The Mirrors of Washington Part 4

Mr. Hughes comes by his coolness naturally. He was born to it, which is the surest way to come by anything. Men have hated him for it, coolness being a disconcerting quality, ever since he emerged from obscurity in New York during the insurance investigation, calling it his "coldness" and adding by way of good measure the further specification, his "selfishness."

If the last characterization is to stand, it should be amended to read, his "enlightened selfishness." He has a good eye for his own interests. Roosevelt disliked him for it, because when governor and again when candidate for president, he refused to gravitate into the Roosevelt solar system, taking up his...o...b..t like the rest of them about the Colonel. But think what happened to that system when the great sun of it went out!

His political a.s.sociates in New York hated him, accused him of being "for nothing but Hughes," when he quit them in the fight "to hand the government back to the people" and went, on the invitation of President Taft, upon the Supreme Bench. But it was his only way out. If he had gone on working with them, he would still be "handing the government back to the people" along with,--but who were the great figures of 1910? He knows an expiring issue and its embarra.s.sments by an unerring instinct. He finds a new one, such as "our national interests," with as sure a sense.

It is worth while casting a glance at him "smoking his pipe," when other real and false opportunities presented themselves to him; one finds discrimination. He refuses a Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City when there is not a chance of electing a Republican Mayor of New York City. He accepts a Republican nomination for Governor of New York State, when the putting up of Hearst as the Democratic candidate makes the election of a Republican as Governor of New York State morally certain. He refuses the Republican nomination for President, in 1912, when another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President, when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected opportunities lie ready to his hand and when the force of world events requires little more than his intelligent acquiescence to bring him diplomatic success.

His discovery of "interests" was no accident. It sprang from that hard unemotional simplifying habit of his mind.

When one writes of Mr. Hughes, men ask, pardonably, "Which Mr.

Hughes? The old Mr. Hughes, or the new Mr. Hughes?" for he has had, as the literary critics would say, his earlier and his later manner.

But it is chiefly manner, a smile recently achieved, a different way of wearing the beard, a little less of the stern moralist, a little more of the man of the world. A connoisseur of Hughes, who has studied him for nearly twenty years, after a recent observation, p.r.o.nounced judgment: "It's the same Hughes, a trifle less cold, but just as dry." And the Secretary of State himself, when one of the weeklies contained an article on "The New Mr.

Hughes," remarked, "People did not understand me then, that is all."

These two eminent authorities being substantially agreed for the first time during many divergent years, there must be something in it. Mr. Hughes must be a gradually emerging personality. You take that new warmth, recently detected; Mr. Hughes himself knows it was always there. It is like the light ray of a star which has needed a million years to reach the earth; it was always there but it required a long time to get across.

Then the beard:--when Mr. Hughes was "handing the government back to the people" in New York, it was a preacher's beard; you might have encountered its like anywhere among the circuit riders. Now it is a foreign secretary's beard; you might encounter it in any European capital,--a world statesman's beard. The change of beard reveals the smile, which was probably always there, and the splendid large teeth. The nose, standing out in bolder relief, is handsomer and more distinguished. You see more of Mr. Hughes than you used to and you gain by the improved vision.

Something has dropped from him, however, beside the ends of the whiskers. I met him first when he was about to run for President in 1916. An icy veil, like frozen mist, seemed to hang between us. We talked through it ineffectively. When I saw him again as Secretary of State, that chill barrier had fallen away; to recur to my figure, he gradually emerges.

Mr. Hughes of the later manner is, however, I am persuaded after long familiarity with his career, more truly Hughesian than the Hughes of the earlier manner; just as the Henry James of the later manner is more explicitly Jamesian than the James of the earlier manner, and the Cabot Lodge of the present is much more irretrievably Cabotian than the Cabot Lodge who years ago stood with reluctant feet where the twin paths of scholarship and politics meet,--and part.

I should say that Mr. Hughes was Bryan plus the advantages, which Mr. Bryan never enjoyed, of a correct Republican upbringing and a mind. The Republican upbringing and the mind have come of late years to preponderate. Looking at Mr. Hughes to-day, you could not tell him from a Republican, except perhaps by his mind, though such esoteric Republicans as Brandegee, Cabot Lodge, and Knox profess an ability to distinguish.

But when he was "handing the government back to the people" in New York, there was too much Bryan about him. The Republicans would have none of him, except as a choice of evils,--the greater evil being defeat. They called him ribald names. They referred to him scornfully as "Wilson with whiskers," when they ran him, reluctantly, for the Presidency in 1916. His opponent being also of the Bryan school, and a minister's son at that, Hughes striving for an issue, failed to make it clear which was which, a doubt that remained until the last vote from California was finally counted after the election. This was the Mr. Hughes of the earlier manner.

Latterly, Mr. Hughes has succeeded in establishing the distinction which he did not succeed in making during that campaign. When he confronted the task of Secretary of State, he carefully studied the international career of Woodrow Wilson, as a sort of inverse Napoleon, a sort of diplomatic bad example.

"This," he said to himself, "was a mistake of Wilson," and he noted it. "And this," he observed thoughtfully, "was another mistake of Wilson. I shall avoid it." "This," he again impressed on his memory, "was where Lloyd George and Clemenceau trapped him. I shall keep out of that pit."

His head, like a book of etiquette, is full of "Don'ts," diplomatic "Don'ts," all deduced from the experience of Wilson.

The former President met Europe face to face. Mr. Hughes thanks his stars for the breadth of the Atlantic. The former President put his League of Nations first on his program. Mr. Hughes puts his League of Nations last, to be set up after every other question is settled.

The former President tried to sell the Country pure idealism. Now as a people we have the habit of wars in which we seek nothing, but after which, in spite of ourselves, a little territory, a few islands, or a region out of which we subsequently carve half a dozen States, is found adhering to us. Mr. Wilson offered us a war in which, of course, we sought nothing and found, at the end of it, not the customary few trifles of territory, but the whole embarra.s.sing, beggarly world adhering to us. The thumbscrew and the rack could not wring from Mr. Hughes the admission that we are after anything more lofty than our interests.

One of the present Secretary's "Don'ts" of similar derivation is "Don't have a fight with the Senate unless you make sure first that you have the public with you."

Mr. Hughes does not run away from fights; he likes them. But believing G.o.d to be on the side with the most battalions, and intending scrupulously to observe this last "Don't," in order to secure the necessary popular support, he is as Secretary of State, "handing the government back to the people," just as he did when governor,--a little less self-consciously, perhaps, a little less noisily, but still none the less truly.

He is the most democratic Secretary of State this Country has ever had, and this includes Bryan to whose school, as has just been remarked, he originally belonged. If we are ever to have democratic control of foreign relations, it will be by the methods of Mr.

Hughes, because of the training and beliefs of Mr. Hughes, and as a consequence of the most undemocratic control of foreign relations which our Const.i.tution attempted to fasten upon us.

A successful foreign policy requires public understanding and support. The makers of the Const.i.tution established in our government a nice balance of powers between the various departments, beautifully adjusted until someone thought of putting a stone into one side of the balance. That stone is the people. The Fathers of the Const.i.tution had not noticed it. The executive put it into its end of the balance some years ago, and the legislative has been kicking the beam ever since. One nice bit of balancing was that between the Senate and the Executive on treaty making. In foreign relations, the President can do everything, and he can do nothing without the approval of two thirds of the Senate. It is a nice balance, which broke the heart of John Hay, frittered away the sentimentalities of Mr. Bryan, and destroyed Mr. Wilson.

No one ever thought of putting the stone into it until the Senate did so two years ago, by discussing the Versailles treaty in the open, right before the public. The people got into the scale, and Mr. Wilson hit the sky.

Mr. Hughes observed what happened. He is determined that the stone this time shall go in on his end of the balance. He talks to the country daily. He takes the people into his confidence, telling all that can be told and as soon as it can be told. He makes foreign relations hold front pages with the Stillman divorce case. He makes no step without carrying the country with him. He comes as near conducting a daily referendum on what we shall do for our "interests" as in a country so big as ours can be done; and that is democratic control of foreign relations, initiated by the Senate, for its own undoing.

Into that balance where he is placing the stone, he will put more of mankind's destinies than any other man on earth holds in his hands to-day. His has been a long way up from the shy, sensitive youth that one who knew him when he was beginning the law describes to me. He was then unimaginably awkward, incapable of unbending, a wet blanket socially. An immense effort of will has gone into fashioning the agreeable and habitual diner-out of to-day, into profiting by the mistakes of the New York governorship, of the campaign of 1916.

One sees still the traces of the early stiffness; the face is sensitive; the eyes drop, seldom meeting yours squarely; when they do, they are the mild eyes of the Church! I suppose the early experiences of the Church help him.

His att.i.tude toward Colonel Harvey's and other of the President's diplomatic appointments takes its color from his good father's att.i.tude toward the problem of evil. G.o.d put evil in the world, and it is not for man to question. The President sends the Harveys abroad; they are not Mr. Hughes', but his own personal representatives.

It is not for Mr. Hughes to question.

He grows a better Republican every day. And the Republicans of the Senate are not reconciled. They feel like the man who saw the hippopotamus:

If he should stay to tea, I thought, There won't be much for us.

There won't be much for them. Enthusiasm grows among them over his admirable fitness for reinterment on the Supreme Bench.

EDWARD M. HOUSE

The nature of Colonel Edward M. House was fully revealed by a story of his youth, which he told me at Paris in the concluding moments of the Peace Conference. He was elated and confident. The compromises in which he delighted had been made. The gifts had all been bestowed--of territory which men will have to fight for to keep, of reparations which will never be paid, of alliances which will never be carried out, of a League of Nations which the Colonel's own Nation will never enter.

Looking the work over with that blindness with which men are struck who are under the dominion of another and stronger man's mind, his gentle soul was flooded with happiness. He was as near boasting as one of his modest habits could be, as his mind turned to the wisdom of his youth which had brought forth this excellent fruit.

"I got my first real sight of politics," he said, "when I was a boy in Cornell University. My great chum there was young Morton, a son of the Republican war governor of Indiana. The Hayes-Tilden contest over the Presidency was being decided. Morton and I used to run away from Ithaca to Washington during that absorbing fight. By reason of his father's position in the Democratic party, he could get in behind the scenes as few young men could; and he took me with him. I saw the whole amazing thing. I made up my mind then and there that only three or four men in this country counted, and that there was little chance of rising to be one of those three or four by the ordinary methods."

He was, when he said this, at the apex of his career, behind the scenes of the greatest World Congress ever held, following the greatest War the world had ever known. And he had been behind the scenes as had no other man, in Europe as a privileged onlooker with both belligerents, and in America as the confidant of tremendous events.

He was there, as in his college days, at the Hayes-Tilden contest, by grace of a friend whose influence had been sufficient to secure him his opportunities. The parallel was in his mind, and he regarded it with self-approval. He had chosen his course and chosen it wisely. It had led him to the greatest peace-making in history.

There was a little more self-revelation. He and Morton had prepared for college with Yale in view. But Morton had flunked his entrance examinations at Yale and afterward succeeded in pa.s.sing the Cornell tests. House had gone to Cornell to be with his friend, an early indication of a capacity for self-effacement, for attachment to the nearest great man at hand who could take him behind the scenes.

The mystery of Colonel House is that he has been possessed all his life, almost pa.s.sionately, with that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its object riches or power or influence. It was merely desire to see for the pure love of seeing.

His is a boundless curiosity about both men and events. His eyes are the clue to his character. Boardman Robinson, with the caricaturist's gift for catching that feature which exhibits character, said to me one day during the War, "I just pa.s.sed Colonel House on the street. The most wonderful seeing eyes I ever saw!"

Nature had made Colonel House all eyes--trivial in figure, undistinguished, slightly ludicrous, almost shambling, shrinking under observation so that he gained a reputation for mystery, with only one feature to catch your attention, a most amazingly fine pair of eyes. It was as if nature had concentrated on those eyes, treating all the puny rest of him with careless indifference. They are eyes that delight in seeing, eyes to seek a place in the first row of the grand stand of world events, eyes that turn steadily outward upon objective reality. Not the eyes of a visionary--House got his visions of the brotherhood of man and the rest of it at second-hand from Wilson--eyes that glow not with the internal fires of a great soul, but with the intoxication of the spectacle.

And with the eyes nature had given House an unerring instinct for getting where, with his small figure, he could see. The ego of the pa.s.sionate spectator is as peculiar as that of the book collector or the curiosity hunter. Given a shoulder tall enough the diminutive House perches upon it, like a small boy watching a circus parade from his father's broad back, whether the shoulder be Morton's in his youth, or Wilson's in his maturity.

Some have tried to explain House by saying that he had the vanity of loving familiarity with the great; but I doubt if House cared for kings, as kings, any more than a bibliomaniac cares for jade.

He wanted to see; and kings were merely tall objects on which to perch and regard the spectacle.

He remained simple and unaffected by his contacts with Europe, did none of the vulgar aping of the toady, coming away from the Peace Conference an unconscious provincial, who said "Eye-talian" in the comic-paper way, and Fiume p.r.o.nouncing the first syllable as if he were exclaiming "Fie! for shame!"--an unspoiled Texan who must have cared as little what kings and potentates thought of him as a newsboy watching a baseball game cares for the accidental company of a bank president.

The world has been good to Colonel House, according to his standards. He has realized his ambition to the fullest. Life has given him all he wanted, the privilege of seeing, more abundantly than to any other in his generation, perhaps in all time; for he is history's greatest spectator.

He is glad. His heart is full. He wishes to give in return. He is the kindest-hearted man who has ever had empires at his disposal.

He wants to give, give, give. He wants to make happy. He was the fairy G.o.dmother of Europe, the diplomatic Carnegie, who thought it a disgrace to die diplomatically rich.