e controlled every election and returned an
overwhelming Republican majority from the Southern States.

The Bill was typical of Mr. Lodge and the way he plays politics.
The Force Bill would probably have ended ingloriously the political
career of any other man, but Mr. Lodge had the luck of being a
gentleman born in Boston. Boston is slow to forget. A quarter of a
century after the Civil War, Boston still remembered that conflict,
its heart still bled for the negro deprived of his vote; and a
Boston gentleman could do no wrong--to the Democratic Party.

The House amused Mr. Lodge, but it was too promiscuous for a person
of his delicate sensibilities who shrank from intimate contact with
the uneducated and the socially unwashed. Henry Cabot Lodge always
creates the impression that it is a condescension on his part to
God to have allowed Him to create a world which is not exclusively
possessed by the Cabots and the Lodges and their connections.

All that is only an unfortunate manner. He is really the friend of
the people, abominating snobbishness and aristocratic pretensions;
in his younger days, when he was campaigning for Congress, he was
known to have slapped a constituent on the back and called him
familiarly by his first name; even now, although he has long ceased
to be a politician and has been canonized as a statesman, the old
impulses are strong in him. When the time draws near for his
reelection to the Senate, he goes back to Massachusetts, there to
take part with the common people in their simple pleasures, and
affably to extend a cold and clammy hand to voters, who still
venerate him as a scholar in politics and a gentleman. So it will
be easily understood why one of Mr. Lodge's temperament should
early have cast his covetous eye on the Senate, and at the first
opportunity moved over to that more select atmosphere, which he did
in 1893.

When Senator Lodge entered public life the flagrant spoils system
was rampant. A little band of earnest men was fighting to reform
the civil service so as to make it a permanent establishment with
merit and fitness the tests for appointment instead of political
influence. It was a cause naturally to appeal to the "best people"
of Boston, and Mr. Lodge, being one of them, having inflexible
principles and a high code of honor, threw himself eagerly into the
reform movement and became its apostle. His principles were so
stern and unyielding, he demanded such an exalted stand