They concentrated their entire equipment and abilities on a single model - and that was a fundamental step in developing the theory and practice of quantity production. For the first time in automobile history, parts were ordered in thousand lots: 2000 sets of transmissiongears from Dodge Brothers; 2000 motors from Leland and Faulkner. They sold the car first for $600; then for $650. The first year, they made 400 machines; the second, 1600; the third, 4000. The capitalization of the firm was $350,000, but $200,000 was all the cash that ever went into the company. The first two years they paid out 105 per cent in cash dividends. That was the indisputable demonstration that the automobile could be more than a rich man's toy. This event, in the in the year 1900, was the birth of the automobile as a commercial reality.

The innovation of "mass production," "quantity production," "repetitive processes," as it is variously called, was the beginning of the second stage of the automobile, the stage of diffusion, which made it available to all. Mass production was accompanied by a new and enormously expanded development of advertising and marketing. Both mass production and advertising became fundamentally important American institutions, not only as respects the automobile but in the widest sense. They will be discussed in a future volume, as will also the later stages of the automobile, its progress from novelty to ubiquity, and the revolutionary material and social effects that accompanied it.

A Fine American and a Fine Achievement. Beginning of the "Open-Door" Policy in China, Whereby John Hay Saves China from Dismemberment. First Civil Governments for Our New Dependencies. First Organized Automobile Race. Havana Has Its Last Epidemic of Yellow Fever. Beginnings of the Direct Election of Senators. First Use of the Direct Primary. Invention and First Use of the Commission Form of City Government. New York Starts Its First Subway. First Pacific Cable. Faint Beginning of the Radio. Beginning of the “B'gosh" School of Fiction, "David Harum," "Eben Holden." First Horseless Bus on Fifth Avenue, New York. Beginning of the "Hall of Fame." Death of Maud S. Congress Rejects a Polygamist. Gold Standard Adopted. Kentucky's Governor Assassinated. Confederate Veterans Meet at Louisville. Protest Against Continued Use of Word "Rebel." Chicago Drainage Canal Opened. New Records in North Polar Exploration, Steamships, Tall Buildings, Speed. Popular Books and Plays 1900.

IN 1900 the foreign relations of the United States were in the hands of a man whose whole life had been a preparation, one of the finest American personalities of his generation. John Hay had been born in a Middle-West (then far-West) frontier one-story brick house, of pioneer but educated parents (his father was a physician and local editor, his mother the daughter of a graduate of Brown University), who supplied his early intellectual curiosity with opportunities to learn German, Latin, and Greek. The boy was sensitive to beauty in words, to the scenes of his home on the banks of the Mississippi, and to the racy Americanism that surrounded the village. When

its name was changed from "Spunky Point" to Warsaw (as an incident of the vogue of Jane Porter's romantic novel "Thaddeus of Warsaw"), Hay railed at the stilted affectation, and hoped that "every man engaged in the outrage is called Smith in Heaven." He went to Brown University, loved it, and not only got, but knew he was getting, and therefore appreciated, the wider horizons of life to which education introduced him. He wrote poems after the model of Poe (who to the 1850's was what Kipling was to the 1890's), and was made class poet; then, leaving a trail of bright affection behind him, returned to Illinois to study law and look forward to corner-lots and tax-titles"; suffered the pains of an artist in an arid environment and wrote to literary friends he had made in New England about "a cool rest under the violets," but was shortly sending notes in French inviting the girls to picnics, dances, and church sociables. At Springfield, Illinois, he foregathered with a cultivated editor of Bavarian birth, John Nicolay, and worked in a law office next door to a long-legged, ungainly, homely character whom people had begun to call "Honest Abe." Lincoln, elected President, made Nicolay his secretary, and Nicolay asked if he couldn't take Hay along as assistant. Lincoln drawled something about not taking all Illinois to Washington, but consented. Both young men lived in hourly intimacy with Lincoln, listened to the wisdom of his dealing with public men, and to his humor when he would come into their bedroom in his nightshirt to read them something in Shakespeare, or the latest newspaper instalment of "Petroleum V. Nasby," the Civil War predecessor of "Mr. Dooley" and Will Rogers. Hay appreciated Lincoln, had the insight and

1This passage is from a letter written by Hay reproduced in William Roscoe Thayer's "Life of John Hay." Some of the other quotations in this chapter and much of the material are from the same source.

E

flexibility to get the full benefit of one of the greatest educational opportunities ever presented to any young man. By close association with immense responsibility he added something extremely important to his scholarship - grew to value deeds, as his instinct and training had taught him to value words. Lincoln came to trust him for tasks requiring tact, discretion, taste, human understanding.

After Lincoln's death, Hay served as secretary of legation at Paris, as chargé d'affaires at Vienna, as secretary at Madrid. He learned the good manners of diplomacy - and also how to avoid being fooled by its more devious ways; learned the varying equations between what men say and what they really think; learned to appraise kings, added shrewdness and common sense to his qualities of imagination. Between intervals of his diplomatic service he wrote short stories and articles for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly; went back to the river slang of his boyhood for the Pike County ballads that gave him his literary fame, "Little Breeches," and the one about "Jim Bludso," who would

Hold her nozzle agin the bank,
'Til the last galoot's ashore.

(Hay came later to feel about that poem as General
Sherman felt about "Marching Through Georgia.") He
increased his understanding of people by looking lecture
audiences in the face, wrote "brevier" (that is, editorials)
for the New York Tribune under Whitelaw Reid, mar-
ried the daughter of a wealthy Cleveland banker, and
settled down to literary work. His "Breadwinners," pub-
lished anonymously in 1883, was the novel of the year
as a serial it was the largest success ever published in
America up to that time. His biographer's epitome, "the
first important polemic in American fiction in defense of

property," is misleading, because Hay's imagination and sympathetic insight were for the common man, but his sense of taste loved order, and his mind was revolted by lack of intelligence he was shocked by the stupid, reckless rioting in which some early labor movements expressed themselves. In the early nineties he ended ten years of collaboration on Nicolay and Hay's “Life of Lincoln," and went to live in Washington as a leisurely observer and as the companion of public men, American and foreign. Henry Cabot Lodge named Hay first in a very short list of the best talkers he ever met.

Hay's wide-ranging mind and gift of companionship carried him to acquaintance with everybody of importance in America, and most of those in Europe. The rarer spirits, men like William Dean Howells and Henry Adams, he more than knew; with them he had kinship. He became cosmopolitan without ceasing to prize America, versatile without ceasing to be scholarly. McKinley made him ambassador to England in 1897 and secretary of state in 1898.

On January 2, 1900, Hay announced to the Cabinet that he had completed negotiations for the "open door in China. The negotiations consisted of securing assurances from the various Powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and Italy, who then had or looked to acquiring interests in China, that in whatever influence they might exercise over China or any part of it, the treaty rights of the United States, and of all other nations, with China, would be respected; that neither our citizens and commerce, nor those of any other nation, would be placed at a disadvantage by any discriminating tariff laws or other conditions.

1

The "open-door" policy in China was an American idea. It was set up in contrast to the "spheres-of-influ