I take it that behind these footlights which we call Washington, just as behind the literal footlights, the actors, if there is to be any lifting of us up, must play a part with which we can identify ourselves in our imagination. He must be articulate. He must get across. Mr. Harding does it admirably. You watch him and you realize that he is the oldest of stage heroes, Everyman. You say to yourself unconsciously, "Only the accident of seven million majority separates him from me." You are lifted up. Ordinary flesh and blood can do this great thing.

Based on this desire to identify ourselves with greatness is our familiar aphorism, "The office makes the man." All that is necessary is the office to "make" the least of us.

Roosevelt played the part even better than Mr. Harding, "an ordinary man raised to the nth power." He strutted to fill the eye. He was the consummation of articulateness. The point is that self-government must be dramatic or it does not carry along the self-governors.

Of course one must not overlook the fact that "the great silent man" is a consolation to common inarticulateness and ineffectiveness, the general belief that where there is a slow tongue profundity is found being one of those pleasant things which we like to think about ourselves—"we could and we would." But after all there is a sense of pity about our kind attribution of hidden power to dullness. We are half aware that we are compensating.

Anyway, even if the great business man is at home upon the stage, which Mr. Mellon is not, the calling of him to office interrupts the drama of self-government. We admit our failure and call in the gods from another world. It is as I have said a staged receivership. We can not identify ourselves with the hero. We are poor worms, not millionaires. We might have the seven million majority but we could not also stand upon a pile of seven million gold dollars. Government ceases to be human. It becomes superhuman. And self-government must be human.

Of course, I exaggerate. Mr. Mellon coming from that other world is not wholly without his human relations. I have alluded to his symbolizing the wish-fulfilment of the inarticulate, and the inarticulate are many. He does more. He fits admirably into what Mr. Walter Lippmann has called in his new book one of our popular stereotypes. We demand a conflict between reality and the stage. We like to see the masks pulled off our actors. One of our best received traditions is that a man who has a fight with the politicians has performed a great service. We like to see our strutters strut in a little fear of us.

But Secretary Mellon's defeat of Representative Fordney, Senator Elkins, and Elmer Dover in their efforts to fill his department with politicians was not so much a sign of power as a measure of the difference between Mr. Mellon's world and theirs.

Mr. Mellon comes into the Treasury from his bank. All he knows is banking, not politics. If he went from the Mellon Bank to the National City Bank of New York he would not discharge all the National City Bank employees and bring in a lot of men who had never seen the inside of a bank before, whom he did not know, who didn't speak the same language that he did. It is only in politics that one finds such perfect faith in man as man.

He goes to one young Democrat in the Department—this actually happened—and he says, "Young man, I like your work. I want you to stay with me," "Ah, but, Mr. Mellon, I can't," plead this Democrat, "You really can't do things that way. It is not done. You will have all the Republican politicians about your ears."

But it was not a sense of power in Mr. Mellon that made him thus defy the conventions. It was merely the instinct of self-protection. He could not live in the atmosphere of politics. He had to do things as he always had done them. The Gods coming down from high Olympus among the sons and daughters of men were probably never as much at ease as the Greeks made them out to be.

With his millions behind him Mr. Mellon was a solid object in his conflict with the politicians. Without them one does not know what would have happened between him and Mr. Fordney, Mr. Elkins, and Mr. Dover.

What is a good Secretary of the Treasury? We have a stereotype about that, too, one slowly and painfully formed. A good Secretary of the Treasury is one who has seen the inside of a bank, who has read the books on finance and knows the rules. Originally our Secretaries of the Treasury were amateurs, like our generals who beat ploughshares into swords. When one got into trouble, he boarded the Congressional Limited for New York and saw Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan came out of his bank holding the safety of the nation in his hands, exhibiting it to reporters who wrote all about it, assuring the public.

At length it was decided to keep the safety of the nation at Washington. And our Secretaries of the Treasury tended to become professional. The young men who tell us whether we have a good Secretary of the Treasury or not are the financial writers of the newspapers. The Secretary acts. The young men look in the books and see that he has conformed to the rules. When he has he leaves nothing to be desired as Secretary.

Mr. Mellon's relation to Alexander Hamilton is the same as Marshal Foch's relation to Napoleon; one knew war from his own head, the other knows it from the teachers. Mr. Mellon's administration is not inspired. In the greatest financial crisis in our history he has no constructive suggestion to make. You would hardly know that Secretary Houston was gone and Mr. Mellon had come. And there is an explanation for this continuity, beside that of the rule books. The hard work of the Department has been done under both administrations by Assistant Secretary S. P. Gilbert, for Mr. Mellon has the successful man's habit of leaning heavily upon an able and industrious subordinate. Mr. Gilbert is an ambitious young lawyer who has mastered the books and who works 18 hours a day. The voice is the voice of Mellon but the hand is the hand of Gilbert.

I have analyzed Mr. Mellon at Washington although only a small fraction of his career is involved and although he operates in the difficult circumstances of an unknown and unfavorable environment. But he is perceptible in Washington, he does appear before Congressional Committees and at newspaper conferences. You can study the Gilberts who surround him. You can estimate the prepossessions that enter into our judgment of him. You can measure him against the standard of public life.

In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged about with the secrecy of business. He is to be seen only through the golden aura of a great fortune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, the product of forces and personalities which can only be guessed at.

He was the son of a banker and inherited a considerable fortune. He operated in a city which expanded fabulously in the course of his lifetime. If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a brother who has that force of personality which we usually associate with fitness for life. His bank was the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the pioneer demigods, who could make the business reputations of men who proved adaptable to his uses.

Thus into the result there enters the power of Frick, the thrust upward of Pittsburg, an industrial volcano, the associated personality of the other Mellon. You have to give a name to all this combination of favoring circumstances and favoring personalities and names are usually given arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew W. Mellon. But how much of it is Andrew W. Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how much of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an electorate seeking a business man for office can not stop to inquire and can not learn if it does inquire.

If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to office they do not enlist in the public service the combination of persons and forces which is known by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, measured by his great fortune, perhaps they get him after he has spent his force or after his head is turned by success, or at any rate they put him into an unfamiliar milieu and subject him to that corrupting temptation, the desire for a second term or for a higher office.

And to go back to what I have said before, they make self-government go into bankruptcy and ask for a receiver.

The great business-man President is just a romantic development of the great business-man illusion.

CHAPTER VII

That is to say, the same considerations that rule in the selection of Senators rule in their selection. They were recruited from the class from which Senators are recruited. I can not say the mental level of the Cabinet is above that of the Senate. Take out of the upper house its two strongest members, its two weakest, and half a dozen of the average sort, and you construct a body in every way equal to the Cabinet of Mr. Harding in intelligence and public morals.

Most of them, never having been members of the upper house, have not suffered from the depreciation in the public eye which attends service in the legislative branch. They come rather from the wonderful business world.

There are, moreover, few of them compared to Senators. Smallness of numbers suggests careful selection, superior qualifications.

And the secrecy of Cabinet meetings makes them impressive. If reporters were present, the public would realize that the Cabinet as a Cabinet was mostly occupied with little things.

The records prove it.

The biweekly meetings of the Cabinet are commonly followed by the announcement: "The Cabinet had a short session today. Nothing of importance was discussed"; or, "Details of administration were discussed." Now, of course, reasons of state may occasionally restrain the disclosure of what actually was the subject before the Cabinet. Yet Mr. Harding's administration has been in office more than a year, and how many important policies has it adopted? How much wisdom has emerged from the biweekly meetings?

Sample announcements of the Cabinet meetings run like this: "The Cabinet listened to the Postmaster General, explaining how much it would facilitate the handling of the mails if people would distribute the mailing of their letters throughout the day, instead of keeping most of them to mail late in the afternoon when they are leaving their offices. The Postmaster General pointed out that the government departments were offenders in this respect." Useful; but why should the whole nation worry about who advises with the President over the inveterate bad habits of the people as letter writers?

Or this: "The Cabinet spent an hour and a half today discussing what to do with the property left in the government's hands by the war. There are millions of dollars' worth of such property." A mere detail of administration, but it came before the Cabinet as a whole because more than one department was left in control of the property.

Moreover, you may estimate the importance of cabinets from the fact that, after all, every administration takes its color from the President. Mr. Wilson's administration was precisely Mr. Wilson. Mr. Harding's is precisely Mr. Harding.

Listen to the experience of a Cabinet adviser. One of the most important Secretaries was explaining to some friends a critical situation. "But," interjected one of the listeners, "does President Harding understand that?" "The President," replied the Secretary, "never has time really to understand anything."

And remember how Secretary Hughes told the President that the Four Power Pact covered with its guarantees the home islands of Japan, and how a couple of days later Mr. Harding informed the press that it did not cover the home islands of Japan; when it transpired that the information of Mr. Hughes on this point had effected no lodgement in the President's mind.

The Presidential mind; that is the bottle neck through which everything has to pass.

Suppose we had today the greatest statesman that this country has ever produced as Secretary of State. Let us say Alexander Hamilton, for example. What could Alexander Hamilton do as the head of Mr. Harding's Cabinet? We shall assume that Alexander Hamilton had the mind to grasp the problem of this country's relations to the world and of its interest in the world's recovery from the havoc and the hatreds of the war, and the constructive imagination to reach a solution of it. What could Alexander Hamilton do? His avenue of approach to world problems would be Mr. Harding. All that was in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State, would have to pass through the mind of Warren G. Harding, President, before it would become effective.

The passage through would be blocked by many obstacles, for Mr. Harding has a perfectly conventional mind; that is why he is President. One of the pictures in Mr. Harding's head is the mechanistic, the God's Time picture. "Things left to themselves will somehow come out all right." Another is the racial inferiority complex. "Man is inadequate to attempt control of his own destiny. There are the forces to be considered." A third is the great business-man illusion. Mr. Morgan going abroad to consider reparations may accomplish the wonders which mere statesmen can not. All these induce avoidance of responsibility, and Mr. Harding has the human liking for avoiding responsibility. Pressed by Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Harding would say: "But I can not move the Senate." Pressed further, he would say: "There is Public Opinion. We shall lose the election if we become involved in European affairs. You and I know those Allied war debts are worthless, but how can we make the people realize that they are worthless?"

Like the rest of us, Mr. Harding perhaps has none of these pictures so firmly in his head as before the war; but the damage to the pictures only makes him more vacillating. I am assuming in all this that Mr. Hamilton has a free mind, which he had, relatively, when he operated a century and a half ago. At that time he had not to think much of Public Opinion or of parties. And the mechanistic theory of Progress, that things come out all right with the least possible human intervention or only the intervention of the business man, had not then assumed its present importance.

"Mind," says a nameless writer in the London Nation, "is incorrigibly creative." It has created so many vast illusions like those above in the last century and a half that like the American spirit in Kipling's poem:

Where our actual Secretary's mind falls short of our supposititious Secretary's mind is in the valuable quality of common sense. I am even prepared to maintain that as a measure of reality Mr. Hughes's mind is distinctly inferior to Mr. Harding's, which is one reason why he never did become President and Mr. Harding did. I can not better explain what I mean than on the basis of this quotation from a recent book of Mr. Orage, the British critic:

"Common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion and all the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality."

Mr. Hughes has only one criterion of reality, his mind, which has been developed at the expense of all his other means of approach to the truth. He lives in a region of facts, principles, and logical deductions. He does not sense anything. And only men who sense reality have common sense. For Mr. Hughes facts are solid; you can make two nice, orderly little piles of them and build a logical bridge over the interval between them. A true statesman builds a bridge resting on nothing palpable, and nevertheless he crosses over it.

Mr. Hughes's mind operates in a region of perfect demonstration; he even demonstrates things to himself. A true statesman never succeeds in demonstrating anything to himself; he uses demonstration only in dealing with others. Yet he arrives in other than logical ways at a sureness for himself which is never Mr. Hughes's. For the Secretary of State statesmanship is an intellectual exercise, for the true statesman it is the exercise of a dozen other faculties. An extraordinary but limited mind, Mr. Hughes impresses us as the boy lightning calculator does, and leaves us unsatisfied.

Take Mr. Hughes's handling of Mexican relations as an example of what I have called statesmanship made a purely intellectual exercise. The practical result which was to be desired when Mr. Hughes took office was stability and order in Mexico, the safety of American property there, and a restoration of diplomatic intercourse.

Mr. Hughes does not seek to obtain these results. Instead he works out the following problem: a + b = c, in which a is the fact that Carranza had issued a decree making possible the confiscation of American property in Mexico, b is the principle of international law that at the basis of relations between peoples must be safety of alien property, and c is a note to Mexico.

Mr. Hughes was excited over the perfection of this intellectual operation. He read his note with all the jubilance of the Greek philosopher who, having discovered an important principle of physics, exclaimed: "Eureka." Mr. Hughes's Eureka is always a piece of paper. He is a lawyer whose triumphs are briefs and contracts.

Now the facts were not merely that Carranza had made an offensive gesture, issuing the famous decree; but that Mexico had not confiscated American property and lived in such fear of her strong neighbor that she was never likely to do so, that the Mexican supreme court had ruled confiscation to be illegal, that the Obregon government was as stable and as good a government as Mexico was likely to have, and that it was to our interest to support it morally rather than encourage further revolution there. They all pointed to recognition.

The validity of the piece of paper that Mr. Hughes demanded of Obregon would rest upon international law. But so did the validity of our right to have our property in Mexico respected. We should not be in any stronger legal position to intervene in Mexico if she violated the contract Mr. Hughes wanted, than if she violated our property rights there unfortified by such a piece of paper. Both rested on one and the same law.

Furthermore, Mexico being weak and sensitive, an arbitrary demand that she "take the pledge," such as Mr. Hughes made, was sure to offend her pride, and delay the consummation everyone wished—stability across the border and a restoration of good relations. Yet Mr. Hughes was immensely satisfied with his intellectual exercise a + b = c, c being not a solution of the Mexican problem, which at this writing is still afar off, but a piece of paper, a note to Mexico. The sheer logical triumph of the deduction of c from a and b is to Mr. Hughes an end in itself.

Now, of course, it is not wholly overdevelopment of mind at the expense of the other criteria of reality which leads Mr. Hughes to vain exercises like a + b = c. He has what a recent writer has described as "an inflamed legal sense." He has, moreover, by an association of ideas all his own oddly transferred to law that sacredness with which he was brought up to regard the Bible. "Sanctity of contracts," is his favorite phrase, the word "sanctity" being highly significant. He has, besides, Mr. Harding over him, and the Senate to reckon with. And in the case of Mexico he has as a fellow Cabinet member, Mr. Fall, the picture in whose head is of a "white man" teaching a "greaser" to respect him. He has to think of winning elections, of his own political ambitions. All these inhibitory influences which generally produce negation do not estop Mr. Hughes. His mind is too vigorous for that. It pursues its way energetically to results, such as a + b = c.

Now, of course, the handling of Mexican relations is not Mr. Hughes's major achievement. But even his major achievement, the Washington conference with its resultant nine pieces of paper, was more or less a lawyer's plea in avoidance.

The major problem which confronted Mr. Hughes was this: The Great War had been followed, as Mr. H. G. Wells aptly says, by the Petty Peace. It was threatening, and still threatens, to flame up again. The problem of a real peace confronted Mr. Hughes, because Mr. Wilson had sought to establish one and failed, and had thus set a certain standard of effort for his successor. Moreover, Mr. Hughes had said that every man, woman, and child in the United States was vitally interested in the economic recovery of Europe.

Mr. Hughes had either to face this task or divert the mind of the court to some other issue. He chose to find his a + b = c elsewhere. The problem of establishing peace where there was war was difficult; perhaps it was too hard for any man, but has not humanity—I say humanity because it is Mr. Harding's favorite word—has not humanity the right to ask of its statesmen something more than timidity and avoidance? The problem of establishing peace where there was peace, in the Orient, was relatively easy.

The war had left the great sea powers with excessive navies and insupportable naval budgets. All wanted naval limitation. It was only necessary to propose an agreement for reduction to have it accepted.

Even the dramatic method of making the proposal, with details of the tonnage to be scrapped, was not Mr. Hughes's idea. Let us do the man in the White House justice. He conceived it on the Mayflower; read it to Senator James Watson who was with him, and wirelessed it to the State Department.

There was the further problem, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Mr. Hughes wanted it ended. Japan and England wanted it substituted by a compact which should be signed by its two signatories and the United States.

All that Mr. Hughes had to do to establish peace where there was peace was to offer an agreement upon naval armament and accept the Anglo-Japanese plan for a wider pact in the Pacific. The details would involve discussion, but the success of the general program was assured in advance.

The conference was called, hurriedly, because, as Mr. Harding once explained, if he had not hastened someone else would have anticipated him in calling it. This shows how obvious was the expedient. The idea of naval limitation was no more original than the idea of the conference. Mr. Borah had proposed it. Lord Lee had proposed it, in the British Parliament. The idea of the Four Power Pact was made in England—it had long been discussed there—and brought over by Mr., now Lord, Balfour. He laid it at Mr. Hughes's feet.

Mr. Balfour sought no triumphs. They should all go to Mr. Hughes. He has the art of inconspicuousness, the result of many generations of fine breeding. As you saw him in the plenary sessions clutching the lapels of his coat with both hands and modestly struggling for utterance after an immense flow of words from our chief delegate, you could not help feeling patriotic pride in the contrast.

Besides, Mr. Balfour was captivated. He became, for the nonce, perfectly American. Mr. H. Wickham Steed said to me, hearing the chief British delegate speak: "It is a new Balfour at this conference." Certainly as you heard the voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for the first time in his life, you realized that it was not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" as the London Nation expressed it, who was speaking. It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great revival meeting, such as Mr. Hughes in his youth must have often attended.

On the Four Power Pact the best comment ever made was Mr. Frank Simonds's, "It was invented to save the British Empire from committing bigamy."

The results of the Washington conference were substantial. They put off war where none was threatening. Perhaps in the longer future they will be seen to be no more than a prolongation of the intent of the Versailles treaty, confirming the dichotomy of powers which that instrument created. Germany, Russia, and China were treated as outsiders in both conferences.

But the great a + b = c of last winter left peace where there is war still unwritten. The problem which "humanity" posed to Mr. Hughes is as yet unattempted. It is as exigent as ever. Immensely plausible as he is, events have a way of overtaking him. Remembering what happened on election night in 1916, I think one cannot sum him up better than by saying that he has the habit of always being elected in the early returns. As in the case of the lightning calculator, after you have recovered from your first surprise at his mental exhibition you are inclined to ask, "But what is the good of it all?"

The two most important advisers to the President in the existing Cabinet are Mr. Hughes and Mr. Hoover. The limitations of the Secretary of State are the limitations of a legalistic mind. The limitations of Mr. Hoover are the limitations of a scientific mind. Men, considered politically, do not behave like mathematical factors nor like chemical elements.

Someone asked Mr. Hoover recently why he sent corn to Russia instead of wheat. "Because," replied the Secretary of Commerce without a moment's hesitation, "for one dollar I can buy so many calories"—carrying it out to the third decimal place—"in corn, and only so many"—again to the third decimal place—"in wheat. I get about twice as many in corn as in wheat."

Mr. Hoover is at his best in feeding a famished population. He then has men where he wants them—I say this without meaning to reflect upon Mr. Hoover's humanitarian impulses; perhaps I should better say he then has men where for the free operation of his scientific mind he requires to have them. For in a famine men become mere chemical retorts. You pour into them a certain number of calories. Oxidization produces a certain energy. And the exact energy necessary to sustain life is calculable.

In a famine men cease to be individuals. They can not say, "I never ate corn. I do not know how to cook corn. I do not like corn." They behave in perfectly calculable ways. So many calories, oxidization; so much energy.

Conceive a society in which results were always calculable: so many men, so much fuel, so much consequent horsepower, and Mr. Hoover would make for it an admirable benevolent dictator; for he is benevolent. If Bolshevism at its most complete exemplification had been a success and become the order of the world, Mr. Hoover might have made a great head of a state; with labor conscripted and food conscripted, all you would have to do would be to apply the food, counted in calories, to the labor, and production in a readily estimable quantity would ensue. I am not trying to suggest that this represents Mr. Hoover's ideal of society; it surely does not. I am only saying that this is the kind of society in which Mr. Hoover would develop his fullest utility.

Science inevitably reduces man to the calculable automaton, otherwise it can deduce no laws about him;—such as, for example, the legal man, a fiction that haunts Mr. Hughes's brain; the chemical retort man, of Mr. Hoover's mind; the economic man, another convenient fiction; the scientific socialism man, another pure fiction, derived from the economic man and forming the basis for Bolshevism at its fullest development.

Now if Chemistry should somehow acquire eccentricity, so that two elements combined in a retort would sometimes produce one result and sometimes another totally different, the chemist would be no more unsure in his mind than is Mr. Hoover, operating for the first time in a society of free, self-governing men. Or perhaps it would be a better analogy to say that if the chemist when he put an agent into a retort could not be sure what other elements were already in it, and could not tell whether the result would be an explosion or a pleasant and useful recombination, he would be somewhat in the position of Mr. Hoover.

You will observe that I am trying to dissociate the real Hoover from the myth Hoover, always a difficult process, which may require years for its accomplishment. I do not pretend that this is the final dissociation. All we know with certainty of the real Hoover is that when he has society at the starvation line and can say "so many calories, so much energy," he works with extraordinary sureness.

When he operates in a normal society he takes his chemical agent in hand and consults Mr. Harding, Mr. Daugherty, or Mr. Weeks as to what agents there are in the political retort, and whether the placing of his agent in with them will produce an explosion or a profitable recombination.

So you see the practical utility of his mind is conditioned upon the minds of Mr. Harding, Mr. Weeks, and Mr. Daugherty. It is a fertile mind, which invents, however, only minor chemical reactions, neither he nor Mr. Harding being sure enough about the dirty and incalculable vessel of politics to know when an explosion may result, and neither of them being bold enough to take chances.

Mr. Hughes, Mr. Hoover, and Mr. Daugherty are the only outstanding figures in the Cabinet. The Attorney General lives in an unreal world of his own, which at the moment of this writing threatens to come tumbling down about his head.

The clue to Mr. Daugherty's world is found in a sentence of Thomas Felder's letter apropos of the failure to collect the $25,000 fee for securing the release of Charles W. Morse from prison, in which he tells how he associated with himself Mr. Daugherty, "who stood as close to the President as any other lawyer or citizen of the United States." "Standing close," men may laugh at the gods, may "take the cash and let the credit go." It is a world of little things without any tomorrow. Long views and large views do not matter. Forces? Principles? Perhaps, but the main thing is all men should "stand close." It is an immensely human world, where men if they are not masters of their own destiny may at least cheat fate for a little brief hour, if only they remain true to each other no matter what befalls.

Mr. Harding, one side of him belongs to that world of Mr. Daugherty's, while another side belongs to that larger political world where morals, wrapped in vague sentimental words, hold sway. It is because he belongs to that world that Mr. Daugherty is Attorney General. Mr. Daugherty "stood close" to Mr. Harding all his life. "Standing close" creates an obligation. Mr. Harding, as President, must in return "stand close" to Mr. Daugherty.

He does so. To the caller who visited him when the Morse-Felder letters were coming out daily, and who was apprehensive of the consequences, the President said, "You don't know Harry Daugherty. He is as clean and honorable a man as there is in this country." In such a world as this, your friend can do no wrong. Goldstein, who received the $2,500 from Lowden's campaign manager, belongs to it. Therefore, he can do no wrong. Therefore, his name goes from the White House to the Senate for confirmation as Collector of Internal Revenue at St. Louis.

To go back to the time before he became Attorney General, Daugherty practiced law in Columbus, Ohio. His cases came to him, largely as the Morse retainer did, because he "stood close" to somebody, to the President, to Senators, to Governors of Ohio, or Legislatures of Ohio. His was not a highly lucrative practice, for Mr. Daugherty is one of the few relatively poor men in the present Cabinet. You may deduce from this circumstance a conclusion as favorable as that which the President, who knows him so well, does. I am concerned only in presenting the facts. At least Mr. Daugherty did not grow rich out of "standing close."

Nor did he accumulate a reputation. When men "stand close" those who are outside the circle invariably regard them with a certain suspicion. Your professional politician, for that is what Daugherty was, always is an object of doubt. And for this reason he always seeks what is technically known as a "vindication." Conscious of his own rectitude, as he measures it, he may come out of office cleared in the world's eyes, and with a fine title, to boot, ready for life upon a new level. And this "vindication" sometimes does take place.

I have no doubt that Mr. Daugherty entered office with the most excellent intentions. He had everything to gain personally from "making a record" in the Attorney Generalship, a title and a higher standing at the bar. Moreover, he was the loyal friend of the President and desired the success of the administration.

But it is not so easy. You cannot one moment by "standing close" laugh at the gods and the next range yourself easily and commodiously on the side of the gods. The gods may be unkind even to those who mean to be with them from the outset, establishing their feet firmly upon logic or upon calories; how much more so may they be with those who would suddenly change sides?

At least it is a matter that admits of no compromise. What is he going to do in office with those who "stood close" to him as he "stood close" to President Taft? All the "close standers" turn up in Washington. For example, Mr. Felder, who "stood close" in the Morse case and who perhaps for that reason appears as counsel in the Bosch-Magneto case, where the prosecution moves slowly, and who moreover permits himself some indiscretions. There is a whole army of "close standers." There are the prosecutions that move slowly. Neither circumstance is necessarily significant. There are always the "close standers." Prosecutions always move slowly. But the two circumstances together!

I present all this merely to show what kind of adviser the Attorney General is, his limited conception of life on this little world, and life's, perhaps temporary, revenge upon him. No one at this writing can pass judgment, so I give, along with the facts and the appearances, the best testimonial that a man can have, that quoted above from the President.

In physique the Attorney General is burly, thick-necked, his eyes are unsteady, his face alternately jovial and minatory,—I should say he bluffed effectively,—rough in personality, a physical law requiring that bodies easily cemented together, and thus "standing close," should not have too smooth an exterior. His view of the world being highly personal, his instinctive idea of office is that it, too, is personal, something to be used, always within the law, to aid friends and punish enemies. He wrote once to a newspaper, which was opposing his appointment, in substance that he would be Attorney General in spite of it and that he had a long memory.

Secretary of War Weeks is the only other general adviser of Mr. Harding in the Cabinet. He is politically minded. Like Mr. Harding he is half of the persuasion of Mr. Daugherty about organization, and half of the other persuasion about the sway of moral forces. All in all he is nearer akin mentally to the President than any other member of the Cabinet, but with more industry and more capacity for details than his chief. He is of the clean desk tradition; Mr. Harding is not.

Secretary Fall hoped to be one of the chief advisers, but has been disappointed. Mr. Harding had said of him, "His is the best mind in the Senate," but he has found other minds more to his liking in the Cabinet.

With a long drooping mustache, he looks like a stage sheriff of the Far West in the movies. His voice is always loud and angry. He has the frontiers-man's impatience. From his kind lynch law springs.

He wanted to lynch Mexico. When he entered the Cabinet he said to his Senate friends, "If they don't follow me on Mexico I shall resign." He has been a negative rather than a positive force there regarding Mexico, deviating Mr. Hughes into the ineffective position he occupies.

He has the frontiers-man's impatience of conservation. Probably he is right. His biggest contribution to his country's welfare will be oil land leases, like that of Teapot Dome.

The Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Wallace, is an excellent technical adviser, as unobtrusive as experts usually are.

The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Denby, with his flabby jowls and large shapeless mouth, has a big heart, and more enthusiasm than he has self-command, judgment, or intelligence. He committed political suicide cheerfully, when the Cannon machine in the House fell into disfavor. He would do anything for a friend, not as Mr. Daugherty would because it pays, but because he is a friend. A cause commands an equal loyalty from him. Just because his head is not as big as his heart he is a minor factor.

Mr. Davis, Secretary of Labor, is a professional glad hand man, appointed because the administration meant to extend nothing to Labor but a glad hand. When a crisis presents itself in industrial relations, Mr. Hoover, who spreads himself over several departments, attends to it. At the conference on unemployment, which was Mr. Hoover's, the best and only example of the unemployed present was the Secretary of Labor.

CHAPTER VIII

And so it was in the blessed nineties to which Mr. Harding would have us return. The people were united upon one end, the rapid appropriation of the virgin wealth of this continent and its distribution among the public, and they had no doubt this was being admirably accomplished by the existing business structure. Parties and governments were subsidiary. The system worked.

In a pioneer society waste is unimportant; it may even be economy. Forests are cut and all but the choicest wood thrown away. They are not replanted. While they are so plentiful it would be a waste of time and effort to use the poor timber or to replace the felled trees.

In a similar society faulty distribution, which is ordinarily a social waste, is unimportant. There is plenty for all. And it may even be a waste of time and effort, checking accomplishment, to seek better adjustments. The object of society is the rapid exploitation of the resources nature has made available. Everyone gains in the process. Justice is a detail, as much a detail as is the inferior timber left to rot.

We no longer have the unity of aim of a pioneer society, yet we have not readjusted our actual government in conformity with the altered social consciousness. Instead we are trying to readjust ourselves to a practice that is outworn. Having ceased to be pioneers, becoming various and healthily divided, instead of making our system express the new variety in our life, and still function, we are trying to force ourselves by heavy penalties and awful bugaboos back into that unity under which our system does work.

And when I say that we have a form of government suited only to a pioneer society, though we have ceased to be a pioneer society, let no one think that I would lay a profane hand upon that venerated instrument, the Constitution of the United States. I am thinking only of the Constitution's boasted elasticity. A new stretching is required, to fit a larger and more diversified society than that to which we have hitherto applied it.

For a simple, primitive people, for a pioneer society with but one task to accomplish,—the appropriation and distribution of the undeveloped resources of a continent,—details of distribution being unimportant where natural wealth was so vast, government by business or government by parties as the agents of business served admirably. The essential unity which is not to be found in our government of divided powers existed in the single engrossing aim of the public.

For a temporary end, like the common defense, against an external enemy or against an imagined internal enemy, concentration upon the Executive also serves. The unity of purpose which the nation has is imported into the government through elevating the President into a dominant position. In the one case the government is made to work by putting all branches of it under control of one authority outside itself; in the other, by upsetting the nice balance which the Fathers of the Constitution set up and, under the fiction of party authority, resorting to one man Government.

But what happens when there ceases to be a single aim, when the fruits of the earth are no longer sufficient to go around generously so that no one need question his share, when a conflict of interests arises, when classes begin to emerge, when in short we have the situation which exists in America today?

Let us examine for a moment the Executive as a source of unity in the government of such a divergent society. To make him executive minorities must agree upon him. He must, to use Mr. Harding as an illustration, be satisfactory to the farmers with one point of view and to Wall Street with another, he must be acceptable to the Irish Americans and to the German Americans and to several other varieties of Americans, he must take the fence between those who believe in a League of Nations and those who hate a League of Nations, he must please capital and at the same time not alienate labor.

Mr. Harding gave a glimpse of his difficulties when he said during the campaign, "I could make better speeches than these, but I have to be so careful." The greatest common divisor of all the minorities that go to making a winning national combination must be neutral, he must be colorless, he must not know that his soul is his own. The greatest common divisor of all the elements in the nation's political consciousness today is inevitably a Mr. Harding. We shall probably have a whole series of Mr. Hardings in the White House.

And when this greatest common divisor of all the classes and all the interests, this neutral, colorless person to whom no one can find any objection, enters the White House does he represent Labor? So little that he will not have a labor man in his Cabinet. Does he represent Capital? By instinct, by party training, by preference, yes, but capital is so divided that it is hard to represent, and the President, like the candidate, "has to be so careful." Does he represent the farmers? He says so, but the farmers choose to be represented elsewhere, on the hill, where they can find agents whose allegiance is not so divided.

And carefulness does not end upon election. Once a candidate always a candidate. The entire first term of a president is his second candidacy. His second term, if he wins one, is the candidacy of his successor, in whose election he is vitally interested; for the continuance of his party in power is the measure of public approval of himself. A president who is the greatest common divisor of groups and interests "must always be so careful" that he can never be a Roosevelt or a Wilson.

Recapitulating the experiences of other peoples with political institutions, we have quickly, since our discovery of one man rule, run upon the period of little kings. The Carolingians have followed close upon the heels of the great Carl. The institution which in the first decade of the twentieth century was a wonderful example of our capacity to adopt the rigors of a written constitution to our ends, of the practical genius of the American people, in the third decade of the twentieth century is already dead.

The monarch with power, not the mere survival who satisfies the instinct for the picturesque, for the play of the emotions in politics, is suited to an undifferentiated people pursuing a single simple end; one end, one man, many ends, many men is the rule. The greatest common divisor of such masses of men as inhabit this continent, so variously sprung, so variously seeking their place in the sun, is something that has to be so careful as to become a nullity.

There is no reason why our presidents should not become like all single heads of modern civilized peoples, largely ornamental, largely links with the past, symbols to stir our inherited feelings as we watch their gracious progress through the movies. Mr. Harding is headed that way and if that Providence which watches over American destinies vouchsafes him to us for eight years instead of only four, the Presidency under him will make progress toward a place alongside monarchy under King George.

Already, in the habit of blaming every failure and disappointment upon Congress, we see signs of the growth of the happy belief that the King can do no wrong. When the King does nothing he can do no wrong.

There is no reason why we should not repeat the experiences of peoples who have gone further upon the road of social differentiation than we have and develop like them parliamentary government. By this I do not mean to echo the nonsense that has been written about having the Cabinet officers sit in Congress.

What is more likely to come is a new shift in the balance, a new manifestation of our genius for the practical, which no written constitution can restrain, which will place the initiative in the legislative branch, whereas I have said, under Mr. Harding it is already passing, and which will make Congress rather than the President the dominant factor in our political life.

This process is already taking place.

When President Harding asked the advice of the Senate whether he should revive an old treaty with Germany suspended by the war, pointing proudly to the tenderness he was showing the partner of his political joys, he conceded an authority in the legislative branch which neither the Constitution nor our traditions had placed there. He took a step toward recognizing the prospective dominance of Congress. It was one of many.

It is a long distance, as political institutions are measured, from President Wilson's telling the Senate that it must bow to his will even in dotting the i's and crossing the t's of the Versailles Treaty, to Mr. Harding's asking the Senate what was its will regarding the old German treaty. Foreign relations are precisely the field where the executive power seems by the Constitution to have been most clearly established, yet it is just here that the legislative branch has made its most remarkable advance toward a dominating position; perhaps because this topic gained a temporary importance from the war and it was naturally in the most significant area that the conflict between the two branches of the government had to break out.

When President Harding introduced the treaties and pacts resulting from the Washington Conference into the Senate, he said that he had been a Senator and knew the Senate views, and that all the agreements he was offering for ratification had been negotiated with scrupulous regard to the Senate's will. And he pleaded with the Senate not to disavow the Executive and impair its standing in the conduct of foreign relations.

No more complete avowal could be made of the dominant position which the Senate has come to occupy in the diplomatic affairs of the country.

In the field where he was supposed legally to have the initiative the President became expressly the agent of the Senate. The Senate laid out the limits of policy and the Executive scrupulously, so he said, observed those limits.

This speech of Mr. Harding's, like his consulting the Senate in advance upon the reviving of the German treaty, is one of the significant evidences of the shift of power that is taking place, away from the Executive toward the Legislative. It did not attract the attention it deserved because our minds are still full of the past when the Presidency was a great office under Wilson and Roosevelt. We read of Mr. Harding's going to the hill to tell Congress what it must do, and we ignore the fact that he always does so when Congress sends for him, acting as their agent.

The King still makes his speech to Parliament, though the speech is written by the ministers. They are his ministers, though Parliament selects them. The power of the King is a convenient fiction. The power of the President will always remain a convenient fiction, even if it should come to have no more substance than that of the King.

In truth it has been the Senate not the Executive that has been determining our foreign policy in its broader outlines for more than two years. The Secretary of State works out the details. But the Senate says "thus far shalt thou go and no farther." And when the Secretary of State has gone farther, as in the case of the peace treaty with Germany, the Senate has amended his work. So Senator Penrose did not exaggerate, when he said apropos of Mr. Hughes's appointment, "It makes no difference who is Secretary of State, the Senate will make the foreign policy." The President has only recently declared that it has done so.

So gradual has been the extension of the Senate's prerogative that few realize how far it has gone. So low had the Senate sunk in public estimation during the war that it did not occur to President Wilson that he might not safely ignore it in making peace. He appointed no Senators to the delegation which went to Paris. He did not consult the Senate during the negotiations nor did he ever take pains to keep the Senate informed. He proceeded on the theory that he might sign treaties with perfect confidence that the Senate would accept them unquestioningly. And so impressed was the country at the time with the power of the Presidency that Mr. Wilson's tacit assumption of dictatorial power over Congress was generally taken as a matter of course.

All this was changed under Mr. Wilson's successor. One half of Mr. Harding's delegation to the Washington Conference was made up of Senators. At every step of the negotiation the Senate's susceptibilities were borne in mind. No commitment was entered into which would exceed the limits set by the Senate to the involvement of this country abroad. Almost daily Mr. President consulted with Senators and explained to them what the American Commission was doing. Practically the Executive became the agent of the Senate in foreign relations and in the end he told the Senate what a good and faithful servant he had been and how scrupulously he had respected its will.

It was only superficially that Secretary Hughes was the outstanding figure of the Conference. The really outstanding figure was the Senate. Mr. Hughes was not free. Mr. Harding was not free. The controlling factor was the Senate. The treaties had to be acceptable to the Senate, whose views were known in advance. No theory of party authority, of executive domination, would save them if they contravened the Senatorial policy disclosed in the Versailles Treaty debate and insisted upon anew to Mr. Hughes's grievous disappointment when the reservation was attached to the separate peace with Germany. When it was realized that Senate opposition to the Four Power Pact had been courted through the inadvertent guaranty of the home islands of Japan, the agreement was hastily modified to meet the Senate's views. President and Secretary of State behaved at this juncture like a couple of clerks caught by their employer in a capital error.

And even Mr. Hughes's prominence was half accidental. The Senate is strong in position but weak in men. Mr. Hughes is vastly Mr. Lodge's superior in mind, in character, and in personality. Suppose the situation reversed, suppose the Senate rich in leadership, suppose it were Mr. Aldrich instead of Mr. Lodge who sat with Mr. Hughes in the Commission, then the Senate which had made the foreign policy in its broad outlines would itself have filled in the details, and a Senator instead of the Secretary of State would have been the chief figure of the American delegation.

Where did Mr. Harding's plan of settling international affairs by conferences originate? You will find it in a document which Senator Knox brought out to Marion, Ohio, in January, 1921. Reports had come to Washington that Mr. Harding's Association of Nations, which was being discussed with the best minds was only Mr. Wilson's league re-cast. The leaders of the Senate met and agreed on a policy. Mr. Knox took it to the President elect. Instead of a formally organized association there was to be nothing more than international conferences and the appointment of international commissions as the occasion for them arose. Mr. Harding's policy is the Senate's policy.

The Senate's victory has been complete. The United States did not ratify the Versailles Treaty. It did not enter the League of Nations. It did make a separate treaty of peace with Germany. It did not appoint a member of the Reparations Commission—the Senate's reservation to Mr. Hughes's treaty keeping that question in the control of Congress.

Senatorial control of foreign relations seems now to be firmly established. No future president, after Mr. Wilson's experiences with the Versailles Treaty and Mr. Harding's with the Four Power Pact, will negotiate important foreign engagements without informing himself fully of the Senate's will. And the principle has been established that the Senate shall be directly represented on American delegations to world conferences.

I recall this history of the recent conflict between the Executive and the Senate over foreign relations to show how completely in this important field the theory of presidential dominance has broken down and been replaced by the practice of senatorial dominance. No amendment to the constitution has taken place. The President still acts "with the advice and consent of the Senate." Only now he takes the advice first so as to be sure of the consent afterward, instead of acting first and obtaining the advice and consent afterward.

The Senate has been aided in this conflict with the Executive by the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority for the ratification of a treaty. If a majority would suffice, a President, by invoking the claims of party, by organizing public opinion, by judiciously using patronage might put his agreements with foreign nations through. But a two-thirds vote is not to be obtained by these methods; the only practicable means is to accept the Senate's views of foreign policy and conform to it.

As soon as foreign relations became sufficiently important to fight over the conflict was inevitable and the victory of the Senate certain.

The conflict between the two branches of the Government will not stop with this victory of the Senate. It has always been present and probably always will be. The importance of the domestic problems that the war left will cause Congress to insist upon a free hand to make domestic policies. In the past Congress busied itself about little except the distribution of moneys for public buildings and river and harbor improvement. The handling of these funds the legislative branch kept out of executive control.

Now public buildings and improvements have become relatively unimportant. But the deepest economic interests of constituents are involved. Formerly taxes were small and lightly regarded. Today their incidence is the subject of a sharp dispute between classes and industries.

Furthermore the use of government credit for certain economic ends, such as those favored by the farmers, will cause a clash between sections, groups, industries, and strata of society. Policies of large importance will have to be adopted about which there will be a vast difference of opinion. The divergent interests cannot be represented in the White House, for the Presidency embodies the compromise of all the interests. They will have to find their voice in Congress. When they find their voice the great policies will be made. And where the great policies will be made there the power will be.

CHAPTER IX

As signs of life they are scandalous, and everybody body is scandalized over them for fear that a vital Congress will be something new to reckon with.

If Congress does realize that it has waked from the dead, who will be worse scandalized than the senile persons whom the newspapers respectfully call its "leaders"? What more threatening spectacle for second childhood is there than first childhood?

Suppose Congress were again a lusty and vigorous creature with the blood of youth in its veins, how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged seventy-two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the irascible old man, with worn nerves, who claps his hands for the Senate pages as if they were not of the same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, if he could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the same way to summon the majority Senators, the recluse who is kept alive by old servants who understand and anticipate every whim, to enjoy greedily the petty distinctions that have come to him late because the Senate itself was more than half dead?

And who would be worse scandalized than the ancient committee chairman, some with one foot in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr. Harding's administration the important chairmanships in the Senate were disposed thus: Finance, the most powerful committee, Senator Penrose, a dying man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; Interstate Commerce, Senator Cummins, 72, and broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator Nelson, 79 and living back in the Civil War in which he served as a private; Immigration, Senator Colt, 76.

Suppose Congress should come to life and represent the real interests of the various sections, classes, and, let us say, kinds of property and business in this country—how long would the Senate remain such a pleasant place to die in?

When these old gentlemen made their successful fight upon President Wilson they signed their own death warrants, and began putting an end to the system that made their tenure possible. Only a Congress which had long been a subject of public contempt could have fallen into and could have remained in their hands. Granted that Congress is negligible, it makes no difference who sits in it or how decrepit its leadership.

But shift power once more to the legislative, and the various conflicting interests throughout the country will grasp for the offices now in enfeebled hands. And by taking predominance in foreign relations away from the Executive and transferring it to themselves, the elderly and infirm "leaders," who have been tolerated out of half contempt, have started the avalanche of authority in their direction. It will sweep them off their unsteady feet.

Let us examine what they have done. When they opposed Mr. Wilson on the Versailles Treaty they established the power of the Senate to mark out broadly the foreign policy of the United States, a dangerous enough beginning for persons who were merely tolerated because Congress was nearly negligible and it was a matter of little difference to the public who its managers were. But when they altered Mr. Harding's treaties they also denied the authority of the Executive as the head of his party to align them in support of his program.

Party authority vested in the Executive thus impaired, it was not long before the representatives of agricultural states also denied it, and began to take their orders from the Farm Bureau Federation instead of from the White House. Then the House leaders in open defiance of the "head of the party" prepared and reported a soldiers' bonus bill which contravened the express purposes of the Executive regarding this legislation. Here we have the organization joining with the farm bloc in declaring the legislature to be its own master.

But on what do the octogenarian feet of Mr. Lodge and Mr. Cummins, and Mr. Colt and Mr. Nelson, and the others, rest except upon party authority? Not upon representing any real or vital principle in the national life. Not upon any force of intelligence or personality.

They move in a region of fictions. They represent the Republican party, when there is no Republican party, no union on principles, no stable body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to be served.

When votes for legislation must be had, Senator James Watson circulates about among the faithless pleading in the name of party loyalty—as well talk of fealty to Jupiter in the capitol of the Popes!

In extremities the President, as "head of his party," is brought on the scene,—for all the world like the practice of a certain cult which long after its founder was dead used to dress up a lay figure to resemble him and drive it about the marketplace, to reassure the faithful and confirm the influence of the priests. Mr. Harding is alive enough, but the "head of his party" is dead and a mere fiction of priests like "Jim" Watson.

Power has passed or is passing from the Executive and has found no one in Congress to receive it. The arrival of power causes as much consternation on the hill as the outbreak of war does among the incompetent swivel chair bureaucrats of an army in a nation that has been long at peace.

Power is passing to Congress because Congress says who shall pay the taxes and who may use the public credit. Where there was one interest a generation ago, there are many interests today, each trying to place the burden of taxation upon others and reaching for the credit itself. Taxation and credit are the big stakes today and Congress has them in its atrophied grasp.