contemporaneousness, the sustained leadership of each over scores of millions of people, and the fact that they sprang from a common political mood. It would be most misleading if carried further. To point out the differences of each from each, to contrast and compare them, is not called for at this point. That constitutes practically the whole political history of the period.

One is obliged to smile at the thought of how each of the three, and especially Roosevelt and Wilson, would have regarded being classified with the others. Roosevelt called Wilson a "Byzantine logothete," an epithet which, although literally meaningless when applied to Wilson, nevertheless, by the very reason of its mystical suggestion, called attention to what Roosevelt regarded as the extreme tenuity of substance in some of Wilson's writings and speeches. This was one of Roosevelt's characterizations of his great rival that the public got the benefit of; privately, Roosevelt's emotions toward Wilson were sometimes clothed in language less classic and less urbane, more "short and ugly." Wilson, on the other hand, carried out a policy of ignoring Roosevelt, because he thought that was the best way to meet, or avoid, the kind of public controversy Roosevelt frequently tried to force on him; to which reason of public policy there was the added motive that Wilson got personal satisfaction out of this course, since he shrewdly thought that to be silent, to have the air of gazing at the stars over Roosevelt's head, was the thing that would most exasperate a rival with the kind of temperament, and temper, that Roosevelt had.

Both Roosevelt and Wilson had less hotness of feeling toward Bryan than toward each other. Bryan, although he got more presidential nominations than either, and dominated his party for a longer period, must be classified apart from and a little below the others. A superior consciousness of that fact enabled the others to be more

amiably genial toward Bryan than they ever could be toward each other. Wilson once expressed the wish that Bryan might be "knocked into a cocked hat," but later made him secretary of state. The relations between Roosevelt and Bryan included much good-natured jibing about the proprietorship of issues. Bryan used to paint a satirical picture of Roosevelt stealing plank after plank of his platform until he had nothing to stand on, a picture which the cartoonists sometimes translated into Bryan reduced to the protection of a barrel while Roosevelt, grinning, ran off with his clothes.

Of the three, it was Bryan and Roosevelt who arose most directly out of the political and economic mood of America during the 1890's. As between Bryan and Roosevelt, Bryan was the first child of that mood.

BRYAN

The Heredity, Background, Education, Environment, and
Early Triumphs, and the Last Phase, of a Born Orator.

In this history there will be many contrasts some of them sensational, considering the shortness of the span. One of the most appealing consists of two newspaper despatches by correspondents who wrote of the same man, in the same setting but in scenes a generation apart. In January, 1924, a Washington correspondent, Clinton W. Gilbert, picturing a meeting of the Democratic national committee, wrote of William Jennings Bryan that "most of the time he was wandering about the lobby of the hotel, attracting no attention"; that at the sessions he was merely "a spectator pressed against the back wall of the meeting-room, wedged between a fat woman and a cub reporter." This correspondent made a cutting comparison: "The committee went in a body to pay its respects to Woodrow Wilson,' but it did not even ask Mr. Bryan to make a speech or have a chair." This account of Bryan at the 1924 meeting of the Democratic national committee did not leave to the reader, or to Mr. Bryan, any leeway to assume that the ignoring of him might be due to political reasons, to the fact that the committee had departed from his leadership and wanted to emphasize the separation. No such comforting assumption was left to the imagination. The situation was made cruelly clear: "Bryan is not ignored by design; he is ignored because he no longer counts." Most poignant of all, this

1 This visit, in January, 1924, was, as it happens, the last that Mr. Wilson received from any group. Within less than three weeks he was dead.