THEIR TREATMENT OF VISITORS

In nothing is Roosevelt more sharply contrasted with the rival candidates than in treatment of the visitor. President Taft and Wilson pay attention to a caller; they listen, listen patiently even to the fool, the babbler, and the bore. Roosevelt never listened to anybody in his life. I have never witnessed anything funnier than the vain efforts to speak made by men whom T. R. had sent for for information, but who came only to be drowned under the spout of his vociferation, and dismissed without having had a chance to finish a sentence.

It is said that Mr.Taft has moods in which he allows himself to be irritated by petty things. If this be true, it is no more than might be said of a great many men habitually occupied with big things. The little things must be made smooth for them or there is trouble. Wilson still occupies himself too much with little things that he could better trust to others, but he never allows himself to be perceptibly annoyed. Roosevelt gets shockingly angry with offenders or those whom he regards as offenders

but never about petty things. Indeed, nothing is petty when it has attracted Mr. Roosevelt's attention. It is instantly a crime against high Heaven; it is infamous; it is treasonable; the culprit is no common misdemeanant, he is a vicious malefactor, a debauched knave, a desperate demagogue, and a witless fool; he has violated every principle of decency; he is a fellow marked by utter absence of morality, sodden lack of conscience, low servility to greed.

Mr. Roosevelt miscalls people to their faces. He arraigns them as if they were before the judgment seat of the Almighty. I have heard him tell the managing editor of a newspaper which had printed editorials criticizing the Administration policy that he was an impious craven who ought to have the sense to believe, even if he could not understand, that the President was an agent of Providence whose will it was wicked to try to thwart and dastardly even to question. I have heard him berate a Congressman who had signed a report displeasing to him in language like this:

"This is a clear case of violent conspiracy! It is a most outrageous act a cowardly and outrageous act! You have put a stain on the flag! You have done America a wrong which it will take years to wipe out." And so on.

That affair came up in Congress on an inquiry by John Sharp Williams as to whether the President had not violated Section 6 of Article I of the Constitution, which provides that no Representative of the people shall be called upon to account in any other place for his utterance in Congress a provision, Mr. Williams said, that had been inserted because it had been the habit of George III of England to call to the Palace members of Parliament and berate them for their votes. In response to Mr. Williams's inquiry, the abused member arose and said that it was true that "the President had intimated that the report might have been worded in a happier manner!"

This is the way in which for years T. R. has been allowed "to get away with it."

President Taft would have made fun of his caller and got in a few serious, telling words. Mr. Wilson (the "offense" being clearly a debatable one) would have reasoned sympathetically with the visitor and won him over. That is what he did, over and over, at Trenton with members of the legislature. They began by opposing bitterly everything he proposed and denouncing him as a kid-glove interloper who would soon be sent about his business, and they ended by voting through his measures almost unanimously and asking for more. Brief as has been Governor Wilson's official life, there is no record in

our politics of a leader who has won over more of his enemies. The man who made at Baltimore the speech putting him in nomination was the man who a little more than a year before had nominated Wilson's chief opponent for the New Jersey Governorship. The instance is merely typical. It has been a wonderful sight at Sea Girt recently to see the procession of famous Democratic leaders from all parts of the country come along to make their sullen submission to the "new boss," and to observe how, after a handshake and ten minutes' talk, they run over each other in cheerful haste to pass under the yoke.

THEIR APTITUDE FOR PUBLICITY There is a constitutional difference in the way in which the three men regard the business of publicity. Mr. Roosevelt has had a more vivid and constant sense of the value of the advertising man than any other American has ever had; he has played to the press more continuously and more adroitly than any other public man we have ever had.

Mr. Wilson appreciates the importance of publicity; he is hospitable to newspaper men, always accessible by them and frank with them; but he has not yet acquired any skill in using them. He is still singularly innocent as to the possibilities of getting “good stuff" into the papers. It has been very hard work for his secretaries even to get advance copies of his speeches; and, since the nomination, dozens of "stories" which Roosevelt would have recognized as good for "front-page display" have failed to reach the ears of the eager reporters. There are a score of bright fellows encamped around the telegraph office by the side of the Little White House at Sea Girt this summer, and one of the Governor's secretaries is especially charged with the duty of looking after them; they have easily persuaded Mr. Wilson to give them a quarter of an hour every morning and afternoon. But it is only by tiresome watchfulness that the press secretary can get hold of the striking incidents of the busy days, and it is only by questions that the Governor can be brought to tell the most important news to the group ready to seize any picturesque

item and to turn it into a big story to transfix the attention of the country tomorrow morning. They are all his admirers, but the newspaper boys often yearn for the good old days at Oyster Bay, when the keenest newspaper artist in the profession seldom let a day go by without handing out a "scare-head" about himself. It was interesting to observe the demeanor of the Wilsons under the unaccustomed trials to which the reporters and photographers are subjecting them. They have faced more serious trials together, and they submit to this one as a family united in resignation. On the part of the young ladies there may have been perhaps a little pleasurable excitement in getting into a motor-car while the motion-picture camera looked on, but they were all very self-conscious and guiltily suspectful that they were making guys of themselves. T. R. always has one eye on the camera brigade and is unhappy if it is not on hand; he will postpone a gesture any time until the last photographer gets his diaphragm. adjusted.

Mr. Taft not only lacks the instinct for publicity, but he has a contempt for it. I have heard him explain, "I don't want any forced or manufactured sentiment in my favor." It was in the White House and a visitor was urging a campaign of press education, saying that all the country needed to bring it to the President's side was a better knowledge of his ideas and his aims; that Mr. Taft had only to open the sluices a little and to let out a few facts, and his opponents would be silenced.

"I simply can't do that sort of thing,' the President replied. "That isn't my method. I must wait for time and the result of my labors to vindicate me naturally. I have a profound faith in the people. Their final judgment will be right." But Mr. Taft will do nothing to help the people to come to a judgment. If he is misjudged, he has himself to blame for it. No public man can afford to neglect the press. Mr. Taft easily accords opportunity for long and frank conversation with reputable writers who ask for it, but he invites nobody, and never makes an occasion.

And yet Mr. Taft is the only one of the

three who has ever been in newspaper work. As a young man he was court reporter on the Cincinnati Times and later on the Commercial.

THREE MOODS OF SELF-REVELATION

This article is intentionally a mere collection of personal impressions; it is confessedly subjective. I am going, in conclusion, to set down here recollections of three evenings, one with each of the rivals, and perhaps the most agreeable hours I ever spent with them. They are not to be described in detail, but of the general spirit of each occasion I may speak:

The first was with Mr. Roosevelt, soon after the close of his Presidential term and near the end of the voyage on the Hamburg, when he was enjoying his first opportunity in many years for rest and retrospect. The ship had passed Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean; we were steaming, toward sunset, along the coast of Spain. I joined Mr. Roosevelt for a walk on deck. We gazed together at the purple headlands, overhung by the glittering snow-peaks of - the Sierra Nevada. Mr. Roosevelt's spirits rose in sober elevation as he gazed at the land which had been the theatre of the long struggle between Moor and Christian, and turned from that to look down at the sea fabled since earliest history began. He talked of the Hellenic adventurers who had sailed out to the Pillars of Hercules; of the ghostly fleets of successive generations that had glimpsed the splendid panorama of the shores galleys of Phoenicians, transports of Iberians going to the Punic wars down to the magnificent modern armadas whose prows had cut the indigo

waters.

It was a delightful hour, for Mr. Roosevelt has a vivid martial and romantic imagination. But his talk was all of expeditions of war, descents on the coast, burning cities, pirates, heroic forays, actions at sea. This I will say, that he had to be reminded that the biggest fleet that ever sailed these waters - a fleet at the sight of which Jason would have swooned, and Villeneuve stared, and Nelson been confounded had been there by his own orders. I reminded Mr. Roosevelt of that,

and he stopped in his walk and looked out over the rail and back again and broke into a grin and a chuckle and exclaimed: "By George, that was me, wasn't it!" And then he woke to real enthusiasm and told with uplifted fist and flashing eye what that fleet would have done if it had ever had a chance, by George!

The second was a late autumn afternoon at Beverly-by-the-Sea. It was on the eve of the long tour of the country which President Taft made last year. By hard labor, Mr. Taft had got ahead of his work (a thing most unusual for him, it may be said) and had an hour or two for rest. He used it sitting before the dying log in his study and meditating out loud on the subject that really lies near his heart: the prospect of international peace.

I was the only listener. For an hour the President soliloquized. It would have startled conservative patriots could they have heard him. There was no length to which the head of the nation was unwilling to go to avoid bloody conflict, no length, I mean, in the direction of substituting arbitration for war. There was no scorn which the tongue of man can utter that he did not pour out upon the savage, childish folly of standing men up to shoot at each other because the governors of their countries have been unable to agree.

That is all: Mr. Taft's thoughts, in his evening hour, turned to peace. With a heat of conviction of which those who do not know him would not have believed him capable, hurling his defiance into the face of the hollow popular sentiment that passes for patriotism, Mr. Taft talked of peace. Mr. Roosevelt, on another evening, watching the sun go down, had babbled of battles.

The third scene was an evening with Woodrow Wilson at the cottage at Sea Girt. There had been high sport at dinner on the broad trellised piazza, and Mrs. Wilson and her eldest daughter had been laughingly bundled into the motor-car for an evening's entertainment at Spring Lake, a mile or two up the coast. Somehow a different mood fell as we who were left sat down in the gathering twilight in the big

hall. There had been a disputed quotation at dinner, and Miss Jessie Wilson had slipped away and brought back the volume in order to verify it. It lay on the table now, an anthology of verse not Palgrave's nor any that I knowand Mr. Wilson took it up and fingered it lovingly. The other daughter, Miss Eleanor, went over and perched on the arm of his chair, and in a moment he was reading bits of poetry, and soon we were all swapping our favorites. Everybody's Everybody's favorites, I suppose they were - "Tintern Abbey," "The Ode to a Grecian Urn," and the rest, favor passing gradually toward songs of heroism like Matthew Arnold's "Let the Long Contention Cease," Arthur Clough's "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth," and Edmund Sill's "Opportunity." That, by the way, Mr. Wilson confessed one of his prime favorites; so let it be set down here for that reason and to point the contrast that will appear in a moment. Sill's verses run:

Master of human destinies am I.

Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait;
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and passing by
Hovel, the mart, and palace, soon or late
I knock unbidden once at every gate.
If sleeping, wake if feasting, rise before
I turn away. It is the hour of fate,
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe
Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury, and woe,
Seek me in vain and uselessly implore.
I answer not, and I return no more.

I submit that the difference in the moral as well as in the artistic elevation of these two ideas of Opportunity is significant of the contrasting nature of the men to whom they respectively appeal.

But Mr. Wilson did not read his real favorite until the evening was gone and bed-time had come. Then, his daughters conspiring, a volume of Wordsworth was produced, and we listened to "The Character of the Happy Warrior." Being well past the years of sentiment, I yet admit that I have seldom been so moved as I was at the noble words as they were read that night. That the reader felt any emotion would have been imperceptible to a stranger, so controlled was his voice and his look. It was the recital, by a great soul, of words well approved of the great souls of the generations since they first were written a description of the character of the true knight. It was impossible not to feel that it was a description, in some particulars peculiarly apt and intimate, of the character of the reader

a revelation of himself truer than any he could otherwise possibly ever have given. The poem is too long to set down here, but here is a little of it:

Who is the happy warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
. . 'Tis he
Whose powers shed round him in the common
strife

Or mild concerns of ordinary life
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has
joined

Great issues, good or bad for human kind,

Twenty, or even ten years ago, a man of his type did not receive consideration for any important political office and, if he dared to enter the political field, public opinion would have been very quick to send the schoolmaster back to his books. Some of that feeling still prevails, of course, but it is not dominant as it was then. The insurgent movement started in the Western Universities and the widespread influence of certain of them, especially of the University of Wisconsin, cannot be questioned. The excellent work of Professor MacCarthy and his reference bureau has met general approval and has found many imitators. In 1911 Professor Merriam was nominated and almost elected mayor of Chicago. By 1910 a University man could be elected Governor of a great state and in 1912 nominated for the Presidency by a great party.

College men could hardly put forward one of their numbers better fitted for political office. Woodrow Wilson has not only thoroughly studied the theory of

statesmanship, he has proved as Governor that he was also up to the practice. As Governor he has accomplished a great deal, realizing in his executive capacity many things that he has advocated in his writings. He had always said that in legislation, as in administration, the Governor or the President should be the real leader of his party and he showed in New Jersey that this was possible.

And I think that if, on certain questions, the initiative and the referendum for instance, he has changed his mind there is absolutely no reason to question his sincerity. Simply the practice of politics made it clear to him, that to get what they want, the people need new weapons and that the election of good executives is not enough. Instead of standing pat he confessed frankly that he had been mistaken. In doing so he did what in England Robert Peel did on the free trade, and Gladstone on the home rule issue, and in France, what Thiers did on the question of the form of government. At the times of their acts these statesmen were called demagogues, but their fame was not endangered by such arraignments and we think that Governor Wilson's memory will share the same fate.

He is of course in no way a demagogue. He is not even a radical, he is only a pro