ation would be an open acknowledgment of the failure of self-government. Those, by the way, who are in haste to have free government granted to the Filipinos now have an opportunity to use their good offices on and for the Cubans-a far easier task, much nearer home. AN OLD NOTION ABOUT FREE GOVERNMENT HIS failure of the Palma government est boon of civilization, but it is also the most difficult achievement of mankind. Its area cannot be hastily broadened. Its benefits. cannot be gratuitously bestowed. Even after it has been won by stout fighting in the first place and long maintained by civic watchfulness and fed by provincial patriotism and helped by geographical position, how hard it is to preserve! Yet here is your excitable Cuban throwing it away-throwing away in a pet what THIS of the patriots of every monarchy on earth Russia, where the movement toward freer government does not seem really to move forward at all, provoke somewhat discouraging reflections in this period of frequent international peace conferences. It is an old and unregenerate notion that a people who do not or cannot win freedom for themselves, are not likely to keep it; and winning it for themselves has generally hitherto meant winning it by stout fighting. If the Russian people, or any strong section of them, were to turn themselves into an army like Cromwell's Roundheads, the whole world would prick up its ears and quicken its hope for them. If President Palma had promptly and vigorously put down the Cuban insurrection by force-if he could have done so the world would have regarded the Cubans as men able to maintain self-government. And you have doubtless heard many men say, that if the Cubans had been able to govern themselves they would have been able to win their freedom from Spain. This old opinion may or may not be true; and, even if it be true, it may not be a sound argument for war. But it is true that selfgovernment for any long period of time is yet the secret of English-sprung races and of the Swiss only. It is a difficult art. You may thrust free institutions on men of other races and they may copy free governmental machinery and methods; but the continuous maintenance of really free government is an art that comes, or seems to come, with race or blood. There are most hopeful experiments in South America-perhaps it is unjust at this late day to speak of them longer as experiments; and there is the French Republic, which seems secure. Yet if the measure of any considerable period of time be required before success is at last assured, these are yet young republics; and some of them are republics tempered with reminiscences of unrepublican ways. Free representative government is the great die for-as children throw away a toy that they have quarreled about. And among us are many men, wise in other ways, who contend that the free gift of independent government would turn Moros into self-restrained New Englanders. SECRET MR. TAFT'S REMARKABLE CAREER ECRETARY Taft is fortunate as most capable and just men. are- -in the high tasks that fall to his hand. A few years ago he was a judge in Ohio, credited with the very proper ambition to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and, so far as the public knows, with no other ambition. He was so good a judge, so vigorously good, that the task of organizing and administering government in the Philippines came to him, by one of those inspired accidents that happen to men of destiny. It was not a career that any man could have planned for himself. It was not a career that a "prudent” man with judicial or even political ambitions would have chosen to become the first colonial governor under the accidental policy that we had had thrust upon us. It was a hazardous venture; or, it would have been hazardous for an ordinary man. But Mr. Taft made it a steppingstone to a lasting place in our history. Nor was it in the course of the usual routine of events that he should come into the President's Cabinet. But, when he became Secretary of War, it was at the time of the beginning of our work on the Panama Canal; and again he found an historic task in his hands. Now, for a third time, he has run into a great opportunity-his recent errand to Cuba. This, too, he did with simplicity, directness, and efficiency. Only those who know the difficulty of dealing with the Spanish temperament will fully understand the extraordinary tact that was demanded to do this delicate task of laying a mailed hand on a government that had failed, and laying it so gently as to confer a favor. BRONZE STATUE OF JOHN W. MACKAY, BY MR. GUTZON BORGLUM, AT RENO, NEV. "SO HE LOOKS AS I HAVE SEEN HIM OVER AND OVER AGAIN WHEN (See Page 8160) PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION AND DIREC- (See Page 8216) He made our purpose in the intervention so clear that he, disarmed the critics of either government, saying in his proclamation: "The Provisional Government hereby established will be maintained only long enough to restore order, peace, and public confidence, by direction of and in the name of the President of the United States, and then to hold such elections as may be necessary to determine on those persons upon whom the permanent Government of the republic should be devolved." Mr. Taft's judicial experience, his historic achievement as Governor of the Philippines, where he created a colonial government of a new sort in the world and for a new purpose, his steady grasp of the whole Panama problem, his cleanness of mind, and his independence of character which led him to rebuke the wretched political ring of his own party in his own state, his almost classic campaign speeches in North Carolina and in Maine, and now his efficient action in Cuba-these tasks have all shown the qualities that men like in a leader; and the Republican party must nominate a man for the Presidency within less than two years. The country is already wondering whether it will be wise enough to rise to a great occasion or silly enough to put forward some mere procurer of Southern and other machine delegates to the convention. In recent times no party has had a nominee who, before he came to the Presidency, had shown such fitness for high executive duties as Mr. Taft has shown. FACTS ABOUT THE ATLANTA MURDERS THE HE principal facts about the race-riot at Atlanta, Ga., are these: On one September Saturday afternoon, four insults or attempted assaults on white women by black men were reported in the neighborhood. That is the first fact. Now there is no gainsaying that crimes of this kind breed violence. But it is equally clear-it has been proved over and over again --that violence does not lessen this crime. Everybody concedes this. There has never been an assault less for all the lynchings; and many a time an innocent victim has been lynched. Moreover, there is no excuse for lynching Negroes in the South on the plea of the slowness of the law; for the laws are made and the courts are conducted by white men. And, whenever trials for assault are slow, the machinery of the law can be quickened. Lynching or shooting, then, for any crime is not a remedy for the crime. Perhaps it is even an excitant of it. And the community that indulges in lynchings is a deep disgrace to American life. The next fact is that the yellow newspapers of Atlanta inflamed "the toughs" on this subject and wrought up the crowd of thugs that thronged the streets on Saturday night of one of the very worst of American cities (for a considerable part of Atlanta is made up of the adventurous riff-raff that the mining towns of the West used to relieve us of)-wrought up the crowd to a murderous pitch; and the whites began to beat and to kill Negroes indiscriminately. No pretense was made that the victims were guilty of any crime. Perhaps twenty-five men were killed in the nights of terror that followed-perhaps more. Nobody knows. The second fact, then, is that vile yellow journals in a "tough" town may at any time. become direct inciters of crime. Indirectly they are inciters to crime always, everywhere. The third fact is that the city of Atlanta has a municipal government that is an encouragement to crime. The police and the fire department did what they could after the riot started and when it was too late. But the city government itself, like the city, lacks character. The next fact, behind all these others, is the criminality of conducting a state_political campaign on the "Negro issue." It was a foolishly long campaign-about a year and a half long-and the contest between the candidates for the nomination for Governor became more and more a contest in denunciation of the Negro as if the Negro had had control of politics in Georgia! The paucity of thought, the narrowness of vision, the low level of public discussion that this campaign revealed is, perhaps, the most discouraging recent fact in American political life. For we come now to the bottom fact of all— that there is a dormant race enmity felt especially by the least efficient white men, that can at any time and at many places be fanned into fury by political agitation and by yellow journalism.. Perhaps at bottom this enmity is industrial. A "sorry" white man resents a Negro's success. Moreover, when other subjects of excitement or discussion fail, there is always the "Negro question"; for it was an Atlanta clergyman who wrote a year ago that the Southern people had talked and written and thought so long about the Negro that they had lost a proper perspective of life. Given the forces at work, therefore, there was nothing surprising in the brutal and barbarous outbreak at Atlanta. Good men of both races had feared it as a result of the political campaign and of the yellow journals devoted largely to the Negro question. BUT THE BURDENED SOUTH wealth, the better buyers they are of American products. This is a fact that many of our academic writers on trade forget. The time will come, and it ought to come soon, when we shall make both a more intelligent and a more diligent effort to build up our trade with South America. No doubt our relative neglect of it is shortsighted. But after all sentimental and theoretical things have been said, it remains true that trade has laws of its own. The flag that it follows is the flag of profit. UT Atlanta and its degenerate journalists and the inflammatory campaigns of Georgia are not the Southern people; of its own. the Southern people; and it is a cheerful sign of fair judgment and of independent thought that few commentators on this lapse to barbarism have regarded it as typical of the South, and that Southern men and Southern journals of character have been prompt and emphatic in their condemnation. The worthless white man and the criminal Negro, whether in Atlanta or in New York, or in towns in the Middle West, are such easy victims of violent impulses that the promptest and most rigid enforcement of criminal laws and the firmest local government are necessary to keep them in restraint when the races clash. Patience, a long patience, the elevation of Southern politics to a higher level than denunciation of the Negro, and the discouragement of degenerate journalism-in a word, real men in command of civic life, and not inflammatory and oratorical leaders-these are called for everywhere. OUR RELATIONS WITH SOUTH AMERICA SECRETARY ROOT'S itinerary of South America has had happy results on both great divisions of our hemisphere. The South Americans understand us better, and we have had, for our enlightenment, a flood of helpful literature about them. And much of the literature of the subject naturally concerns our trade relations. Our manufacturers and merchants are reminded of the neglected opportunities that await them from Panama to Patagonia. Truly, too; for our South-American trade is yet a pitifully small item in our mounting foreign commerce. But the explanation of its smallness and of its slow growth is its smallness. There are not yet enough people in South America who buy foreign wares, to compel us to give especial attention to their market so long as we find much larger and much more profitable markets in Europe in the United Kingdom, in Germany, and in France. The further advanced a people are in their needs and tastes and In a generation or two this status will be changed, for the population of that great continent will by that time be far greater than it is now. And trade must forever depend on population. The Argentine Republic has now only about 5,500,000 inhabitants; but Buenos Ayres has grown from 100,000 to 1,000,000 in half a century. A great era of railroad building is coming in South America. This will be the era also of a quickened immigration. Then, when the population is large enough and their wants such as our manufacturers can best supply, our trade chance will become greater. But, in the meantime, European peoples will continue to build up trade in that continent faster than we will, because South America supplies Europe with some of the same products that have made, till recently, the bulk of our foreign trade. South America still awaits our cultivation, as it has for generations; and the trade relations between the two Americas become gradually more important. But no sudden increase is to be expected. MR. CHARLES E. HUGHES, OF NEW YORK SCANDALS in public affairs are humil iating, but, when the public arouses itself, they serve a good purpose in revealing strong and honest men. strong and honest men. No better example could be given than the discovery, for political uses, of Mr. Hughes, of New York, by his conduct of the examinations into the gas and insurance scandals. He went about this work in so direct and effective a way-the truth and the public interest being always his aim—that he naturally appeared the best man for the Republican nomination for Governor. He put the same vigor and directness into the campaign that he threw into these investigations. A clean strong lawyer, not a parasite or a tool of corporations, he is the type of man who best represents a plundered community when it turns on its plunderers and is in a mood |