ou don't have
to stand here trying to think of something to say to me. I know you
well enough not to be offended if you don't talk to me at all while
I am here."

He laughed and took her at her word. He had the habit of too great
relevancy to be human. If he could have said more than "Well" to
that woman, he might have been President.

HENRY CABOT LODGE

When Henry Cabot Lodge was elected to Congress thirty-four years
ago there were no portents in the heavens, but there was rejoicing
in his native city of Boston and in many other places. It was
hailed as the dawn of a new era. Young, he was only thirty-seven,
well educated, a teacher of history, and with six serious books to
his credit, he was a new figure in politics; Providence, moving in
its mysterious way, had designed him to redeem politics from its
baseness and set a shining example.

Everything was in his favor; he was not only learned, so learned,
in fact, that he was promptly dubbed the "scholar in politics," but
he was rich, and therefore immune from all sordid temptation; he
was a gentleman. Mr. Lodge's forbears had been respectable
tradesmen who knew how to make money and to keep it--and the latter
trait is strongly developed in their senatorial descendant. From
them he inherited a fortune; he had been educated in a select
private school and then gone through Harvard, whence he emerged
with an LL.B. and a Ph.D. attached to his name. By all the
established canons he was a "gentleman" as well as a scholar. In
the intervals between teaching and writing he had found time to be
admitted to the Boston bar.

With that equipment it could be safely predicted Mr. Lodge would go
far. He has. To-day he is the leader of the Republican party in the
Senate of the United States.

He early justified the promise. While still a Congressional
freshman he drafted and introduced into the House the "Force Bill,"
which came to a violent death in the Senate. That Bill was not only
a prophecy but it is a resume of Mr. Lodge's career. It is
partisanship gone mad.

On the pretense that it was intended to secure fair elections in
the South, but actually, as described by a member of the House at
the time, to prevent elections being held in several districts, it
placed the election machinery in the control of the Federal
Government, which, through the Chief Supervisor of Elections, to be
appointed by the President, and his Praetorian Guard of Deputy
Marshals, would hav