y in the
open, right before the public. The people got into the scale, and
Mr. Wilson hit the sky.
Mr. Hughes observed what happened. He is determined that the stone
this time shall go in on his end of the balance. He talks to the
country daily. He takes the people into his confidence, telling all
that can be told and as soon as it can be told. He makes foreign
relations hold front pages with the Stillman divorce case. He makes
no step without carrying the country with him. He comes as near
conducting a daily referendum on what we shall do for our
"interests" as in a country so big as ours can be done; and that is
democratic control of foreign relations, initiated by the Senate,
for its own undoing.
Into that balance where he is placing the stone, he will put more
of mankind's destinies than any other man on earth holds in his
hands to-day. His has been a long way up from the shy, sensitive
youth that one who knew him when he was beginning the law describes
to me. He was then unimaginably awkward, incapable of unbending, a
wet blanket socially. An immense effort of will has gone into
fashioning the agreeable and habitual diner-out of to-day, into
profiting by the mistakes of the New York governorship, of the
campaign of 1916.
One sees still the traces of the early stiffness; the face is
sensitive; the eyes drop, seldom meeting yours squarely; when they
do, they are the mild eyes of the Church! I suppose the early
experiences of the Church help him.
His attitude toward Colonel Harvey's and other of the President's
diplomatic appointments takes its color from his good father's
attitude toward the problem of evil. God put evil in the world, and
it is not for man to question. The President sends the Harveys
abroad; they are not Mr. Hughes', but his own personal representatives.
It is not for Mr. Hughes to question.
He grows a better Republican every day. And the Republicans of the
Senate are not reconciled. They feel like the man who saw the
hippopotamus:
If he should stay to tea, I thought,
There won't be much for us.
There won't be much for them. Enthusiasm grows among them over his
admirable fitness for reinterment on the Supreme Bench.
EDWARD M. HOUSE
The nature of Colonel Edward M. House was fully revealed by a story
of his youth, which he told me at Paris in the concluding moments
of the Peace Conference. He was elated and confident. The
compromises in which he delighted had bee
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