T

HE relations between the President and his Secretary of State afford Washington and the political world in general their most precious subject of gossip. Few politicians believed that Mr. Bryan would be in Mr. Wilson's Cabinet. Many doubted that he would be asked; more believed he would decline. When they learned that he both had been asked and had accepted, there was a pretty general falling back on the dark prediction that the relationship of President and Premier would endure only a few months. Two men so ambitious, it was argued, could not possibly be expected to pursue a common course. Two temperaments so imperious could not get along together. Mutual suspicions, if not mutual antagonisms, were certain to arise. The aim of one would be to make his administration so great a success that he would be acclaimed for a second term; the other would hardly have that as an aim, especially in view of the Baltimore platform declaration in favor of a single term.

With regard to the single term, that is a matter which undeniably lies unsettled, undiscussed, unreferred to, between the two men. But that is precisely where it ought to lie. There often arise questions which no discussion and no announcement of intentions can settle; which must be left to settle themselves. Bryan undoubtedly believes that the Baltimore plank pledges Mr. Wilson to a single term. Probably Mr. Wilson has no such idea. He has never declared his acceptance of the Baltimore platform, and the single term plank is highly ambiguous

Mr.

it assumes to pledge the candidate to “the principle" of a single term. There were those who believed that if Mr. Bryan were invited to join the Cabinet, he would ask Mr. Wilson whether they were in agreement on that plank. We may assume with entire confidence that that question was never asked for, of course, Mr. Wilson could not have permitted himself to answer it.

The truth is, the subject is peculiarly and entirely one which can be dealt with wisely, from every point of view, in just one way - and that way is, by letting it alone. It would be an exhibition of very poor taste for Mr. Wilson to refuse a second term before any one had suggested offering him one. It would be impolitic for him to do so, for it would weaken his influence. It would be as idle for him to do so as it was for one of his predecessors to refuse, four years in advance, a third term. If, as the campaign of 1916 draws on, Mr. Wilson's administration has been a failure, it will not be necessary to appeal to the Baltimore plank to prevent his re-nomination. If it has been the success his friends believe it will be, the Baltimore plank will be forgotten; no pledge could have been invented so solemn that its recollection could stop his re-nomination. The single term question will settle itself.

Now, Mr. Bryan knows this. He is not so unpractised in practical politics as to believe that an ambiguous platform plank is going to have any consideration in 1916. Yet to deny that the defeated hero of three campaigns would like to be President would take hardihood indeed. My conclusion is that Mr. Bryan, so far as he is actuated by any ambitious anticipations,

expects nothing else than to succeed Mr. Wilson in 1921. He will then be only sixty-one years old, and he will be as mellowed and widely beloved a man as ever sat in the chair of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln. Not a vestige then will remain of the hate that villified him. His career will round itself out completely, in the light which it is already assuming, as one of the most remarkable illustrations of the reversal of a people's judgment.

The only other tenable theory is that Mr. Bryan hopes to wreck the Administration. Some light on this hypothesis may be thrown by a passage of words that took place last winter; my account may be taken as authentic. A political friend was suggesting to Mr. Bryan that it would be a mistake for him to commit his fortunes to the Wilson Administration. "Stay out of it," he urged. "Suppose it is a failure. You will be involved, and be discredited yourself. The nomination in 1916 wouldn't come to you, and if it did, it wouldn't be worth while for a member of the Cabinet to run."

"Have you reflected, my friend," was Mr. Bryan's reply, "that if the Wilson Administration is a failure, it won't be worth while for any Democrat to run in 1916?"

Mr. Bryan is in the Cabinet in good faith. It is impossible that he should not be conscious of the irony which, in the hour of Democratic victory, ignoring him who chiefly bore the burden and heat of the day, gave the reward to another. Mr. Bryan is hardly a philosopher, but he

ing within the memory of this generation matches the abominating horror the shrieks of which greeted the nomination of the "cross of gold" orator.

To hear him execrated as a fellow of Aaron Burr, Benedict Arnold, and Judas Iscariot was common a dozen years ago. "Mouthing demagogue,' anarchist," "renegade," "puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld" - such were the ordinary epithets by which he was described. I have seen men cleanse their mouths after having spoken the name of Bryan. For years, half of the people of the United States piously believed that William Jennings Bryan was a depraved, vicious man; an enemy of law and of Society. Almost as many more, it is true, hailed him as a Savior; thousands would have laid down their lives for him. But the astonishing fact is that the virulence of the hate which, on his appearance, broke out and raged like a pestilence or a mania, has disappeared. He has not changed; he has not recanted. He has just lived.

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. "What is success?” is a query on which the meditative might reflect with possible profit. To go down in battle three times; to be still denied, in 1912, what seemed almost within reach in 1896; after sixteen years of unprofitable fighting to hand over the leadership at the dawn of a new and propitious day to a new captain unheard of in the earlier battles this would not commonly be said to describe "success." But can you say that that man is a defeated man who now sees his principles prevail and the party that he fought to save from itself finally committed to all he stood and stands for and finally triumphant in the Nation that so long rejected it? There is nothing so vulgar as "success." Anybody can "succeed." It takes the great to "fail." Mr. Bryan belongs to one aristocracy the aristocracy of men who might "succeed," but who magnificently decline to do so; who set their hearts on a great end but scorn to stipulate for the personal rewards which in the eyes of the vulgar are the proof and perquisites of triumph.

At the nominating convention held in

St.Louis in 1904, Mr. Bryan, declining then to run a third time, returned the commission, as he put it, which he had held for eight years as leader of the party. The climax of this, one of his most affecting speeches, was in these words:

"You may dispute whether I have fought a good fight; you may dispute whether I have finished my course; but you can not deny that I have kept the faith."

And the faith has triumphed. The free coinage of silver, even if you regard it as an utterly mistaken and mischievous idea, was, after all, only a passing expression of the doctrine that human rights are higher than property rights. On the subject of the relationship of the man and the dollar, the thought of the Nation has been completely revolutionized within the last sixteen years—and it is that revolution which has given birth to the whole programme of economic reform and social justice with its concern over the welfare of women and children, workingmen's insurance, and all the rest of it. The initiative and referendum, which might have been a rare zoölogical specimen, so far as most people knew, when Mr. Bryan began to advocate it, is here. Direct nominations, campaign publicity, the responsibility of the courts to the people, are popular and triumphing doctrines. The Constitution has been altered to permit the popular election of United States Senators and the imposition of the income tax.

Is this failure or success?

Indeed, so thorough has been the triumph of Mr. Bryan's faith that, unless he shortly finds new articles for it, he will be left behind by the progressive temper of the country. It was after Mr. Roosevelt's election to the Presidency eight years ago, during a dinner at which they were both present, that I heard Mr. Bryan humorously charge the Republican President with having "stolen his clothes." Mr. Bryan told how an old darkey woman lying sick had finally sent for the white physician in the neighborhood, the colored "doctor" having failed to give her relief. The new physician said: "Well, aunty, you had to send for me after all, didn't you? What did that old fraud do for you? Did he find out what was the

matter with you? Did he take your temperature?" Aunty replied: "Deed sir, I don't know what all he done took. I ain't had time look 'round yit, but dem no 'count niggahs liable take anything." Mr. Bryan wasn't sure that Mr. Roosevelt had left him even his temperature. That was a good joke in 1905. In 1913, it is a pure matter-of-fact statement to say that Mr. Bryan has, between Democrats and Progressives, been spoiled of every idea he ever had.

III

There shines out in Mr. Bryan's life a personal quality without recognition of which no analysis of his character is complete - a quality which indeed is its core and key.

life, shall you find a candidate for Congress Where, outside of the story of this man's at the close of the campaign gravely and gently presenting his adversary with a copy of Gray's "Elegy," expressing good wishes for his foeman, whether the morrow's balloting gave or forbade him

The applause of listening Senates to command!

Where, in the annals of hot partisan strife, will you find an orator, facing the enmity of a frenzied national convention, throwing away a point because he had caught sight of a wife in the throng of ten thousand?

The first draft of Mr. Bryan's resolution asking for the withdrawal of Mr. Ryan and Mr. Belmont from the Baltimore convention contained a passage referring to the methods by which Mr. Taft had just obtained his re-nomination at Chicago. It was the climax of the resolution. When Mr. Bryan came down from the platform after the dramatic speech offering this resolution, his friend and old-time secretary, Mr. Robert F. Rose, pulled him by the coat and said: "What became of the passage about Taft?" Mr. Bryan turned his head and asked in reply: "Why, didn't you see that Mrs. Taft was in the gallery?"

Where, in all the chronicles of Jeffersonian simplicity, more or less spontaneously practised in Democratic times at Washington, is a match for this? —

Mr. Bryan now rides in a carriage

furnished by the Government and driven by an Irishman who has conducted the Secretaries of State about Washington for nearly a quarter of a century. Mr. Bryan immediately became interested in his coachman, as he does in everybody associated with him in any capacity. A day or two before the delivery of the St. Patrick's Day speech which, by its comment on the abolition of the House of Lords, caused some comment in England, the Secretary asked his driver if he were going to the St. Patrick's Day dinner which the Irish societies of Washington were giving. No, the driver wasn't going. "Well, I should like to have you go," said Mr. Bryan, "and I'll see that you get an invitation." Accordingly, on the night of March 17th, the banquet at which the Secretary of State spoke was graced by the presence of his coachman, who was conspicuously placed, not only at the table, but on the programme; for, being a guest of honor and bearing the name of "Barry," which takes alphabetical precedence over "Bryan" and "Belmont," for instance, the coachman found that lo! his name led all the rest!

The conscientiousness of the man is unbelievable. Only his capacity for work makes it possible to execute the duties he lays upon himself. His labors as a campaigner will never be matched. I have myself been on the train with Mr. Bryan when he made an average of fifteen speeches a day for the best part of a week, and this is not an unusual record. So far as I know, his hardest day's work was done in Missouri during the close of the campaign of 1908; starting from St. Joseph at four o'clock in the morning, Mr. Bryan concluded his thirty-second speech at half past one o'clock on the following morning. By midnight the newspaper correspondents were to a man utterly worn out. One or two of them heard the beginning of his last speech, which was made in the open air, as most of the others had been, and which was expected to last five or ten minutes. Mr. Bryan actually spoke an hour and a half with undiminished power. A few hundred men had waited up for him, and he gave them his best.

Another day's work of that campaign,

however, taxed Mr. Bryan's strength to the limit of his endurance. Starting from Rock Island, having had no sleep at all the night before on account of continued conferences, the candidate journeyed across lowa, traveling by trolley and steam, making twenty-two speeches before he reached the end of his programme. He saw to it that the correspondents on the train were snugly provided for in Pullmans, and then disappeared. A little later his secretary found him stretched out on a hard seat of a wretched car at the back of the train. He was utterly exhausted, but had not failed to see everybody else comfortably in bed before he fell down to his own comfortless rest.

Of his public labors, everybody knows; of the long hours at his desk, the public knows nothing. At the close of the campaign of 1896, after the staff of correspondents had departed from Lincoln, he found that there still remained unanswered 60,000 letters. Every one of these was answered, with Mrs. Bryan's help. took the two of them a year and a half.

An instance of Mr. Bryan's conscientiousness was afforded a friend who once found him working over-time signing several hundred photographs which had been sent in for his autograph. Near by sat his brother, Mr. Charles Bryan, idly scribbling a signature which an expert could not have told had not been written by "William J. Bryan." The suggestion that Mr. Charles Bryan's aid would greatly facilitate the writing of those autographs provoked an indignant response from Mr. Bryan.

IV

The word that describes Mr. Bryan is simplicity. He is that quality incarnate. He might be a character imagined by Dickens - whose characters are traits, characteristics, qualities, personified. Mr. Bryan is simpleness personified. His heart is simple, and his mind is simple, almost obvious. His moral strength is the singleness of his conscience, the definiteness with which, shaking off accidents and complications, it sees, laid bare, the core of the matter, the issue between right and wrong. There abides the greatness