tour of the world. He
showed us Europe and the Orient. In honor of Manila Bay he invented
that brilliant fiction, the "open door" in the East. Turning our
attention to the world we discovered the General Staff. Hitherto
our army had fought mostly with the scattered Indian tribes of the
West and you cannot use a General Staff in conducting six separate
wars at once, each no bigger than a good-sized riot. But as Admiral
Perry had opened the eyes of the Hermit Kingdom of Japan, so
Admiral whatever-his-name-was who consented to be sunk by Dewey,
the unremembered hero of this great enlightenment, had opened the
eyes of this Hermit Republic of the West to the world across the
seas.

We had to have a General Staff. Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, gave
us one, faithfully copied from the best European models. Roosevelt,
the Magnificent, stood by and said "Bully." Everything was of this
order; so it was to a tremendously interesting job that Mr. Root
succeeded when he took the place of John Hay as Secretary of State.
The mood of the hour was expansive and a luminous personality
pervaded the national life.

But public service cannot always be so interesting as it is at its
fullest moments. The luminous personality went out. And Mr. Root's
next experience, in the United States Senate, was disillusioning.

The Senate is a body in which you grow old, ungracefully waiting
for dead men's shoes. The infinite capacity for taking pains which
Senators have is not genius. If the gods have been good to you, as
they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter the upper house young, a
scholar and idealist, with the hope of the Presidency as the reward
of generous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay aside
your winged gifts one by one and your ambition centers finally not
on the Presidency but on some committee chairmanship clung to by a
pertinacious octogenarian.

Hope deferred makes you avaricious of little favors, until when a
British journalist writes of you as one did of Henry Cabot Lodge,
making his speech before the last Republican national convention at
Chicago, that you "looked like an elderly peer addressing a labor
gathering," your cup of happiness, is full to the brim, as Henry
Cabot Lodge's was,--whether because you are compared to a lord or
because other people, lesser than Senators, are put into their
proper inferior place. Mr. Lodge is the perfect flower of the
Senate. It is a flower that does not bloom in a night. It is