well to answer criticisms which are based on such obvious misapprehension of plain facts that a mere citation is sufficient to impale the critic.

In The Outlook of August 2 there was a very interesting and readable article entitled "Will the Rural Credits Law Work?" It was a beautiful illustration of how much more readable an article can be made when the author does not allow himself to be hampered by those troublesome details called facts." The author of this criticism exposes his unfamiliarity with his subject in almost the first paragraph, by referring to "the Federal Land Board, comprising the Secretary of the Treasury, ex officio, and four other commissioners." The fact is that the title of the Board, as expressed throughout the Act, is "Federal Farm Loan Board," and that it comprises the Secretary of the Treasury and four "members," only one of whom is "Commissioner." This is a perfectly harmless error, and is cited only to show that ignorance of the Act, and not a deliberate attempt to misrepresent, is probably responsible for the subsequent errors in matters more material.

After referring to the fact that the Government will subscribe to as much of the original stock of each land bank as may not be taken by private investors-and throwing out the prophecy that this will be all the stock -the author adds: "But after any of the banks has accumulated $100,000 surplus a sinking fund of twenty-five per cent of all subsequent profits will be applied in taking up the Government stock until all of it is retired." Now the fact is that the payment and retirement of the Government's stock is not contingent upon either the accumulation of any surplus or the earning of any profits.

the Act provides (Section 5) is that after farm loan associations shall have subscribed $750,000 to the stock of any Federal land bank, twenty-five per cent of all sums thereafter subscribed to capital stock" by National farm loan associations shall be applied to the retirement of the stock originally subscribed.

The Act provides that the banks may charge the borrower on mortgage a rate one

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per cent higher than that which they are themselves paying on the bonds they sell. Our critic explains that "the one per cent difference is to cover overhead expenses of the bank and pay the Federal Board a salary of $10,000 for each Commissioner." Where this last idea had its birth it is impossible to guess. It would certainly have come to an untimely end if its author had happened to glance at Section 3 of the Act, where he would have read, "The salaries and expenses of the Federal Farm Loan Board . . . shall be paid by the United States."

One other statement is made in such a form that it is impossible to tell whether it is intended as a statement of facts or as a prophecy. I refer to the sentences: "The twelve Federal land banks are to be made Government depositories for Government deposits to a total amount of $6,000,000 at any one time. Interest is to be paid by the banks at 2 per cent." If this be prophecy, I will not quarrel with it. But might not modesty in that case have suggested the interpolation of "probably " or " I think "? If it be intended as a statement of anything appearing in the Act, it is wide of the mark. Section 6 does say, to be sure, that they shall be Government depositories "when designated for that purpose by the Secretary of the Treasury," but the Secretary has not yet designated them, or evidenced any intention to designate them. There is a further provision in Section 32 that under special conditions the Secretary may "make deposits for the temporary use of any Federal land bank," but that the aggregate of such temporary deposits shall not exceed the sum of $6,000,000 at any one time. It would seem that at this point our critic anticipated with prophetic insight the action of the Secretary of the Treasury, failed to notice the distinction between authorization and direction, confused ordinary and extraordinary deposits, and then capped the climax by evolving a rate of interest from his inner consciousness.

Attention is called to these details only to emphasize the importance of discussing this or any other Act of Congress with due regard to the facts.

Τ

HE Governor's job, as he started West, was first to convince that distant part of the country that he is human enough to be President of the United States, because that part of the country doesn't wish any other kind of a man to sit in the seat of the mighty at Washington; and, second, under difficult and delicate circumstances, to begin to create a Republican majority that will finally be responsive to the Hughes ideals out of a broken and leaderless party in process of reconstruction after a revolution. And to begin to accomplish this second labor of Hercules at a time when, after some twenty years of political ebullience, an ease-loving, prosperous, and conglomerate population is torn asunder in sentiment with respect to dominant international affairs and gives no sign of desire to register a majority for idealisms, anyway—at least until after a process of education which is not likely to be completed before election day in November. Some job!

I am going to try to give the readers of The Outlook a picture of how the Governor met his task, of how the character and personality of the man responded to the temperament and environment of the folks in the West, and of how they responded to him. I have spoken of the Governor's job and the Governor's task. It is strange how, even in American politics, the good works that men do sometimes live on in the recollection of the electorate. I heard him occasionally referred to as Justice Hughes by some judicial dignitary or other. But almost always it was the Governor of New York whom the great audiences had in mind, and not the Judge at all. Nearly every introduction was of what he did when he was Governor of New York, -and the most instant and generous applause that came to him as he spoke would occur again and again when he referred to some

thing that happened or of how he tried to conduct himself when he was Governor of New York. Everybody seemed to know all about that, and the content of their thought of him whom they had never seen before was of a man who had fought for party freedom and liberal measures of legislation and for the thing that was right in the capitol of the State of New York. And my judgment is that that is the thing which is more likely to carry him through to success at the election than all the campaign argument which will be heard in his behalf between now and November. To the mind of the great majority of the American people he is not running on his promises or on his views of what happened or ought to have happened under the Wilson Administration. He is running on his record-on the belief of the people of the United States that he is the kind of a man who will meet future National contingencies as they arise with the intelligence and firmness and strength and patriotism with which he met the lesser contingencies in the commonwealth of New York.

Some of the current likenesses of Hughes do him justice, but many do not. He is tall and splendidly set up, with a full, powerful face and massive forehead, a well-trimmed beard which adds dignity and strength. It was interesting to see the great crowds at the station pick out the candidate. "That's him," they cried; "the tall chap with the whiskers." He has an eye, large and keen and penetrating, which seems to say, “Come on, if you are straight, I am with you." A splendid chest and back, great arms and legs, pretty thoroughly bald, but altogether a powerful physical figure. As he has gone among the Western crowds he has had a fine, alert, and regnant appearance. He looks like a President-that is, like a born leader of democracy; and as I occasionally mingled

with the vast audiences and listened to the comment of the people I found that everybody was satisfied on this score. They thought he was big enough for the job.

Mentally, Hughes is a great dynamo of energy who properly and modestly realizes his power. He has a wonderful capacity for analyzing facts and situations. There is probably no man in American public life in our time who has in his public work shown a surer quality of detachment from personal bias. He could sit in a case which involved his own family and not be influenced by a hair. He thinks straight, and he has a controlling sense of right. He has broadened on the bench. Not simply because he has made such profound studies in Nationalism and human justice, but because he has thought deeply into political movements and read widely in the liberal political literature of our time. And he has grown in the direction of broad and generous political liberalism. Through all his Western speeches there ran this thread. The Republican party must be the genuine liberal party of America. "I would not be here if I did not think of the Republican party as a liberal party," he said again and again. And his emphasis throughout the West upon efficiency, economy, a budget system, the businesslike administration of government, the expert, the overthrow of the spoils system, a scientific tariff, industrial organization, and especially upon Nationalism, was avowedly intended to give fair notice that, if he is elected, he will seek to lay the foundations of freedom and human welfare so deep that we shall have in America not only a thoroughly organized government by the people, but also a government perfected, fitted, and able to do whatever ought to be done for the last man, woman, or child under its sway that needs protection and succor. And the Republican party will be that kind of a party under his leadership or go out of business. My judgment is, from what I saw in the West and from what I have seen elsewhere, that even the stiffnecked generation of the Republican reactionaries will be constrained to follow him humbly, if not gladly. It is the only way out. It is probably the last chance that Republicanism has once more to make good in the United States of America.

Hughes made it clear throughout the West that he understands the need of a great liberal party in the United States; that he knows well that the Democratic party, chained

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to a belated political South and to other influences and traditions which delay its advance, cannot in time be made over into an instrument of efficient liberalism. Hughes believes that the Republican party, broken and stricken and chastened as it has been, with its sound instincts of Nationalism and efficiency, can once more become the instrument of freedom and human welfare if it can be shot through with a sense of right, with a sense of integrity and devotion to the cause, not of a class or an interest, but of the whole people. And it is in this spirit and with precisely this in view that Hughes told the West he desired to serve his party and his country.

I suppose you think that a man of the Hughes sort is above being a good politician. It depends upon what you mean by politician; whether you use the term in the lower or the higher sense. If you mean a glorified ward-heeler who knows every kind of human nature at a glance and can always pick his man for his own purposes-that is hardly like Hughes. Probably Hughes can make the usual number of mistakes in reading certain ranges of human nature and picking men—and correct them. But I regard him as a very able politician-I believe in taking that word over and purifying its content I like it better than statesman. The statesman is of too lonely grandeur, in danger of being too detached from the world as it sins and sighs and struggles. Hughes is an able politician in the sense that he weighs cautiously and fairly the great human forces that are at work in the world and in the American population, and he reads the mind of his countrymen, I think, exceedingly well..

As we turned our faces from the Pacific coast once more towards the East, there began to reach us from the Atlantic slope expressions of political concern and disquietude which I was very much interested to analyze. Hughes, it was said in the hostile journals and by a few anxious political correspondents, was not striking out from the shoulder as he was of old wont to do in his hand-to-hand struggles with his New York foes. He was limiting the range of his discussion. not revealing his whole mind. His emphasis was wrong. He didn't say enough about the European war or about our international relations with countries across the sea. He was not sufficiently pro-Ally or pro-German. And these particular correspondents and newspapers seemed to be under the impres

He was

sion that we had perhaps been traveling for three weeks through the frost belt towards political defeat and despair.

I was interested, because no such impression as this could possibly be gathered in the West. Not from any newspaper of any party, not from any one of the vast audiences that faced the Republican candidate from Detroit to Seattle and from San Diego to Denver. If ever a man talked to people by the acre in this country, it was Hughes on his Western trip. In a subsequent article I shall undertake to describe these Western mass-meetings of the people and how they reacted to the message of Hughes. But what I call attention to here is that the West felt no such lack in the candidate and his message as seemed to be indicated by the hostile portion of the Atlantic press or by the friendly concern of a certain respectable and intelligent element of the East.

Hughes is remarkable in his power to extemporize the expression of ideas which have themselves been thoroughly wrought out in advance. And he delivered a series of such speeches, never twice the same, from Detroit around to Denver and beyond, before great eager and delighted crowds ranging from five to twelve and fifteen thousand people. Those who remember his campaigning during his Governorship will recall him calmly stalking from one end of the platform to the other, his quiet, strong mind working as if on ball-bearings-a Corliss engine, noiseless and efficient. The range of his discussion in the West was very wide-labor, democracy, efficiency, economy, Nationalism, the failure of the foreign policy of the Government, the need of the expert, the tariff, preventive diplomacy, social welfare, naval and military preparation, a new industrial organization, the way to permanent peace, National unity, the assimilation of aliens, the protection of American life and property throughout the world, international arbitration, the development of Alaska, the dominance of the public interest in every concern of the United States and there was no frigidity and no pussy-footing in any of it, and I heard it all. His discussion of the tariff in Spokane and other parts of the Northwest where this subject is of great importance was broad and wise and sound in its economics. In fact, I didn't know that any judge in the United States knew so much economics. And everywhere Hughes left the trail of great, confident crowds, of Republican assurance, and a suffi

cient measure of the spirit and the practice of reunion to give promise of good majorities at least for the National ticket in these old-time Republican commonwealths. There were lions in the way, and there are difficulties yet to be overcome, to which I shall later refer, before these States become again permanently Republican, but Hughes carried with him the impression and presage of success from Michigan to the Pacific.

I think he is more astute than his critics as well as broader-visioned. In the West he was cautiously but fundamentally constructive, and beyond this he took care, like the good lawyer that he is, only to file a complaint against his Democratic adversary. As I write this, the demurrer which will come from the President at the time of his notification has not yet appeared. When that comes, I look for the swift joining of the issue and an oral argument that will cover a wide and sufficient range. It is not wise in political conflict to unfold your whole strategy too early.

But I think it is not going to be possible for Mr. Hughes to satisfy entirely the more perturbed and turbulent of his critics, who would have him enter into concrete attacks upon Germany or England or dip deeply into. some of the more harrowing and ill-handled international events of the present Administration. No doubt he will go further than he has yet gone. No doubt he will discuss freely the international rights and duties of the country. But, whatever his strong personal views may be upon the ill-starred events which have aroused the passion and prejudice of great elements of our population, he has a National duty as the official head of a great party which he is not at liberty to forget. Not simply to win in a paltry sense, but to create a fresh National majority out of suspicious and discordant elements in a discordant country, and to create that majority for a great patriotic purpose, in order that in some National group there may be the power and the will to govern firmly and wisely a hundred million people. That is his job, and it involves a course of conduct and of speech which the private citizen is under no obligation to follow. And he can never forget, either, that he is not simply going through the motions of the campaign for the sake of the mental and physical exercise, but that after the 4th of March next he is likely to be the President of this whole people, of Germans and Irish as well as of English and Russians, for whom he must furnish a