ssessed of considerable personal magnetism and a
good political nose--a man who could scent how the pack was running,
take a short-cut, and presently appear to be leading. In other words an
opportunist. Though he has not much education, and though as a writer he
is far from polished, it is said that he has written powerful
editorials. "When his editorials have been good," said one gentleman,
"it is because he has been stirred up over something, and because he
manages sometimes to get into his writing the intensity of his own
personality." His office used to be, and still is, when he is in
Raleigh, a sort of political headquarters, and he used to be able to
write editorials while half a dozen politicians were sitting around his
desk, talking.

With his paper he has done much good in the State, notably by fighting
consistently for prohibition and for greater public educational
advantages. The strong educational movement in North Carolina began with
a group of men chief among whom were the late Governor Charles B.
Aycock, called "the educational governor"; Dr. E.A. Alderman, who,
though president of the University of Virginia, is a North Carolinian
and was formerly president of the University of that State; Dr. Charles
D. McKeever who committed the State to the principle of higher education
for women, and other men of similar high purpose. A gentleman who was
far from an unqualified admirer of Mr. Daniels, told me that without his
aid the great educational advance which the state has certainly made of
recent years could hardly have been accomplished, and that the same
thing applies in the case of prohibition--which has been adopted in
North Carolina.

"What sort of man is he?" I asked this gentleman.

"He is the old type of Methodist," he said. "He is the kind of man who
believes that the whale swallowed Jonah. He has the same concept of
religion that he had as a child. I differ with his policies, his
politics, his mental methods, but I don't think anybody here doubts that
he is trying, not only to do the moral thing himself, but to force
others to adopt, as rules for public conduct, the exact code in which he
personally believes, and which he certainly follows. His mental
processes are often crude, yet he has much native shrewdness and the
ability to grasp situations as they arise.

"He does not come of the aristocratic class, which probably accounts for
his failure, when he first became secretary, to perceive the nec