s painted before Beethoven was born, you
would say at once, "Beethoven!" There is a look of stern endurance, as
if the artist had admired Rembrandt's "Burgomaster" a little too well,
yet that sturdiness belonged to the Master, too; and there are the
abstracted far-away look, the touch of proud melancholy, and the
becoming unkemptness that we know so well.

The child is grandfather to the man. Beethoven bore slight resemblance
to his immediate parents, but in his talent, habits and all of his
mental traits, he closely resembled this sturdy Dutchman who composed,
sang, led the military band, and played the organ at the Church of Saint
Jacques in Antwerp.

Being ambitious, Ludvig van Biethofen, while yet a young man, moved to
Bonn, the home of Clement Augustus, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne.

The chief business of elector was, in case of necessity, to elect a
King. America borrowed the elector idea from Germany. But our "electoral
college" is a degenerate political appendicle that is continued,
because, in borrowing plans of government, we took good and bad alike,
not knowing there was a difference. The elector scheme in the United
States is occasionally valuable for defeating the will of the people in
case of a popular majority.

In justice, however, let me say that the original argument of the
Colonists was that the people should not vote directly for President,
because the candidate might live a long way off, and the voter could not
know whether he was fit or not. So they let the citizen vote for a wise
and honest elector he knew.

The result is that we all now know the candidates for President, but we
do not know the electors. The electoral college in America is just about
as useful as the two buttons on the back of a man's coat, put there
originally to support a sword-belt. We have discarded the sword, yet we
cling to our buttons.

But the electors of Germany, in days agone, had a well-defined use. The
people were not, at first, troubled to elect them--the King did that
himself, and then as one good turn deserves another, the electors agreed
to elect the successor the King designated, when death should compel him
to abdicate. Then to fill in the time between elections, the electors
did the business of the King. It will thus be seen that every elector
was really a sort of King himself, governing his little State, amenable
to no one but the King.

And so the chief business of the elector was to keep the people i