Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

"He is a first class second," said Senator Penrose, objecting to him as a candidate for President at the Republican Convention of 1916, "but he is not his own man."

He is always someone else's mouthpiece and publicly he is chiefly remembered as Mr. Roosevelt's mouthpiece. When he came to New York and made the speech that elected Hughes Governor and made possible Hughes as Secretary of State he said, "I speak for the President." He equally spoke for the President when he delivered that other remembered address, warning the States that unless they mended their ways the Federal Government would absorb their vitality.

The law is a parasitic profession and Mr. Root's public career is parasitic. He lacks originality, he lacks passion--there is no place for passion in that clear mind--he lacks force. He elucidates other men's ideas, works out or puts into effect their policies, presents their case, is, by temperament, by reason of gifts amounting almost to genius, of defects that go with those gifts always and everywhere, the lawyer. His public career has been controlled by this circumstance.

I doubt if he ever had a real love of public life. He turned to it late, after he had made his success in the profession of his choice, and he carried over into it the habits of the law. He always seemed to be taking cases for the public. He took a case for Mr. McKinley as Secretary of War because the War Department needed reorganization and the case promised to be interesting. He took a case for Mr. Roosevelt as Secretary of State because Mr. Roosevelt was the most interesting client in the world. He took a case for New York State, to remodel its constitution, a case that ended disastrously. He took a case for Mr. Wilson in Russia and another, the League of Nations, to form its international court for it. He was willing to take a case for Mr. Harding to make a going concern of the world for him following the smash-up of the war, something like the task of counsel of a receivership, the most interesting receivership of all time.

For a few years Mr. Roosevelt made public life interesting to Mr. Root who, it looked then, might devote the rest of his career to national affairs.

It was a sparkling period for America. We have never had an "age" in the history of this country like the age of Elizabeth or the age of Louis XIV, or the age of Lorenzo, the Magnificent; time is too short and democracy too rigid for such splendors; but the nearest equivalent to one was the "age," let us call it that, of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the central figure--an age must have a central figure--a buoyant personality with a Renaissance zest for life, and a Renaissance curiosity about all things known, and unknown, and a boundless capacity for vitalizing everyone and everything with which he came in contact.

Dull moments were unknown. Knighthood was once more in flower, wearing frock coats and high hats and reading all about itself in the daily press. Lances were tilted at malefactors of great wealth, in jousts where few were unhorsed and no blood spilled. Fair maidens of popular rights were rescued; great deeds of valor done. Legends were created, the legend of Leonard Wood, somewhat damaged in the last campaign, the legend of the Tennis Cabinet, with its Garfields and its Pinchots, now to be read about only in the black letter books of the early twentieth century, and the legend of Elihu Root, still supported in a measure by the evidences of his highly acute intelligence, but still like everything else of those bright days, largely a legend.

Roosevelt, the Magnificent, made men great with a word, and his words were many. His great were many likewise, great statesmen, great public servants, great writers, great magazine editors, great cowboys from the West, great saints and great sinners, great combinations of wealth and great laws to curb them; everything in scale and that a great scale. Mr. Root acquired his taste for public life in that "age" just as Mr. Hoover, Mr. Baruch and a dozen others did theirs in the moving period of the Great War. It is easy to understand how.

Like all remarkable ages this age was preceded by discoveries. The United States had just fought a war which had ended in a great victory, over Spain. The American people were elated by their achievement, aware of their greatness, talked much and surely of "destiny," the period in Washington being but a reflection of their own mood. Their mental horizon had been immensely widened by the possession, gained in the war, of some islands in the Pacific whose existence we had never heard of before.

Until that time there had been for us only two nations in the world, the United States and England, the country with which we had fought two wars, and innumerable national campaigns. Historically there had of course been another country as friendly as England had sometimes been inimical, France, but France had ceased to be a nation and became a succession of revolutions.

Manila Bay had been a series of revelations, besides teaching us that Philippines is spelled with two "ps" and only one "l." We had there discovered Germany, a country whose admirals had bad sea manners. We knew at once that our next war would be with Germany, although the day before Dewey said, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," we would as soon have thought that our next war would be with Patagonia.

There too we had an interesting and surprising experience with England, hitherto known chiefly for her constant designs on the national dinner pail. She behaved in striking and pleasing contrast with Germany. Blood, on that bright day, May 1, 1898, began to be thicker than water. Learning once more had come out of the East. From Manila Bay flowed such a tide of new ideas, such a reassessment of old conceptions as had not visited the world since the discovery of Greek and Latin letters put an end to the Middle Ages.

Perceiving our widened interest, John Hay, as Secretary of State, took our foreign relations on a grand Cook's tour of the world. He showed us Europe and the Orient. In honor of Manila Bay he invented that brilliant fiction, the "open door" in the East. Turning our attention to the world we discovered the General Staff. Hitherto our army had fought mostly with the scattered Indian tribes of the West and you cannot use a General Staff in conducting six separate wars at once, each no bigger than a good-sized riot. But as Admiral Perry had opened the eyes of the Hermit Kingdom of Japan, so Admiral whatever-his-name-was who consented to be sunk by Dewey, the unremembered hero of this great enlightenment, had opened the eyes of this Hermit Republic of the West to the world across the seas.

We had to have a General Staff. Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, gave us one, faithfully copied from the best European models. Roosevelt, the Magnificent, stood by and said "Bully." Everything was of this order; so it was to a tremendously interesting job that Mr. Root succeeded when he took the place of John Hay as Secretary of State. The mood of the hour was expansive and a luminous personality pervaded the national life.

But public service cannot always be so interesting as it is at its fullest moments. The luminous personality went out. And Mr. Root's next experience, in the United States Senate, was disillusioning.

The Senate is a body in which you grow old, ungracefully waiting for dead men's shoes. The infinite capacity for taking pains which Senators have is not genius. If the gods have been good to you, as they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter the upper house young, a scholar and idealist, with the hope of the Presidency as the reward of generous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay aside your winged gifts one by one and your ambition centers finally not on the Presidency but on some committee chairmanship clung to by a pertinacious octogenarian.

Hope deferred makes you avaricious of little favors, until when a British journalist writes of you as one did of Henry Cabot Lodge, making his speech before the last Republican national convention at Chicago, that you "looked like an elderly peer addressing a labor gathering," your cup of happiness, is full to the brim, as Henry Cabot Lodge's was,--whether because you are compared to a lord or because other people, lesser than Senators, are put into their proper inferior place. Mr. Lodge is the perfect flower of the Senate. It is a flower that does not bloom in a night. It is almost a century plant.

Into this Senate came Mr. Root, full stature, as he might walk into the Supreme Court of the United States, preceded by his reputation. On Olympus one may spring full grown like Minerva from the head of Jove. But not in the Senate, where strong prejudice exists against any kind of cerebral generation. A young Senator from Ohio, Mr. Harding, arrived in the upper House early enough to see the portent of Mr. Root there. He keeps to this day a sense of its unbecomingness.

From his desk on the floor Mr. Root talked to the country, but the Senate did not listen. One does not speak in the Senate by the authority of intellect or of personality. One speaks by the authority of dead men's shoes.

Not being a big committee chairman, Mr. Root was not of counsel in the big cases. He tried to associate himself with counsel but the traditions of the Senate and the jealousy of Senators were against him. He had not the passion for public service that makes Reed Smoot and Wesley Jones miraculously patient with the endless details of legislation. After six years he quit.

"I am tired of it," he said to Senator Fall, "the Senate is doing such little things in such a little way." It was different from public life under Roosevelt where one did not notice size of what they did--one has not yet noticed the size of what they did--for the grandeur of the way they did it.

I have said that Mr. Root's mind with its advocate's bent always occupied itself with the justification of other men's views, his chief's or his party's. There was one notable exception, his break with the Republicans while he was in the Senate on the question of discriminating in favor of American shipping through the Panama Canal. A clever lawyer's argument can be made that when the United States said "all nations" in its treaty with Great Britain regarding the Canal it meant all nations except itself. But Mr. Root declined to make it, holding that plain morality and a greater respect for the obligations of a treaty than Bethman Hollweg expressed when he called them scraps of paper required this country to charge just the same tolls for American ships using the canal as for British ships or any other ships using it.

The general Republican argument is that thus interpreted, the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is so foolish and so inconvenient a treaty that Mr. Hay must not have meant what he said when he wrote it, and really did mean something that he wholly failed to say. The reasons for contending that Mr. Hay meant no tolls for the United States and tolls for England, when he wrote the same tolls for everybody are highly ingenious and as it was a Democratic President who was asserting that Mr. Hay used language in its ordinary sense, Mr. Root as a Republican might have been expected to declare that Mr. Hay used it in quite the reverse of its ordinary sense. But he did not. He supported the Democratic President and treated the Republican position as if it had not the slightest taint of legality in it, to the lasting shock of Mr. Harding, on whose side the precedents are, for nations do say "all nations," and are later found to mean all nations but themselves when their virtuous promises to make no exceptions in their own favor turn out to be inconvenient.

When Mr. Root took a high moral stand on the treaty it was said among Republican Senators that he was thinking more of the transcontinental railroads which were fighting competition by water than he was of the sanctity of international engagements. The probability is that he was probably thinking more of John Hay and Elihu Root than he was of either. He was in the Cabinet when John Hay as Secretary of State made the treaty. Senator Lodge, the only other Senator to agree with Mr. Root and disagree with his party about the meaning of all nations, was John Hay's closest friend. Probably both of them, intimately associated with Mr. Hay, had their part in the making of the treaty. They had perhaps the sensitiveness of authors about their capacity to say exactly what they meant. They wanted to recognize their own international piece when it was put on the stage by the commercially minded producers of the Senate.

The history of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is interesting and unfamiliar. Attaching Pauncefote's name to the treaty was a delicate act of international courtesy since there is Pauncefote's word for it, privately spoken, that he had nothing to do with the writing of it.

Hay draughted the treaty by himself probably with the cognizance of Root and Lodge, the great lawyer who was his associate in the Cabinet and his closest personal friend in the Capitol. Hay then handed it to Pauncefote, the British minister here. Pauncefote transmitted it to the foreign office in London which received it with surprise and probably with satisfaction, for the Clayton-Bulwer treaty which it in a sense revived, had been forgotten for nearly half a century. Delay is the rule of foreign offices.

Perhaps Mr. Hay's treaty was not so generous as it seemed on first reading, a suspicion which seems to have been justified by the interpretation put upon it by the final authority upon international engagements, the Republican National Convention at Chicago. And if it was as generous as it seemed let not America think Great Britain too eager in accepting it, let America pay a little to overcome the reluctance of Great Britain in setting her approval upon the new contract.

At last, after much apparent hesitation, the foreign office agreed to the new treaty in consideration of America's throwing in, with it an arbitration of the Bering Sea dispute. President Roosevelt interpreted Mr. Hay's arbitration contract much as the Republican National Convention interpreted Mr. Hay's treaty, by appointing American arbitrators who promised beforehand, in giving a fair and impartial hearing to the Canadian claims, always to vote for the American position and to resign and be succeeded by others if they found that they could not do so.

Why, then, the prevailing distrust of Mr. Root? His public morals regarding the Hay-Pauncefote treaty were better than those of his party, even if we accept the view that they were dictated by nothing more than a certain mental integrity, a certain consistency with himself. He was as virtuous in the taking of the Panama Canal as the virtuous Mr. Roosevelt. He had the advocate's honesty of being true to his client, whether his client was the public or the great corporations. Mentality was uppermost in him, so that he took primarily a logical rather than a moral view of all questions; but also so much that he could not pretend, could not act, and thus he was more honest than the politicians.

His statesmanship was discontinuous, being an interesting avocation rather than a career. Of it little has been permanent. His General Staff soon lapsed into incompetence; if it had not, it might have been the danger to American national life that the German General Staff was to German national life. Recently it was merged with the high command. As Secretary of State he was not creative, Mr. Harding turning back to the solid ground of American international policy, rested upon John Hay's open door and Knox's dollar diplomacy. Root in foreign relations merely succeeded with the Senate where Hay had failed. Always the advocate, he takes other men's ideas, Hay's or Wilson's and justifies them or makes them practical. His New York constitution failed, being unjustly suspected. His world court has little better hope of acceptance, for Mr. Hughes is not a voluntary sharer of glory.

In spite of it all, some greatness remains, the impression of a powerful though limited intelligence. His career was to give us a moral. It is: if you have an adroit and energetic mind you will find public affairs uninteresting; except in their occasional phases. If you have such a mind and must enter politics, hide it; otherwise democracy will distrust you. Whatever you do, be dull.

HIRAM JOHNSON

Hiram Johnson would have enjoyed the French Revolution, if accident had made him radical at that time. He would have been stirred by the rising of the people; he would have given tongue to their grievances in a voice keyed to lash them to greater fury. He would have been excited by it as he never has been by the little risings of the masses which he has made vocal. In all the noisy early phases of it, he would have made the loudest noise. And he would have gone to the block when the real business of the revolution began with the fanatics at its helm.

In the Russian Revolution, he would have been a Kerensky; and he would have fled when the true believers in change arrived. He is the orator of emeutes, who is fascinated by a multitude in a passion.

Johnson is not a revolutionary. Not in the least, not any more than Henry Cabot Lodge is. But revolution has a fierce attraction for him. He once said to me, speaking bitterly during the campaign, of Mr. Harding's prospective election, "The war has set back the people for a generation. They have bowed to a hundred repressed acts. They have become slaves to the government. They are frightened at the excesses in Russia. They are docile; and they will not recover from being so for many years. The interests which control the Republican party will make the most of their docility. In the end, of course, there will be a revolution, but it will not come in my time."

That "it will not come in my time" was said in a tone of regret. It was not so much that the Senator wanted revolution. I do not believe he did. But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular resentment which would bring him to the front, with the excitement, the sense of power that would come from the response of the nation when his angry voice translated into words its elemental passion.

Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson's nostrils. Twice he has thoroughly enjoyed its intoxication.

His political life was blank paper when the tumult of popular indignation swept California at the time Francis J. Heney, who was prosecuting the San Francisco grafters, was shot in the court room. He had thought nothing politically, he had felt nothing politically. He had neither convictions, nor passions, nor morals, politically speaking. He grew up in soil which does not produce lofty standards. Something of the mining-camp spirit still hung over California, which had been settled by adventurers, forty-niners, gold seekers, men who had left the East to "make a new start" where there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for life which was untrammeled by Puritanism. San Francisco had its Barbary Coast and in every restaurant its private dining rooms for women. Johnson himself was sprung from a father who was a "railroad lawyer," the agent of privileges in procuring special favors, by methods once well known, from the state legislature. The atmosphere of his youth was not one to develop a sensitive conscience or a high conception of public morals.

Johnson at this time was a practicing attorney, not noted for the quality of his community service. The administration of San Francisco had been a scandal for years. Few cared. It was a "corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney charged with their prosecution.

Johnson then felt for the first time something he had never felt before--the stirring of the storm of angry popular feeling. It woke something in him, something that he did not know existed before--his instinct for the expression of public passion; his love of the platform with yelling multitudes in front of him.

He threw himself into the fray on the side of civic virtue. The disturbance to the complacency of San Francisco disturbed the complacency of the State, which had calmly endured misgovernment for many years. Misgovernment procured by the railroad, the public utility corporations, the other combinations of wealth, through their agents, and through the corrupt politicians. Johnson became the spokesman of public protest and the reform governor of the State.

After that came battling for the Lord at Armageddon--the most intoxicating experience in American political history, for a man of Johnson's temperament. It was a revolution, not in a government, but in a party. Bonds were loosed. Immense personal enlargement came to those who had known the ties of regularity. It was an hour of freedom, unbridled political passion, unrestrained political utterance. Docility did not exist. Vast crowds thrilled with new hopes yelled themselves hoarse over angry words.

Association with Roosevelt on the Progressive ticket lifted Johnson from a local to a national importance. The whole country was the audience which leaped at his words. It was a revolution in tittle, a taste, a sample of what the real thing would be, with its breaking of restraints, its making of the mob a perfect instrument to play upon, its unleashing of passion to which to give tongue. Johnson has felt its wild stimulation and like a man who has used drugs the habit is upon him.

Moreover, his one chance lies that way. I have said that he is, by accident, radical. Let us imagine a great outburst of popular passion for reaction. And suppose that Johnson was, when it arrived, a political blank, as he was when Heney was shot. Johnson would have raised his angry voice against radicalism, just as readily as for it.

The essential thing with him is popular passion, not a political philosophy. He has no political philosophy. He has no real convictions. He does not reason or think deeply. His mentality is slight. He is the voice of many; instinctively he gives tongue to what the many feel; that is all.

Suppose the strong-lunged Californian were a political blank, just reaching the national consciousness, when the reaction against Wilson began and when the public swung to conservatism.

You know those vast tin amplifiers employed in big convention halls, or in out-door meetings, to carry the voice of the speaker to the remotest depths of the audience; Johnson is a vast tin amplifier of the voice of the mass. When the people had become "docile" he would have thundered "docility" to the uttermost bounds of the universe, if he had not by earlier utterances been definitely placed on the side opposed to docility.

But he had been definitely placed in the battle of Armageddon. A thousand ennuies located him for all political time. No convictions hold him where he is in case there be profit in changing sides; other men habitually conservative would have the preference over him on the other side. In this sense he is accidently radical, accidently because he happened to emerge in politics at a radical moment. That takes into account only the mental background of his political position. There is an element that was not chance. Public passion is almost invariably radical, springing as it does from the resentment of inequality, and Johnson is the tongue of public passion.

Is he dangerous? He is, only if public passion becomes dangerous and only up to the point where the speakers of revolution pass from the stage and the doers of it rig up their chopping blocks. At present he furnishes the words, the ugly words, which men throw instead of stones at the objects of their hate. He is the safety valve of gathering passion. Men listen to him and feel that they have done something to vindicate their rights. They applaud him to shake the roof, and vote for Mr. Harding.

It is customary to speak of his magnetism over crowds. He has no magnetism in personal contact. He walks toward you as if he were about to deliver a blow, an impression that is strengthened by his square menacing figure. His voice is unpleasant. His smile is wry. He not unusually has a complaint to make against the public, against the press, against fate, against you personally. He is not interested in people, as Roosevelt was to so an amazing degree, and as magnetic persons usually are. He is cold, hard, and selfish. His quarrels are numerous, with the campaign managers of the Armageddon fight, with his own campaign manager of 1920, with the newspaper correspondents. He is habitually pessimistic, and pessimism and magnetism do not go together.

His complaint that the people were docile and would not recover their confidence and self-assertion in his time, was a bit of his inevitable gloom. His dark habit of thought hung over his campaign for the presidential nomination of 1920, preventing his making a real effort in many states, and lay in the way of his success. He has few friends, love having been left out of his make-up. I do not speak of family affection--but love in its larger implications. Those who surround him--clerks and secretaries--have the air of repressed, starving personalities.

That which gathers the crowds and sets them shouting is not his magnetism but the perfect expression of their passion. For them and for it he is a sounding board. His voice with its hard angry tone, its mechanical rise and fall, has the ring of a hundred guillotines in operation. Having little culture, unintellectual, he is primitive as the mass before him. He talks their language and an instinct all his own gives him an exact sense of their emotions.

And what he says leaves the impression of tremendous sincerity. His sincerity does not arise from reasoned convictions but from hatred; deep and abiding hatred.

Senator Borah once said, "The difference between Johnson and me is that I regard questions from the point of view of principles while he regards them from the point of view of personalities. When a man opposes me I do not become angry at him. On the next issue he may agree with me. When a man opposes Johnson he hates him. He feels that the opposition is directed personally against him, not against the policy that separates them."

Johnson's opponents are the elements of reaction, the malefactors of great wealth, the supporters of that social inequality which the crowd resents. They stood in his path in California. They made impossible his nomination at Chicago. When the bitter enders, during the treaty fight, planned to send him on a tour of the country, these monied men closed their pocketbooks, exclaiming to Senator Knox, "What do you mean to do? Advertise this man Johnson and make him the Republican candidate for President? Not with our money."

Only the raising of a fund by Senator McCormick and some of the old Progressives, gave him his chance to speak. He hates them and when he attacks them it is with all the force and sincerity of his soul. It is no mere question of hatred, such as Roosevelt would employ to dramatize and make personal the issues he was representing to the people; it is bitter, revengeful detestation. It makes Johnson the most sincere man before the country to-day. And that pessimistic strain in his nature causes the darkness of his diatribe to seem all the more true.

But he swallows for expediency as other men swallow their convictions for it, and wrath is the bitterer dose. During the 1920 campaign he trafficked with Senator Penrose, the representative of hated wealth, for support at Chicago, offering, it has not been disclosed what considerations, for his aid.

He was ready at that time to take back his speech advocating the government ownership of railroads, a gesture against "the interests," made at the bidding of Hearst, at the beck of whose agents he is prone to bestir himself.

It must be an irksome livery, that of Hearst, for he hates all service and overshadowing. Equally irksome is his service to regularity under the rod of the Republican party. But he bows to it, and supports Harding whom he hates. He bobs up like a Jack-in-the-box and makes his laudatory speech whenever the name of Roosevelt comes up, though in his heart he must reverence none too deeply that overshadowing personality.

He has no roots except in the mob and no hope except in its aroused resentment against inequality. Not being interested in individuals he has not that personal organization possessed by Roosevelt, with his army of correspondents, friends and idolators, in every hamlet.

And of course he has little hope of ever controlling his party organization. He is curiously alone.

"There are only three men in the world whom I trust," he once said to a friend. There is no reason to regard this as an exaggeration. His attitude toward his associates in the Senate is this: "If I were crossing a desert with any one of them and there was only one water bottle, I should insist upon carrying that bottle."

On such pessimism and distrust it is impossible to build political success. It can come only when his pessimism and distrust coincide with like pessimism and distrust in the masses. He waits the day, but gloomily, without confidence.

PHILANDER CHASE KNOX

"I like Knox and I admire him tremendously, but I will not ask him to be my Secretary of State. He is too indifferent."