the War Department sent them on their way to Columbus with full power to take charge of relief operations.

The next day the Secretary himself and General Wood left for the scene — left so quickly that Major Rhoads, the President's aide, went in a full dress uniform that was meant to grace a White House tea.

"We can't guarantee any schedule," said the railroad officials.

"I don't care a continental about schedules," answered the Secretary. "All I want is to get to Ohio in the best way you can get me there."

It was a slow trip. The floods delayed the special, but in spite of this he was able to get in touch with the state and local authorities and to straighten out the channels of communication and relief. But in a way what the Secretary saw was more important than what he did.

Almost as soon as Major Normoyle and Captain Logan left Washington a train of supplies left Chicago. The Major telegraphed officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad urging that it be rushed. It even had right of way

of way over passenger trains. Officers at all the posts near the disaster were notified to report for duty, and the engineers, all the way from West Virginia to St. Louis, were asked to collect river steamers, launches, scows, etc.

Of course, the flood in Ohio and Indiana had done its worst before the army officers arrived on the scene, but in the trail of the flood follow epidemics. This year they never came. They were nipped in the bud. Down the Muskingum and Scioto came hospital relief ships, loaded with doctors and vaccine for typhoid, small-pox, and spinal meningitis. They organized the local health authorities, planned a defence against epidemics, left the towns fortified, and moved on. And while the army doctors (the navy and the marine corps were also represented) were organizing the defence against epidemics, Major Normoyle, with his relief plans, got ahead of the flood. All the way down the Mississippi, where breaks were likely to occur, were steamers, launches, and scows. They rescued thousands of people and the officers provided food and shelter for tens of thousands - all this going on long after

the papers had ceased to talk of floods. From Parkersburg, W. Va., to New Orleans, Major Normoyle had the flood relief organized, and this with less than 200 officers, of whom many were non-commissioned officers-sergeants and corporals. State governors, health officers, town officials, relief committees, the national guard, all did tremendously effective work. But the ability to organize to meet catastrophe lay with the army; and letters from governors, health officers, and commercial organizations in all parts of the flood district testify that the people who were in the stricken country realize what the little handful of army officers and doctors did.

Mr. Garrison saw it, too. I think it must have been what he saw in the flood emergency that made Mr. Garrison tell me how much impressed he was that we have 3,500 men the officers of the United States army-trained to emergency and responsibility, men who can be called upon to do anything from establishing an accurate and efficient custom house at a Philippine port to revising the laws of Cuba or to handling epidemics and floods, and who incidentally at any time are ready to risk their lives in any of these services.

To give an added incentive to efficiency the Secretary is carrying out a plan to make merit the sole criterion of promotion. He is sending out letters to all officers of a certain grade with a set of questions for them to answer. The questions all refer to the fitness of the officers who have become eligible for promotion to the higher grades of the army. In the past there has been talk of "swivel chair" officers who attained high rank by their residence in Washington and not by service with their commands. Whether this talk is justified of the past or not, it ought to have no foundation for the future because it is not likely that an officer who has long held a pleasant and easy post in Washington will get the same endorsement from his fellow officers as a man who has been with his regiment or with as much of his regiment as the present scattered condition of the army allows. The men who get the endorsement of their fellow officers will be the men who are recommended for promotion.

The Secretary talks freely, fluently, enthusiastically about the army and he takes a great pride in the efficiency with which it does all the extraordinary services that it is called upon to perform. But like everyone else who has looked at the question seriously he realizes that it is not prepared for war. It is truly an army of peace. That might not be as bad a situation as it is if it were not for a peculiar delusion that most Americans secretly cherish, the delusion that if you hand an American a rifle you have made him a thoroughly competent soldier.

Mr. Garrison explains this state of mind in some such way as the following, for he is fond of making his points by concrete illustrations or anecdotes:

You will see a man in the morning and he will tell you that he is against war expenditures. He doesn't believe in militarism. He does not know much about the army and he does not want to know any more. In the course of the day he hears that some of his Mexican investments have been disturbed by the revolution in that country. When you meet him in the evening he is all excited. "What's the Government thinking about?" he says. "We'll have to go in there and straighten things out."

You remind him that even if we should wish to intervene in Mexico, we are not very well prepared to do so.

"I don't know about the army," he'll answer, "but there are ninety million people behind Uncle Sam. I guess that's enough.

Not an hour after Mr. Garrison told me this I had it amply verified. I took lunch with a well informed resident of Washington. Something in the despatches from Tokio had angered him. He thought that there was no more reason why we should be anxious to mollify public opinion in Japan than there was for them to mollify public opinion here. He was quite belligerent. Remembering the SecRemembering the Secretary's story, I asked him:

"If we should have a war what should we do for an army? Ours is not prepared to fight." "Fight them with ninety million people," he answered, "what more do you want?"

The Secretary does not believe much

in the ninety millions theory. He thinks that so far as the army is concerned a well equipped enemy could take the Philippines or Alaska. Even our coast cities are not protected. In answer to a recent article about our coast defences Mr. Garrison was frank enough to tell the blunt truth about them: o.

security through fortifications alone are dessecurity through fortifications alone are dès

All systems of coast defense which look to

tined to be of little use in time of real war. The fortifications are only a part of the defense, and while they are entirely adequate for the purpose for which constructed, they are fixed defenses, effective only over the area within range of their guns;, beyond this range an enemy is entirely free to operate, unless he is opposed by mobile troops,

It was to demonstrate the fact that the great mass of fortifications guarding Boston was helpless to prevent the capture of that city by land attack that the Massachusetts manœuvres of 1909 were held. The attacking troops were landed at New Bedford, and occupied Boston from the rear. This is feasible at any of our seacoast: cities, unless the coast defenses are supplemented by an adequate mobile force. The well-trained and armed soldier on his feet is the determining element, and any country which trusts itself to defenses unsupported by a mobile army is destined to disaster.

The Secretary knows that we have no mobile army. That part of our army which ought to be mobile is normally fixed in small detachments in an absurd number of posts, though at present on account of the Mexican situation there is a mobile force of about 12,000 men at Galveston. Both for economy and efficiency many of the army posts should be abandoned and the troops concentrated into tactical units and kept in a state of preparedness. According to the military plans of the General Staff of the army, about 80 per cent. of the present posts should be abandoned. But this measure does not meet with the approval of Congress. The places in which these many posts are situated do not want to lose them. Every state is bent upon keeping all that it has. This situation, Mr. Garrison inherited from his predecessor.

When

I asked him what he was going to do about it he reminded me that the doing had to

be authorized by Congress. But he admitted that he had been thinking over a solution. He lighted a cigarette and in some such colloquial manner as this pointed out a path of procedure:

Suppose we consolidate into one all the posts in every state. That is a big reduction to begin with. Suppose we have in every one of the consolidated posts enough troops to make an economical and effective tactical unit for military purposes. Suppose we locate the posts in adjoining states so that their garrisons can quickly and easily get together for manœuvres or mobilize for active service. It is not a perfect military plan? Perhaps not, and neither is this a perfect military country. It is not even a perfected plan at all, but in general on some such basis we might reduce the cost and improve the serviceability of the army. Even the initial expense of the consolidated posts would mean little actual outlay, for the profits from the sale of the abandoned forts should almost or entirely take care of it.

These state posts fall naturally into another scheme about which the Secretary thought out loud a little. It is a scheme to popularize the army. This he considers is one of the particular tasks of his office. It is a subject which makes him a little more animated than usual. He swung round in his chair and pointed in the general direction of the Washington baseball field and then he explained the connection of "the Senators" with the United States army. Every afternoon out in the baseball park are four or five thousand people yelling themselves hoarse for Washington. None of the men they are yelling for are Washingtonians. Probably half of them never saw Washington until they were hired to play ball. But they have Washington on their shirts and Washington's interest and support is theirs. The Secretary has a notion that if every state had a regiment or two in its post, these organizations might get the sympathy and interest of at least one state and the army would have fortyeight chances of popularity whereas now it is so scattered that it makes little appeal to the public imagination anywhere. Perhaps Illinois, for example, would take

pride in the showing of the Illinois regiments in rifle practice or manœuvres or in war; perhaps in every state some enthusiasm for the army would grow up.

Whether a plan based upon this line of reasoning will popularize the army or whether it will have to be done some other way, one thing is certain: there is at present an almost unlimited field of popular ignorance about the army.

It is not unusual to find men who know a fair amount about the navy. Almost everyone knows the name of a half dozen battleships and remembers the picture of the Governor's daughter or niece christening the ship named after his state. He may even have been aboard and seen the silver service which the state presented.

But not one man in a hundred knows what regiments are on the Mexican border or could tell whether there is such a thing as the forty-eighth infantry.

tary, Minister of

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It is interesting to see a man speculating upon the constructive possibilities of a task when the routine and the details of his business are as multifarious as those of the Secretary of War. man in that position really holds three cabinet positions. He is Colonial Secretary, Minister of Public Works, and Secretary of War. The direction of the insular governments of the Philippines, Guam, and Porto Rico is a part of his task. The dams and locks and levees on the navigable rivers all over the United States are built by the United States army engineers, and the dredging of our harbors and the building of breakwaters is in their charge. The Panama Canal Zone and all the operations on it are under the jurisdiction of the War Department. I sat in the Secretary of War's office once, when Mr. Stimson was Secretary, while a half-dozen questions came in to him to be settled. They varied from legal points in the Philippines to railroad rates on the Isthmus. None of them had anything to do with the army. The same is true now. A man who simultaneously became the president of the biggest engineering corporation in the world and the legal adviser to the King of Siam would have no more heterogeneous duties than fall upon our Secretary of War.

A not impossible turn of fortune might have made Mr. Garrison either the head of a great corporation or legal adviser to the court of Siam. Many able lawyers have become the receivers of great corporations and run their affairs, and American lawyers have been advisers to the Siamese court.

As it was, a turn of fortune, most unexpected to him, gave Mr. Garrison a task about the size of both of these with the administration of the army thrown in.

Our insular possessions came into our hands through the army. The civil government which succeeded the military governors, and which still maintains about 12,000 troops in the Philippines, is under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of War. Not a great deal of fighting goes on there now but in this connection Mr. Garrison told me an interesting story that Brigadier-General Scott had told him:

The Sultan of Sulu came to New York. (The Sultan came from the Mohammedan tribes of the Southern Islands from whom the Spaniards and later the Americans have defended the more numerous but less warlike Tagalogs and Visayans who make up the main population of the Philippines and among whom are the educated and politically ambitious.) Some reporter asked the Sultan what would happen if the Americans should withdraw from the islands. The Sultan, with outstretched hands and a smile, said:

"We take 'em."

At present, however, the Philippine problems are chiefly legal and administrative, not military, and the same is true of the questions that the Porto Rican Government refers to Washington. It is because of the great amount of this legal work from the foreign possessions that the Secretary of War is, almost necessarily, a lawyer.

In large affairs, even in private corporations, nowadays it is wise to have a generous attitude toward the gatherers of public news. In the government service, of course, it is more necessary than elsewhere, for the Government's work is the public's business. Mr. Garrison is in thorough sympathy with what seems to be the policy of this Administration

a sincere desire to have its aims and actions known to the public. His office door is open to the press. He takes a good deal of trouble himself to satisfy all legitimate inquiries about the affairs of the War Department. But there is no publicity man in the office, no one whose business it is to watch for events in the department that properly would make news.

There are a good many men in Washington who become famous because of their peculiarities. They maintain outward and visible characteristics on which the public mind is fixed. It is easier, for example, to make cartoons of Senator La Follette and Speaker Clark than to make one of Mr. Underwood. Everyone knows that the Senator wears his hair pompadour and that the Speaker has a Missouri hat. There is nothing peculiar about Mr. Underwood. He has no intentional or inadvertent advertising eccentricities. Neither has Mr. Garrison. He is a well built man of medium height, with a little more flesh than he would have if he could have found time to play golf more often than he has. But he is, nevertheless, a vigorous looking man. He is clean shaven, wears gold spectacles, and he has a pleasant but business-like manner. He is the kind of man you would expect to find in an inner office on Broad Street, New York, or La Salle Street, Chicago. It is interesting to see such a man transferred to Washington surroundings. For, although his predecessors were New York and Chicago lawyers, their presence did not give the War Department any metropolitan appearances. As I went across the open square to the old building of "gingerbread" architecture that houses the State, War, and Navy departments, the big stone steps were crowded with clerks and colored messengers watching the parade of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show go by. Near the entrance of the building is an information desk and, every twenty or thirty feet beyond, down the corridors is a little table with a Negro messenger sitting by it. sitting by it. The Secretary's outer office is open to the public. Every five or ten minutes a guide brings in a group of sightseers, and in a sing-song voice points out

the clock that has served the War Department since 1853, the flag that was fired on at Fort Sumter, General Washington's sword, and the paintings of various generals and former secretaries. There is no air of active business, common in the offices of our great cities, until you penetrate to the Secretary's inner room. Even that room has not that trim, efficient look that the offices of presidents of industrial concerns usually have. But Mr. Garrison himself is business-like. He has a pleasant and cordial manner, but it does not delay him in getting down to the business of the occasion. If he sees what the point of your remarks is going to be before they are fully developed he will answer without waiting for the end, and similarly, when he is outlining his own ideas, he will stop and say:

"You see where that would lead? I do not have to develop it any further."

While we were talking, General Wood came in with a paper for the Secretary. In the friendly little conversation that followed, Mr. Garrison said that he had heard some Washington gossip to the effect that the order to stop the use of influence to advance the rank of officers had been instigated by General Wood. That caused a little smile from both of them, for the truth is, the General knew nothing of it until it was issued. Of course, he is in sympathy with it, but people make a mistake in judging the new Secretary who think that he is in any way kin to a dummy director.

The praise or the blame for the administration of the War Department while he is Secretary will belong to Mr. Garrison; and in saying that there can be no disparagement of General Wood, or of Colonel Goethals, or of the Governor of the Philippines, or of any other responsible man whose work is under the jurisdiction of the War Department.

What the Secretary has already done and the plans that he has for the future. lead one to believe in a remark Mr. Garrison made in answer to a reference to his new honors.

He said rather impatiently: "I don't

want merely to draw my breath and my salary here and have the honor of being in the Cabinet. When I leave here I want to leave things better than I found them."

I repeated this to one of the dozen or two men who had had an opportunity to see Mr. Garrison intimately in Washington.

"More than that," was his comment. "If Mr. Garrison does not think he is doing a good service he will leave. I don't think he cares at all about the honor part of it.

"A previous President on one occasion removed a man from a minor Federal office for instigating a newspaper article unfavorable to the President's party. The removal was made over the protest of the Cabinet officer under whom the offender served. It is inconceivable that Mr. Garrison would remain in office after such an occurrence, just as it is inconceivable that Mr. Wilson would issue such an order." But this kind of thing the Secretary would not say about himself. There is nothing spectacular about him—not the faintest trace of demagoguery. Even his cordial welcome of newspaper representatives, I think, is more duty than pleasure. He considers it a part of his task, and when he talks about what he hopes to do in the administration of the War Department he mentions himself in his relation to the problems before him. He does not speak of the problems in their relation to him.

Indeed, I do not think it is likely that he could play to the galleries if he wanted to. He is the kind of man who becomes a large figure in the public imagination because of what he has accomplished and not from any spectacular or dramatic instincts, or from any personal peculiarities. He looks like what he is, an able lawyer from the eastern part of the United States. He is more like a lawyer than like the popular idea of a judge. He has been a judge and has the judicial temperament, but he accents the deciding part of the judicial functions. Weighing matters is not a hobby with him, but a means to an end.