ness interests had much to do with his diminishing political activity. Soon after 1847 the family suffered reverses in business, which resulted in its dispersal in 1852. Dr. Hanna was forced to start his business career all over again under novel surroundings; and his new work and its heavier responsibilities could not have left him much leisure for politics.

Nevertheless, it is significant that the only one of Benjamin Hanna's sons who exhibited any active personal interest in politics was Mark Hanna's father; and this interest was apparently merely one expression of a versatile and sympathetic disposition, which was aroused to action by every serious call made upon him by his domestic and social surroundings. In addition to being a business man and a political speaker he was an energetic temperance reformer, and he always retained a lively interest in his early profession. It was a period in which one man could easily and acceptably play many parts, and in which a man of an essential social and communicative disposition was inevitably driven to play many parts. The better men of that generation tended to spread their personal energy over a very large area.

In the case of Dr. Hanna the business interest was dominant, and the others only subordinate. He was a man who acted from personal rather than impersonal motives, from sympathies and affections rather than from strong purpose. In the absence of any special bent for professional or political life, he merged his own interest with that of the family. By the year 1840 there were not very many men in Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, who were as much like capitalists as Benjamin Hanna and his sons. The careers of the sons were determined by the opportunities which their father was able to offer to them; and in accepting this opportunity Dr. Leonard Hanna was apparently the only one who sacrificed other personal interests of any great importance. He did not travel very far either as a physician, a politician or a business man, but if his efficiency was diminished by his versatility, the same quality served only to increase the attraction of his personality.

H. Melville Hanna tells a story about his father and grandfather which is both touching and amusing, and which may fitly terminate this sketch of Mark Hanna's immediate for

bears. After Dr. Leonard Hanna had moved to Cleveland in 1852, he frequently returned to New Lisbon to see Benjamin Hanna, who by that time was a very old and a very sick man. While talking over his ailments with his son, who retained in the family the authority of a physician, Benjamin said, "Dr. Speaker has stopped my smoking, Leonard. What dost thee think about it?" The other answered nothing, but going to the big mahogany sideboard, filled his father's pipe, gave it to him and lighted it. The old man took a few puffs and then said, "I was sure, Leonard, that thee knew more than Dr. Speaker."

CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD

IN the house of Dr. Leonard Hanna there seems to have been less discipline and more kindliness than was usual in American homes of that period. Discipline there was, for Samantha Converse Hanna had inherited the traditions of domestic New England, and as Dr. Hanna was frequently away from home for days and weeks on end, the mother's authority was dominant and pervasive. She exercised it decisively but with fairness and good judgment. She is described as a woman of positive character, energetic mind and considerable executive ability. Her active life was centred around her home and children, but she was social by instinct, and under less primitive social conditions she would have entertained liberally. As it was, whenever any conspicuous man came to New Lisbon, she always wanted to have him at her table.

Dr. Hanna, on the other hand, was preeminently a kindly and an easy-going man. He did not believe in the practice of flogging, which at that time prevailed in many American homes; and, as we shall see, he was inclined to let his children have their own way. While his wife was bright but not witty, he had an Irishman's love of a good joke. Miss Hattie Converse, a cousin of Samantha Hanna, and for a while a school-teacher in the town, lived with the family; and she and Dr. Hanna were continually exchanging jokes and sharpening their wits at each other's expense.

The Leonard Hanna household was not only unusually genial for its time and place, but it was also unusually refined. The Converses were much more like gentlefolks than were the average pioneer settlers in the Western States. Samantha Hanna had a taste for flowers, ornaments and good furniture, and their house itself was an exceptionally good-looking building for Ohio in 1840. Whenever Leonard Hanna made one

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of his frequent trips to Philadelphia on business, his wife loaded him with commissions. Their furniture was all imported from the East, and what was still more unusual, the yard was planted with shrubbery, which had also to be obtained from the seaboard. The table was abundant, the food well-cooked, the linen of excellent quality, and the children well-clothed. All together very few Ohio boys of that time were brought up in such a well-equipped, well-ordered and genial home.

Of course, it remained very simple, and all hands had to share in the work. If Mark Hanna escaped the scars of that grim struggle for existence in which most Americans of the previous, and to a large extent of his own, generation were engaged, he was certainly not brought up in idleness. As soon as he was old enough, he did his share of work in the field, and he had certain regular chores assigned to him, such as driving the cows to pasture. There were no gentlemen of leisure in a Middle Western town before the War. Of course there were loafers, but they were called loafers. The possession even of considerable means did not entitle a man or his sons to abandon labor with their own hands.

In religion a mitigation of the earlier Puritanism had already taken place. Benjamin Hanna's sons did not remain strict Quakers. One of the laws of the association was that any person who was married outside the church or who was married by anybody but a Quaker minister should be disowned. The application of this rule left Leonard Hanna and all his brothers except Kersey outside the pale. It does not appear, however, that they became active in any other denomination. Their situation made them tolerant, and the process of religious emasculation which begins in toleration usually ends in indifference. Kersey Hanna stated that Leonard, in spite of certain doctrinal disagreements with the Hicksite Quakers, considered himself to be by conviction a member of that sect. Nevertheless, after leaving New Lisbon, he regularly attended the Presbyterian Church, to which his wife belonged, without becoming a Presbyterian himself. Thus in the matter of religious training the earlier rigorous standards were very much relaxed; and Mark Hanna as a boy could, as we shall see, joke with impunity about his religious convictions.