causes he represents, so that the best way to obtain aid is to ask for it with "Hoover" in big letters and with the suffering children of Central Europe in small letters, still he remains only a name to the American people. They know that he always wears a blue suit of clothes cut on an invariable model, which he adopted years ago. They know that he worked his way through college as a waiter. They know that he grew rich as a mining engineer in the East. That is all. They think of him as a symbol of efficiency, as one who may save their money, as one who may find markets for them and develop their trade, as one who may help the world upon its feet again after the War, as a superman, if you will; but not as a man, not as a human being.

All his advertising has made him appeal to the American imagination, but not to the American heart. He is a sort of efficiency engineer, installing his charts and his systems into public life,—and who loves an efficiency engineer? There are no stories about him which give him a place in the popular breast. It is impossible to interest yourself in Hoover as Hoover; in Hoover as the man who did this, or the man who did that, or the man who will do this or that, yes,—but not in Hoover, the person.

The reason is that he has little personality. On close contact, he is disappointing, without charm, given to silence, as if he had nothing for ordinary human relations which had no profitable bearing on the task in hand. His conversation is applied efficiency engineering; there is no lost motion, though it is lost motion which is the delight of life. At dinner, he inclines to bury his face in his plate until the talk reaches some subject important to him, when he explodes a few facts, and is once more silent.

Had he a personality with his instinct for publicity, he would be another Roosevelt. But he is a bare expert.

I doubt if he really thinks of human beings as human beings; on the contrary, some engineering graph represents humanity in his mind. It is characteristic of him that he always speaks of the relief of starving populations not in terms of human suffering, but in terms of chemistry. The people, of whatever country he may be feeding, have so many calories now, last month they had so many calories; if they had ten calories more, they could maintain existence. Many times have I heard this formula. It is a weakness in a democracy to think of people in terms of graphs, and their welfare in terms of calories; that is, if you hope to be President of that democracy— not if you are content to be its excellent Secretary of Commerce.

When he came to Washington as a Food Administrator, he brought with him an old associate, a professor from California. A few days later the professor's wife arrived and went to live at the same house where Mr. Hoover and her husband resided. Mr. Hoover knew her well. She and her husband had long been his friends. He met her in the hall, shook hands with her, welcomed her and then lapsed into silence. After some moments, he said, "Well,—" and hesitated.

"Mr. Hoover," she said, "I know you are a busy man. You don't have to stand here trying to think of something to say to me. I know you well enough not to be offended if you don't talk to me at all while I am here."

He laughed and took her at her word. He had the habit of too great relevancy to be human. If he could have said more than "Well" to that woman, he might have been President.



HENRY CABOT LODGE

When Henry Cabot Lodge was elected to Congress thirty-four years ago there were no portents in the heavens, but there was rejoicing in his native city of Boston and in many other places. It was hailed as the dawn of a new era. Young, he was only thirty-seven, well educated, a teacher of history, and with six serious books to his credit, he was a new figure in politics; Providence, moving in its mysterious way, had designed him to redeem politics from its baseness and set a shining example.

Everything was in his favor; he was not only learned, so learned, in fact, that he was promptly dubbed the "scholar in politics," but he was rich, and therefore immune from all sordid temptation; he was a gentleman. Mr. Lodge's forbears had been respectable tradesmen who knew how to make money and to keep it—and the latter trait is strongly developed in their senatorial descendant. From them he inherited a fortune; he had been educated in a select private school and then gone through Harvard, whence he emerged with an LL.B. and a Ph.D. attached to his name. By all the established canons he was a "gentleman" as well as a scholar. In the intervals between teaching and writing he had found time to be admitted to the Boston bar.

With that equipment it could be safely predicted Mr. Lodge would go far. He has. To-day he is the leader of the Republican party in the Senate of the United States.

He early justified the promise. While still a Congressional freshman he drafted and introduced into the House the "Force Bill," which came to a violent death in the Senate. That Bill was not only a prophecy but it is a resume of Mr. Lodge's career. It is partisanship gone mad.

On the pretense that it was intended to secure fair elections in the South, but actually, as described by a member of the House at the time, to prevent elections being held in several districts, it placed the election machinery in the control of the Federal Government, which, through the Chief Supervisor of Elections, to be appointed by the President, and his Praetorian Guard of Deputy Marshals, would have controlled every election and returned an overwhelming Republican majority from the Southern States.

The Bill was typical of Mr. Lodge and the way he plays politics. The Force Bill would probably have ended ingloriously the political career of any other man, but Mr. Lodge had the luck of being a gentleman born in Boston. Boston is slow to forget. A quarter of a century after the Civil War, Boston still remembered that conflict, its heart still bled for the negro deprived of his vote; and a Boston gentleman could do no wrong—to the Democratic Party.

The House amused Mr. Lodge, but it was too promiscuous for a person of his delicate sensibilities who shrank from intimate contact with the uneducated and the socially unwashed. Henry Cabot Lodge always creates the impression that it is a condescension on his part to God to have allowed Him to create a world which is not exclusively possessed by the Cabots and the Lodges and their connections.

All that is only an unfortunate manner. He is really the friend of the people, abominating snobbishness and aristocratic pretensions; in his younger days, when he was campaigning for Congress, he was known to have slapped a constituent on the back and called him familiarly by his first name; even now, although he has long ceased to be a politician and has been canonized as a statesman, the old impulses are strong in him. When the time draws near for his reelection to the Senate, he goes back to Massachusetts, there to take part with the common people in their simple pleasures, and affably to extend a cold and clammy hand to voters, who still venerate him as a scholar in politics and a gentleman. So it will be easily understood why one of Mr. Lodge's temperament should early have cast his covetous eye on the Senate, and at the first opportunity moved over to that more select atmosphere, which he did in 1893.

When Senator Lodge entered public life the flagrant spoils system was rampant. A little band of earnest men was fighting to reform the civil service so as to make it a permanent establishment with merit and fitness the tests for appointment instead of political influence. It was a cause naturally to appeal to the "best people" of Boston, and Mr. Lodge, being one of them, having inflexible principles and a high code of honor, threw himself eagerly into the reform movement and became its apostle. His principles were so stern and unyielding, he demanded such an exalted standard of private and public morality, that, although he worshipped the Republican Party with a devotion almost as great as the memory of that grandfather who laid the foundation of the family fortunes, with a sorely stricken heart he was compelled to differ with Mr. Blaine and to flirt with those Ruperts of American politics, the Mugwumps.

"The man who sets up as being much better than his age is always to be suspected," says a historian, "and Cato is perhaps the best specimen of the rugged hypocrite that history can produce."

As a summary of the character of Cato, this is admirable, but no one would call Mr. Lodge "rugged."

Mr. Lodge's principles, it has been observed, are inflexible and rest on solid foundation, but like good steel they can bend without breaking. An ardent civil service reformer, a champion of public morality, so long as offices were being awarded to the faithful, he saw no reason why he should be the victim of his own self denying ordinance. Early in his career he became a very successful purveyor of patronage, developing a keen scent for vacant places or a post filled by a Democrat. As a theoretical civil service reformer Mr. Lodge left nothing to be desired; as a practical spoilsman he had few equals. A Senator's usefulness to his friends is much greater than that of a member of the House, and if a Senator works his pull for all that it is worth he can accomplish much. Mr. Lodge was not idle.

With his grandfathers and his fortune Mr. Lodge inherited a violent and bitter dislike of England. Probably no man—not even the most extreme Irish agitator—is more responsible for the feeling existing against England than Mr. Lodge; because the outspoken Irish agitator is known for what he is and treated accordingly; carrying out Mr. Roosevelt's thought, he will be execrated by decent people; but Mr. Lodge, posing as the impartial historian and the patriotic statesman, is applauded.

Just as Mr. Lodge gained a certain fame when he was a member of the House from the Force Bill, which his own party repudiated, so he signalized his admission into the Senate by proposing to force England to adopt free silver. It was an opportunity to strike at England in a vital spot; it was as statesmanlike and patriotic as his attempt to deprive the South of their representatives.

Mr. Cleveland was fighting with splendid courage to save the country from free silver, caring nothing for politics and animated solely by the highest and most disinterested motives, and Mr. Lodge was thinking only of his spite. President Cleveland, said a Boston paper, deserved and had the right to expect Mr. Lodge's support, instead of which "we find our junior Senator introducing a legislative proposition intended to appeal at once to the anti-British prejudices of a good many Americans, and to the desire of the then preponderating sentiment of the country to force a silver currency upon the American people. It was an effort to strike at England."

Mr. Lodge proposed that all imports from Great Britain or her colonies should pay duties double those of the regular rates, and any article on the free list should be made dutiable at thirty-five per cent; these additional and discriminating duties were to remain in force until Great Britain assented to and took part in an international agreement "for the coinage and use of silver."

Mr. Lodge's free silver amendment shared the same tomb with his Force Bill; in the Senate fortunately there were men with broader vision and less passion.

In his biography in the Congressional Directory (written by himself) and in the numerous biographies and sketches which have been published with such frequency (Mr. Lodge has a weakness for seeing himself in print) curiously enough no mention can be found either of the Force Bill or the attempt to coerce England with a silver club. One can only explain this reticence by excessive modesty.

Two years later Mr. Lodge deserted his silver allies and was as enthusiastic in support of the gold standard as he had previously been zealous for the purification of the civil service. A Boston paper said that he "was made to realize, by the influences brought to bear upon him, that he must advocate the gold standard or else provoke the active hostility of the prominent business men of this State." That perhaps is as infamous as anything ever written. That any influences, even those "of the prominent business men of Massachusetts," could cause Mr. Lodge to swerve from his convictions no one will believe. He must have had convictions when he sought to drive England to a silver standard, he must have been convinced that it was for the good of the United States as well as the whole world, he must have satisfied himself, for Mr. Lodge never permits his emotions to control his intelligence, that his action was wise and patriotic. But although Mr. Lodge will not surrender his convictions he has no scruples about consistency.

Mr. Lodge's principles are so stern that he refused to consent to Colombia being paid for the territory seized by President Roosevelt. Mr. Lodge made a report (this was when Mr. Wilson was President, and I mention it merely as an historical fact) in which he denounced Colombia's claim as blackmail, resented it as an insult to the memory of Mr. Roosevelt, and declared in approved copybook fashion (being fond of platitudes), that friendship between nations cannot be bought. Later (this was when Mr. Harding was President, and I mention it merely as an historical fact) as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, he brought in a report urging the ratification of the treaty, and discovered that Mr. Roosevelt had really been in favor of the treaty, expunged the unpleasant word blackmail from his lexicon, and sapiently observed, so impossible is it for him not to indulge in platitudes, that sometimes a nation has to pay more for a thing than it is really worth; a reflection that would have done credit to the oracular wisdom of Captain Jack Bunsby.

Mr. Lodge attacked the treaty of peace with Germany while it was still in process of negotiation and severely criticised Mr. Wilson for not having consulted the Senate. That the Senate has no right to ask about the details of a treaty before the President sends it in for ratification is a constitutional axiom which Mr. Lodge, with his customary mental infidelity, caressed at one time and spurned at another.

When the treaty with Spain was before the Senate (that was when Mr. McKinley was President, and I mention it merely as an historical fact) it was attacked by some of the Democrats. To silence these criticisms Mr. Lodge said, "We have no possible right to break suddenly into the middle of a negotiation and demand from the President what instructions he has given to his representatives. That part of treaty making is no concern of ours."

The Democrats attempted to defeat the ratification of the treaty, and if that was done, said Mr. Lodge, "we repudiate the President and his action before the whole world, and the repudiation of the President in such a matter as this is, to my mind, the humiliation of the United States in the eyes of the civilized world." The President could not be sent back to say to Spain "with bated breath" (even in his most solemn moments Mr. Lodge cannot resist the commonplace) "we believe we have been too victorious and that you have yielded us too much and that I am very sorry that I took the Philippines from you."

But that was precisely what Mr. Lodge demanded should and must be done when Mr. Wilson brought back the peace treaty. Inconsistency, as I have before remarked, Mr. Lodge cares nothing about, but his patriotism and partisanship are so inextricably intertwined that it is always difficult to discover whether in his loftiest flights it is the patriot who pleads or the partisan who intrigues.

Thus, in the debate on the Spanish treaty, Mr. Lodge delivered himself of these noble sentiments: "I have ideals and beliefs which pertain to the living present, and a faith in the future of my country. I believe in the American people as they are to-day and in the civilization they have created," and many more beautiful words to the same effect. It was the language of a statesman with aspirations and convictions. It sounded splendidly. Mr. Lodge is a classical scholar, and one wonders whether he remembers his Epictetus: "But you utter your elegant words only from your lips; for this reason they are without strength and dead, and it is nauseous to listen to your exhortations and your miserable virtue; which is talked of everywhere."

It was the late Senator Wolcott, one of the most brilliant orators of his day, who explained why Mr. Lodge's oratory left men cold. Wolcott was commenting on a speech delivered by Lodge a few days earlier and someone said to him that men listened to Lodge with eyes undimmed.

"To bring tears from an audience," said Wolcott, "the speaker must feel tears here (and he pointed to his throat), but Lodge can speak for an hour with nothing but saliva in his throat."

Mr. Lodge's dislike of Mr. Wilson was almost malignant. Rumor ascribes it to professional jealousy. Before Mr. Wilson came into prominence Mr. Lodge was the only scholar in politics, but Mr. Wilson was so far his superior in erudition, especially in Mr. Lodge's chosen profession of history, that he resented being deprived of his monopoly. Perhaps there is another reason. Mr. Lodge has cherished two ambitions, neither of which has been gratified. The Presidency has been the ignis fatuus he has pursued; he was the residuary legatee of Mr. Roosevelt's bankrupt political estate in 1916, it will be recalled; last year, after his fight on the treaty, he considered himself the logical candidate and believed he had the nomination in his grasp. He has longed to be Secretary of State, and it was a bitter disappointment when Mr. Harding did not invite him to enter the Cabinet.

Mr. Lodge is a curious and not uninteresting study in psychology. He has no great talent, but he is not without some ability; in his youth he was an industrious plodder and fond of study. He has read much but absorbed little; he is well educated in the narrow sense of the schoolmaster, but he has no philosophic background; his is the parasitic mind that sucks sustenance from the brains of others and gives nothing in return. He is without the slightest imagination and is devoid of all sense of humor; and without these two, imagination, which is the gift of the poet, and humor, which is the dower of the philosopher, no man can see life whole.

He has genius almost for misunderstanding public sentiment. To him may be applied Junius' characterization of the Duke of Grafton: "It is not that you do wrong by design, but that you should never do right by mistake."

With all these defects, the defects of heritage and environment and temperament, so much was expected from Mr. Lodge, and so much he might have done, that it is a disappointment he has accomplished so little. He has been thirty-four years in Congress, and his career can be summed up in three achievements—the Force Bill, the attempt to wreck England by driving her to silver coinage, and the part he took in defeating the treaty of peace with Germany. The Force Bill and the silver amendment his biographers have charitably forgotten; will the future biographer deal as gently with the closing years of his life? And if so, what material will the biographer have?

Macaulay, reviewing Barere's Memoirs—and allowing for the difference in time and manners and morals there is a strange similarity between the leader of the French Revolution and the leader of the Senate—said, "We now propose to do him, by the blessing of God, full and signal justice."

We think we may say, with proper humility, that, by the blessing of God, we have done Senator Henry Cabot Lodge full and signal justice.



BERNARD M. BARUCH

A clever woman magazine writer once asked Bernard M. Baruch for some information about the peace treaty. The question was not in his special field, the economic sections of the treaty, and he told her so.

"It took him one sentence to say that he could not tell me what I wanted to know," she described the interview afterward. "And then he talked to me for two hours about himself. He told me of his start in life as a three-dollar-a-week clerk, how rich he was, his philosophy of life; how you should recognize defeat when it was coming, accept it before it was complete and overwhelming and start out afresh, how liberal and advanced were his social views, how with all his wealth he was ready to accept a capital tax as perhaps the best way out of the bog in which the war had left the world, how democratic he was in his relations with his employees and his servants. It all seemed as amazing to him as if he were describing someone else, or as if it had just happened the day before."

Perhaps it is only to women and to journalists that men talk so frankly about themselves, to the most romantic and best trained listening sex and profession, who perforce survey the heights from below. But this young woman's experience was, I have reason to believe, a common one.

Is it vanity? You say that a man who talks so much about himself must be vain. To conclude that he is vain is not to understand Mr. Baruch. Is a child vain when it brings some little childish accomplishment, some infantile drawing on paper, and delightedly and frankly marvels at what he has done? It is given to children and to the naive openly to wonder at themselves without vanity, with a deep underlying sense of humility, and in Mr. Baruch's case the unaffected delight in himself proceeds from real humility.

After twenty-five years in the jungle of Wall Street, there is—contradictions multiply in his case—much of the child about Mr. Baruch, simple, trustful—outside of Wall Street,—incapable of concealment,—outside of Wall Street—of that which art has taught the rest of us to conceal. His humility makes him wonder; his naivete makes him talk quite frankly, unrestrained by the conventions that balk others. After all, is not wondering at yourself a sign of humility? A vain man, become great by luck, by force of circumstances, by the possession of gifts which he does not himself fully understand, would still take himself for granted. He would not be a romance to himself, but a solid, unassailable fact.

For Baruch the great romance is Baruch, the astonishing plaything of fate, who started life as a three-dollar-a-week broker's clerk; made millions, lost millions, made millions again, lost millions again; finally, still young, quit Wall Street with a fortune that left the game of the market dull and commonplace, seeking a new occupation for his energies; became during the war next to the President, the most powerful man in Washington; emerged from the war, which wrecked most reputations, with a large measure of credit, prepared by the amazing past for an equally amazing future. A career like that makes it impossible for the man who knows it best not to expect anything. Why not the "Disraeli of America?"—a phrase he once, rather confidentially, employed concerning his anticipated future.

Did you ever see a portrait bust smiling, not softly with the eyes or with a slight relaxation of the mouth, but firmly, definitely, lastingly smiling, with some inward source of satisfaction? Look at Jo Davidson's bust of Baruch, among the famous men at the Peace Conference.

I once saw the various sketches in clay that went to the making of that portrait—the subject was proving elusive to the sculptor. There were two obvious traits to be represented; the unusual knot in the brow between the eyes and the smile, without which it was evident that you had not Baruch. The extraordinary concentration in the forehead was easy enough to transfer to clay; but the smile kept defying the artist. When a smile was traced in the clay it softened the face out of character, destroyed that intensity which the central massing of the brow denoted; and when the smile was deleted the face lost all its brilliance, became merely intense, concentrated, racial, acquisitive perhaps, clearly not Mr. Baruch's face. Ultimately the sculptor succeeded in wedding a smile to that brow, and the bust went on exhibition with those of Wilson, Foch, House, Clemenceau, and the others; but the union was never more than a compromise, a marriage of convenience for the artist.

That smile is as inevitable a part of Baruch as his engaging naivete in talking about himself. It is always there, brilliant, unrelated to circumstances. It does not spring from a sense of humor,—Mr. Baruch, like the rest of the successful, has not a marked sense of humor; a sense of the irony of fate he has, perhaps, but not more. It does not denote gaiety, nor sympathy, nor satire; it is not kind nor yet unkind; it does not relax the features, which remain tense as ever even when smiling; it suggests satisfaction, self-confidence, and a secret inner source of contentment. It is with Mr. Baruch when he is tired, or ought to be tired; the romance of Baruch is an internal spring of refreshment. It does not leave him when he is angry, if he is ever angry; the romance of Baruch diverts him. Though always there, it is not a fixed smile, a mask, something worn for the undoing of Wall Street; it is a real smile. Somewhere subconsciously there abides the picture of the poor clerk become amazingly rich, of power in Washington, of a beckoning future with possibilities as extraordinary as the wonders of the past. Life is not logical, dull, commonplace, a tissue of cause and effect; it proceeds delightfully by daily miracles. The American Disraeli is no further away to-day than was the Baruch of to-day from the Baruch of yesterday. Enough to account for a smile in marble, bronze, or in whatever metal the human face is made of.

Take the miracle of the War Administration. It was not vanity but humility, the kind of humility that would have saved Wilson, that served Mr. Baruch there. He came to Washington out of Wall Street and Wall Street is always anathema. More than that he came out of that part of Wall Street which is beyond the pale; he did not belong to the right monied set there; which is to be anathema with that part of the community to which Wall Street itself is not anathema; moreover he had been unjustly accused in connection with the famous Wall Street "leak." And he entered an administration which was the center of much prejudice and hatred. Yet he was modest enough, however, to assume that his personality did not count, that it was the work to be done which mattered, and that he could depend upon the friendliness both of the Republicans and of the great industrial interests of the country to that work if it should be properly done.

The belief Mr. Wilson has and a much lesser man, Hiram Johnson, has, that men are thinking exclusively about them personally and not about the causes they advocate or the measures they propose is a more dangerous form of vanity than the habit of admiring oneself audibly. It requires colossal egotism to imagine the existence of many enemies and Mr. Baruch is genuinely humble in the matter of enmity. After watching him during the war, in an administration which was enemy mad, I fancy he counts his genuine foes on the fingers of one hand. Moreover he was quite impersonal about his task. He did not do everything himself on the theory that no one else was quite big enough to do it. There is no practical snobbism about him. His knowledge of the industries of the country was that of the speculator; it was not that of the practical industrialist, and he knew it.

He surrounded himself with the best men he could find. He trusted them implicitly, his habit being not to distrust men until he finds that they can be trusted but to trust them unless he finds that they cannot be trusted—also a modest and naive trait. He was never tired of praising Legg, Replogle, Summers, and the other business men whom he brought to Washington, praising himself, of course, for his skill in choosing them—he never achieves self-forgetfulness—but giving them full credit for the work of the War Industries Board. And he inspired an extraordinary loyalty among his associates, big and little. He treated the Republicans as he treated big business as if all had only one interest, above politics and personalities, and that was to win the war. And when President Wilson, in response to Republican criticism of the war organization, gave him real power to mobilize American industry, the Republicans applauded the bestowal of authority as constructive and took credit to themselves for accomplishing it.

Baruch and Hoover, alone of the business men who came to Washington during the war achieved real successes in the higher positions, and he showed vastly the greater capacity of the two to operate in a political atmosphere. A man who was nothing but a Wall Street speculator, not an industrial organizer, organized successfully the biggest industrial combination the world has ever seen; a man who was suspect of American business got on admirably with American business, and a man who had not been in politics accomplished the impossible task of adjusting himself to work under political conditions. It is another chapter in the romance of Baruch.

He cannot explain it, so why should not he wonder about it quite openly and quite delightedly, with all his engaging naivete? That inability to explain anything is one of the characteristics of Mr. Baruch. When you begin to apprehend it you begin to see why he is a romance to himself. He cannot explain himself to himself, nor to anyone else, no matter how much he tries. And even more, he cannot explain his opinions, his conclusions, his decisions to anyone in the world with all the words at his command. He can never give reasons. Mentally nature has left him, after a manner, incommunicado. His mind does not proceed as other men's minds do.

The author of the "Mirrors of Downing Street" describes Lord Northcliffe's mind as "discontinuous." If I had never talked to Lord Northcliffe I should be led to suppose that his mind resembled Mr. Baruch's. But the British journalist's mental operations are a model of order and continuity compared to those of the former American War Industries Chairman. Like the heroes of the ancient poems Mr. Baruch's mind has the faculty of invisibility. You see it here; a moment later you see it there, and for the life of you cannot tell how it got from here to there, a gift of incalculability which must have been of great service in Wall Street, but which does not promote understanding nor communication. And the more Mr. Baruch tries to give you the connecting links between here and there the worse off you are, both of you.

The ordinary mind is logical and is confined within the three dimensions of the syllogism. You watch it readily enough shut in its little cage whose walls are the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. There is no escape as we say, from the conclusion. There is no escape anywhere.

But Mr. Baruch's mind escapes easily. It possesses the secret of some fourth mental dimension, known only to the naive and the illogical, or perhaps supralogical. He has brilliant intuitions, hunches, premonitions, the acute perceptions of some two or three extra senses that have been bred or schooled out of other men.

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!"

There is no fun in being not a wonder but a copy book. And a perfectly logical mind would flirt with Disraeli warily. It would say, "One does not at fifty change from business to politics with success. Disraeli didn't start out in Wall Street. As the Germans say, 'what will become vinegar sours early.'"

Mr. Baruch slips easily through the three sides of this reasoning. Life is not logical. Fate is not logical. He is not logical.

He has had his taste of public life under Wilson and he wants more. I venture to say that he would give every one of his many millions and be as poor, well, poorer than any member of the present cabinet, to be in the place Mr. Hughes occupies to-day.

Everyone who knows him has heard him say that when he entered office he resolved to quit business because he learned so much as head of the War Industries Board that it would be improper for him ever to go into the market again. There is more to it than that; public life has given him a profound distaste for mere money-making. He wrote to Senator Kenyon the other day that he had not made a dollar since he went to work for the government. I believe that to be true for I have found him an extraordinarily truthful and honest man. He has that desire for public distinction which is so often characteristic of his race. He has the idealism, a characteristic also of the race which gave to the world two great religions. He has the same passion for public service now that he once had for the market. And he belongs to a race, which, in spite of all our national catholicity on the subject of races, has never yet produced its Disraeli in America, and to a party out of power, perhaps for a long time, and he spent his youth learning a trade which is not the trade he would follow now.

All of this accounts for his restlessness. He is still youthful and has enormous energies and no occupation for them. He loves personal publicity and has an instinct for it, not so keen as Hoover's or Will H. Hays', but still keen.

Whither shall he turn? To the organization of his party? There he may buy the right to be lampooned and in the end, if his party succeeds, to be introduced into the Cabinet apologetically, as Hays and Daugherty were, on the plea that the President must appoint a number of party workers. To the Senate? It is a body which affords escape from the boredom of small town life for men who have grown rich on the frontier or in the dull Middle West. It carries with it an excuse to live in Washington, some social position there, and a title envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. Senators who start young serve long and obediently, suppressing all their natural instincts for self-expression, and attain if they are lucky the scant distinction of a committee chairmanship in a legislature that has steadily tended toward submergence. To the House? Individuals are lost in the House. And the Presidency comes to few, and by chance.

Knowing his ambition for public distinction and his wealth, men go to him every day to sell him the road to power and influence, and, if you will, public service. Let him have the Democratic organization on condition of paying its debts and financing its activities. One faction of the Democratic party recently sought control, spreading the understanding that Mr. Baruch would, in the event of its success, open wide his pocket book. After the meeting of the National Committee at which this faction met its defeat I said to a prominent member of the victorious group: "Now that you have won you will probably get Baruch's money. He is restless, eager to find an outlet for his energies, less interested in any personality than in his party. Hang on and wait and he must come to you."

"Do you know," he replied, lowering his voice confidentially, "That is just the way I diagnose it."

And at this very time the Republicans, hearing much of Mr. Baruch's money and its use to build up such an intensive organization for the Democrats, as Chairman Hays with a million or two at his disposal had erected for them, considered seriously whether or not it would not be wise themselves to occupy Mr. Baruch's energies and divert his ambitions away from party organization. They debated putting Mr. Baruch on the commission to reorganize the executive departments of the government. All had their eyes on the same ambition and the same wealth!

Several daily newspapers in New York, and I know not how many magazines and weeklies, have been offered at one time or another to Mr. Baruch, for it is known that one of his ideas of public service is to own and edit a great liberal journal, a "Manchester Guardian" of America. But an opportunity to buy a newspaper in New York is an opportunity to invest $3,000,000 or $4,000,000, to lose $500,000 or more for several years thereafter and to become the national figure that Mr. Ochs is, or Mr. Reid is, or Mr. Munsey is, certainly something far short of the American Disraeli or even the Baruch of the War Industries Board.

Mr. Baruch, you will observe, has no vulgar illusions about what money will buy. He likes money. It brings with it a certain personal enlargement. It adds to the romance of himself in his own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. It procures the flattering ears of journalists, and a place on front pages, and, if one inclines toward ostentation, even the ownership of a newspaper itself.

But money will not buy a commanding place in public life. And even if it would buy such a place he would not be content to do other than earn one. He wants to repeat the thrills of his youth in the market, in the thrills of a second youth in Washington. He is incurably romantic.

To sum him all up in a sentence—he has an extraordinary sense of wonder and an unequalled sense of reality, the sense of wonder directed toward himself, the sense of reality directed largely but not exclusively elsewhere.



ELIHU ROOT

Elihu Root might have been so much publicly and has been so little that a moral must hang somewhere upon his public career.

He might have been many things. He might have been President of the United States if his party ever could have been persuaded to nominate him. He might have been one of the great Chief Justices of the Supreme Court if a President could have been persuaded to appoint him. He might have given to the United States Senate that weight and influence which have disappeared from it, if he had had a passion for public service. He might have been Secretary of State in the most momentous period of American foreign relations if a certain homely instinct in Mr. Harding had not led him to prefer the less brilliant Mr. Hughes. He might have made history. But he has not. Out of his eight years in the Cabinet and six years in the Senate nothing constructive came that will give his name a larger place in history than that of Rufus Choate, another remarkable advocate who was once Attorney General.

Distrust has always barred his way, distrust of a mind and character to which problems appear as exercises in ingenuity rather than questions of right and justice. His greatest opportunity for constructive statesmanship was offered in the making of the New York State constitution. But when it became known that Mr. Root had dominated the Constitutional Convention, that the proposed constitution was Mr. Root's constitution, that was enough; the voters rejected it in the referendum.

Distrust spoiled the mission to Russia during the war. The Russians distrusted him while he was with them. President Wilson distrusted his report when he returned. And Mr. Wilson's successor equally distrusted him when he chose a man to finish the work which Mr. Wilson had badly done or to correct the work that Mr. Wilson had left undone at Paris.

Light on President Harding's attitude toward Mr. Root is thrown by an incident at Marion during the campaign. The Republican candidate had made his speech of August 28th in which he indicated his views upon the League of Nations. Two days later a newspaper arrived in Marion containing a dispatch from abroad where Mr. Root then was, at work upon the international court.

The correspondent represented Mr. Root as "amazed" at the position Mr. Harding had taken.

The candidate came to the headquarters early that morning. One of the headquarters attaches handed him a copy of the paper. Mr. Harding read the dispatch and was angry.

"That man Root," he exclaimed, "has done more harm to the Republican party than any other man in it! He is always pursuing some end of his own or of some outside interest." He started away; then turned back, still angry, and added: "You remember the Panama Canal tolls incident. That was an example of the kind of trouble he has always been making for the party."

Many reasons have been given why the President passed over the obvious man for Secretary of State. Mr. Root himself, who would have taken the place gladly as an opportunity for his extremely keen intelligence, but who did not seek it, thinks that the Senate, flushed with its recent victory over Mr. Wilson and desiring itself to dominate foreign relations, conspired to prevent his choice. The Senators did oppose Mr. Root, but their lack of influence with the President has been sufficiently exposed by events.

The real obstacle to Mr. Root's appointment was Mr. Harding's distrust of him, the instinctive feeling of a simple direct nature against a mind too quick, too clever, too adroit, too invisible in many of its operations. Mr. Harding, being commonplace himself, likes a more commonplace kind of greatness than Mr. Root's. Those who were close to him said the President feared that Mr. Root would "put something over on him." A certain moral quality in Mr. Hughes outweighed Mr. Root's special experience and wider reputation.

Mr. Roosevelt used to tell a story boastfully of his own practicality which throws much light on Mr. Root and upon the reason for Mr. Root's comparative failure as a public man.

"When I took Panama," he would say, "I found all the members of my Cabinet helpful except one. Mr. Root readily found numerous precedents. Mr. Taft was sympathetic and gave every assistance possible. Mr. Knox alone was silent. At last I turned to him in the Cabinet meeting and I said, 'I should like to hear from the Attorney General on the legality of what we are doing.' Mr. Knox looked up and said, 'Mr. President, if I were you I should not have the slightest taint of legality about the whole affair.'"

Such was Mr. Root. Public questions always were likely to occur to him first as exercises in mental adroitness rather than as moral problems. His extremely agile mind finds its chief pleasure in its own agility. Then he was always the advocate, always instinctively devoting himself to bolstering up another man's cause for him.