of places is arranged by conference. between the opposing powers. Before election the distribution of votes is not infrequently arranged in the same manner: one candidate is sacrificed to save or to defeat another candidate of more importance. In the last days of the campaign precisely such a compromise was openly attempted and enjoined by Tammany for the defeat of Mr. Jerome. The instructions that went out from Tammany headquarters were to trade votes in any manner that would keep the District Attorney's office safe. That the District Attorney's office should be friendly, or at least quiescent, is a matter of supreme necessity to all the systematic violators of the law; it is necessary, not indeed for their immunity-the District Attorney is far enough from being omnipotent-but for their peace of mind. Witnesses may be suborned or else removed, be the District Attorney and his staff never so active or so vigilant; juries and judges still may intervene between the offenders and the law. But between the indictment and the verdict, and even between the beginning . of the investigation and the formulation or abandonment of the indictment, the violators of the law are sure to pass unquiet hours. It is worth to them whatever it may cost to go their wonted way in peace.

The next morning there were published interviews with Senator Platt and Mr. Whitney denying that they had been recently in conference, and newspapers which had given Mr. Jerome steady support dealt in unfriendly criticism. Men who had worked for him and candidates on the ticket with him visited his headquarters with long faces. Word came that Senator Platt had given orders that he should not be permitted to speak in any hall controlled by the Republican organization until he had publicly recanted and apologized. Practically every one held hin to blame for two things: for sacrificing a notable career for himself, and for jeoparding even his associates on the ticket, both for a freak of temper. I set these things down because they place in high relief the fact that the men who are to reform American politics must be prepared at times to stand alone. I asked Mr. Jerome that same day what had, in

his own eyes, justified him in making that speech. His offhand reply was: " If Platt wants a fight, he can get it. I was not going to wait for him to strike the first blow. I do not want public office badly enough to be a puppet in the hands of any man or set of men. I am not making this campaign to win out as District Attorney; I am making it to tell the people of New York the things they ought to know." Later in the day there came to visit him at headquarters a man in whose integrity he was known to have implicit confidence, commissioned to assure him that to his personal knowledge there had been at the conference in question or elsewhere no consultation or agreement between Mr. Platt and Mr. Whitney with regard to any political matter whatsoever. That the secret conference had taken place was by this informant not explicitly denied. There are persons who still affirm themselves to have good and sufficient reason to believe that the subject of the conference was in fact precisely that declared by Mr. Jerome, and that a conspiracy was in fact defeated by being brought so soon and so auda ciously to light. Mr. Jerome himself accepted his informant's word. "I have received assurances," he said that night at his first public meeting, “ from a gentleman who is in a position to know, and in whose honor and integrity I believe, that at the conference of which I spoke last night there was no discussion between Mr. Platt and Mr. Whitney of any matter bearing on this election. These statements I accept. I am satisfied from the assurances that I have received to-day that the Republican organization in this city will loyally support the whole ticket-the whole ticket, without exception; and that the returns on election day will show this support to have been given. To this extent I qualify what I have said, and to this extent only. What I have said, as it touches the broad facts and issues of our politics, I stand for, if I stand alone."

The attack on Senator Platt and Mr. Whitney was in a manner the turningpoint of the campaign. For Mr. Jerome himself it was a turning-point. In the attack on Senator Platt he had at last given complete expression to his own conception of the essential nature of the

state of things to be reformed. He had made appeal to those, and to those alone, by whom alone, as he believed, it could be lastingly reformed. He had made appeal to the unattached, plain man. He had grown weary of inveighing against Tammany and only Tammany. The Tammany administration was corrupt; he had fought and was fighting with a will to have it overthrown. He was far from dreaming that the battle of reform would have been won when Tammany was overthrown. He knew well that in Tammany lay neither the sole root nor the sole fruit of the administrative lie. He knew well that no system different in essentials from that of Tammany ever has existed, or will ever enduringly exist, under the sway of the administrative lie. The government of the city, he had repeatedly declared, was in the hands of a gang of criminals; it is an exact description, from a legal point of view, of illegal licensers and liberal enforcers of a mendacious law. Besides the gang of criminals actually in power, there is sure to be at least one other gang of criminals that has been and still desires to be in power. As against the plain people, there was to his thinking a natural alliance between the rival gangs, as also between whatever gang might chance to be in power and the richest violators of the law. The difficulty lay in bringing home to the plain man the fact of this alliance and its scope; the difficulty lay in rousing the plain man to a sense of his own interest in the strife and to a sense of his own power. The hostile intervention—the at least apparent hostile intervention-of Senator Platt, the open hostile intervention of Mr. Whitney, had given him his opportunity, without departing from the question of the hour, to make appeal with passionate explicitness to the plain man against the plain man's natural foes. The attack on Senator Platt had been to the plain man a convincing proof that here was not the ordinary office-seeker, with a loud voice and much to say of the iniquities of those upon the other side. The applause that in a virtually Republican mass-meeting rewarded the attack upon the party chief of the Republicans was a convincing proof that the plain man in every party was prepared to stand by the

There

man he found that he could trust. had been applause for Mr. Jerome, and vehement applause, from first to last whenever he appeared; but never such applause as when he struck into a course in which it was supposed that he would. find himself alone.

Those who were about Mr. Jerome in the few remaining days of the campaign must often have had running in their minds the well-worn lines descriptive of the "happy warrior;" he, too, was "happy as a lover," and was "fired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired." His energies, astonishing before, seemed quadrupled; he spoke at even more meetings, he spoke longer; what his speeches lost in picturesque detail they gained in impetus and scope. In every speech he pressed home his appeal to the plain man. In the very experiences, the very preoccupations, that had seemed to separate him from the generality of men, he found a vital ground of unity with the plain people of the land. There is small difference of opinion concerning the main outlines and enactments of the criminal law. There is small difference even of feeling, except as feeling may be found dishonorably inert or honorably strong. In the broad lines laid down by the criminal law he found the lines of demarcation between the party of the criminal and the party of the plain people of the land.

They tell me," he said, in response to his applauders at the Murray Hill Lyceum, "that I should have made none of the speeches I have lately made. They tell me I have been needlessly arraying against our cause great and powerful enemies. But I judge your hearts by mine, and I think that there are enemies whom it rejoices and exalts and fortifies men's hearts to encounter face to face. I think that the great corporate interests that have entered into a corrupt alliance with corrupt politicians to despoil the people of this city of their rights have not waited until these last days of the campaign to know which side to fight on, and that it is for the people of this city of the last importance, and animating and invigorating and well-omened, to know at last beyond a peradventure on what side those interests mean to fight. In finding them

arrayed against us we find arrayed against us interests which the hearts of men love to defeat."

"By happy force of circumstance," Mr. Jerome said on November 2 at Cooper Union, "this campaign has grown in visible importance since the day it was opened in this hall until to-night. Its issues have been defined more and more imposingly, until they have been seen to merge themselves in one great issue, not whether this or that man is the better, not whether this or that man is less vile than in his public actions he seems to show himself to be, but whether the American people is fit to rule itself under democratic institutions. We have had as yet only a hundred years of so-called self-government, and we are just attaining our full growth as a Nation; and the hour of our trial is at hand.

"Within the memory of man there has been no campaign fought on the line of this campaign, and if at the election it is not plain beyond a doubt that we have had the people with us. I believe that there is no man here to-night who will live long enough to see a great campaign fought on these lines again. There has been implicit faith put in the plain people; there has been not one single word uttered that is not absolutely true; we have fought a clean fight, every one of us, from start to finish; and it is for the plain people of this city to decide what shall be the outcome of our fight.

"Not that in my heart I have one instant's fear of a defeat. I believe with

all my heart, unswervingly and absolutely, that the plain people Abraham Lincoln trusted to the end of his magnificent career are to be relied on now as then to see the fact and do the right. I have been taught, boy and man, that rectitude means something; that on it, in their hour of trial, human beings may rely. I may be young and an enthusiast, as they tell me; but I have had time to know all sorts and conditions of men in this great country, and I have had time to read nearly every word the fathers of this country ever spoke or ever wrote; and the wise men may be right who tell me that I am doomed to disappointment; but I do not think I am. The plain people are slow to judge, and rightly; they are slow to act, and rightly; but here in this city they have had before their eyes for long years the actions and the lives of the gang of criminals that rules it, and I think the fullness of the hour is come.

"There is no controversy possible about the acts of the administration that we have been living under; there is a question only whether acts like those shall be continued and condoned. And I believe that God Almighty placed in all men's hearts a clean-cut line between right and wrong; and that when an appeal is grounded, not on this man's merits or on that man's merits, but on those eternal laws that will remain immutable when you and I and all of us are gone, the hearts of English-speaking men throughout the habitable globe are certain to respond." [TO BE CONTINUED]

T

HE finest line in Emerson's greatest poem, "The Problem," is: "Himself from God he could not free." In itself it has no poetic merit, but it is the key-word that solves the problem which ever vexes the mind of man until it is referred to God. Emerson, in these oft-quoted lines, sets forth the greatest achievements of man and of nature as well, and explains their wonder by putting each one in some relation to the world of the spirit. The scope, the splendor, the insight of the poem are immense. It vindicates what we have called the unconquerable habit of prayer. Whatever great thing is done, is done through God.

In order to put the same truth in like relation to personal life, we place beside it a once familiar hymn by Mrs. Phoebe Brown:

I love to steal awhile away From every cumbering care. It is infinitely below Emerson's great lines in poetic value, but far above them in meet

ing conscious human necessity. Its meaning is lost in its homely simplicity and the very depth of its humility. Emerson's central thought is overwhelmed by the splendor of the entire poem. Together they cover the two sides of prayer-one, the unconquerable sense of God; the other, the unappeasable desire to commune with God.

Nothing is more deeply wrought into us than the instinct of prayer. No matter what first prompts it: let the theories go, and trust the fact; pray man always has, and pray he always will. Some astonished reader who has not breathed or thought a prayer since childhood may quote himself as the refutation of this assertion. Nevertheless, there will come a time when he will pray, even if in some extreme moment it be but "the upward glancing of an eye." Still, it must be confessed that man is so wonderfully wrought that he can turn upon himself and extirpate his highest faculty or put it

to a sleep that seems death; nature has room for monstrosity. The habit of prayer is a part of the contents of human nature. We may toss it out of the window of science or of metaphysics, but it will come back. We may let it lie, a forgotten thing, in some corner of our house; or set it down as a superstition and quote as proof its prevalence among the benighted the world over-as if universality were not the infallible sign of a truth; all this may be, still from God ourselves we cannot free, even if we never steal away from our cumbering cares to commune with him. Prayer has fuller expression among the untaught because there is a simpler play of nature; instinct more freely asserts itself-like the motions of the babe at its mother's breast; but these instincts are the roots of our strongest passion. The immense variety of its forms is the pledge of its reality. What is universal is absolute. It may sink to such a depth as prayer-wheels and numbering rosaries, or rise to the ecstasy of St. Agnes as she sends her breath to heaven on her frosty eve; it may run into all sorts of vagaries; but one simple fact is clear all the way through-man will pray, and will not suffer himself to be kept from it. If it is sometimes gross; if it misses the idea of importunity, and lapses into thinking that it will be heard for much speaking, or that if simultaneous it has special power; or if it clothes itself in ritual robes that seem to smother its breath, still its central character is not lost: it is still humanity bowing before its Creator and turning to its eternal and infinite Friend.

It is a poor question to ask, Is prayer for gain, or does it gain anything? Does it spring out of weakness or fear? Poor questions because they overlook the poverty and weakness of humanity as it turns to its only possible helper. Prayer is as natural and simple as the cry of young ravens to God for their food. The correlation of prayer to humanity, rising out of simple and unmeaning forms and growing rational as man advances toward his ideal, until at last he cries, "Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee," is a fact with which we must settle before turning it

over to mere piety, or dropping it out of our lives.

It is strange that the beauty of prayer is so overlooked by present-day thought. The poet never misses it. In the long run the poets win the great human verdicts. What they bind remains fast. They know that the beautiful is the true. In all ages and the world over, the bowed head, the bended figure, the folded hands, the upturned eyes, have not only commanded reverence but stirred a sense of mingled charm and awe as if some mystery were unfolding. The artist studies the picture long, for he is never deceived by a fiction, nor does he stop to admire unreality. When one chances as may happen in other lands—to pass a wayside shrine where a poor woman has bowed to pray for her sick child, or an old man stops to rest both body and soul, one's heart joins in the prayers, whatever the head may think of it-from God ourselves we cannot free. The prayers make the ground holy where we stand, and the trees glow with indwelling Deity.

There is a verse in the New Testament that one cannot read-if he will pause a moment upon it-without a sense first of wonder and then of awe: "He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God." accustomed to-day to think of Christ as a divine humanist. Whatever else we may believe, we are agreed upon this: he was humanity itself at work with every faculty-no mystic, no debater in the schools, but a servant of humanity down to the last detail of service, the busiest and the most practical of men, always among the people, and apparently with no thought but for them. Not wholly so, however. Service was his passion; but he had another passion-a passion for God. The calm ecstasy of a vision of God was upon him, and he could not break it until day dawned, when-full of God-he went down to his work again. We are here not in the region of miracle, nor even of religion as we name it, but of pure and perfect humanity-doing the thing most natural and most necessary to itself. To pray is natural. To fail in it is to fall short of humanity-not utterly, perhaps, but to miss its glory and its strength.