Part 7

It was an ideal situation for the exercise of Harvey's peculiar talents. He met various factional leaders and before many weeks his house became their rendezvous, the G. H. Q. of the forces who were to encompass the defeat of Wilson. Harvey flattered and cajoled and counselled, enjoying himself immensely all of the time. This diversion was much more to his liking than the academic dignity of the editorship of the "North American Review".

When President Wilson sailed away on his disastrous mission to Paris, Harvey's "Weekly" threw aside all restraint. It cut and slashed indiscriminately the President's policies. For the first time Harvey took on the guise of a Republican among Republicans. He even aided and abetted, with amused cynicism, the groping and fumbling of Republican leaders who were dazzled at the sudden break in the political clouds which had so long enshrouded them. He helped raise the funds used to counteract the league propaganda and toured the country in opposition to it.

The next shift in scenes was as much beyond Mr. Harvey's power of manipulation as it was beyond most of the Republicans who now sagaciously give the impression that their hands were on the ropes. Stories have been told of the great part Mr. Harvey played in the nomination of Mr. Harding. Mr. Harvey did not go to Chicago with the intention of supporting Mr. Harding any more than any other of the candidates, except Wood and Hiram Johnson, whom he despised.

He and the Senate oligarchy that coyly took the credit for nominating Mr. Harding turned to him when it was manifest that the machinery was stalled. Mr. Harding owes his nomination to a mob of bewildered delegates. It was not due to a wisely conceived nor brilliantly executed plan.

I doubt very much that George Harvey and President Harding had much in common until Harvey was invited to Marion. At that time the "irreconcilables" were beginning to be afraid that Elihu Root and William H. Taft were about to induce Mr. Harding to accept a compromise on the League of Nations. Harvey served the purpose of restoring the equilibrium. At the same time it is quite probable that the President was impressed by a mind so much more agile than his own. It was reasonably certain that it would not be diverted or misled by the intricacies of European diplomacy. And there was never any doubt of Harvey's Americanism.

The President's selection of Mr. Harvey for the London post is, of course, accounted for in other ways. There are some persons who profess to believe that Mr. Harding preferred to have the militant editor in London and his "Weekly" in the grave rather than to have him as a censor of Washington activities under the new regime. It can be said definitely that a sigh of relief went up from many a Republican bosom when the sacrilegious journal was brought to a timely end. And this did not happen, it is to be observed, until the nomination of George Harvey to the Court of St. James was duly ratified and approved by the Senate of the United States.

But if the "Weekly" has passed, the Republicans are still acutely conscious that Mr. Harvey is alive,--has he not reminded them of it in his first ambassadorial utterances?--and the journal is not beyond resuscitation. That is why Washington does not know whether to be chagrined or angry, whether to disavow or to condone. The discomfited Republicans frankly do not know what to think of it and probably will not so long as the amazing ambassador makes his own rules.

CHARLES EVANS HUGHES

"Mais resiste-t-on a' la vertu? Les gens qui n'eurent point de faiblesses sont terribles," observed Sylvestre Bonnard of the redoubtable Therese.

This fearsomeness of the good is an old story. Horace remarked it, when, walking about near Rome, pure of heart and free from sin, he met a wolf. The beast quailed before his virtue and ran away,--to bark at the statue of the she wolf giving suck to Romulus, by way of intelligent protest.

A similar prevalence of virtue and a similar romantic quality, where it is least to be expected, was disclosed in a recent encounter between Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, and one of the irreconcilables, when Mr. Hughes, integer vitae scelerisque purus had just commissioned Colonel George Harvey to take the seat once occupied by Woodrow Wilson in the Supreme Council.

When the news of this appointment reached the Capitol, Senator Brandegee, of Connecticut, hurried down to that structure across the street from the White House whose architectural style so markedly resembles the literary style of President Harding, the State War and Navy Building, official residence of Mr. Hughes.

Harvey being, in a sort, Brandegee's ambassador to the Court of Saint James, the Senator's object was to tell Mr. Hughes what Harvey should do in the Supreme Council. Mr. Brandegee has the gift of direct and forceful speech. In his earnestness, he dispenses with the elegancies and amenities. The upper ranges of his voice are not conciliatory.

In this tone, he developed views regarding this country's foreign relations with which Mr. Hughes could not agree. The Secretary of State combatted the Senator from Connecticut precisely as he combats counsel of the other side when a $500,000 fee is at stake. The discussion was energetic and divergent.

Mr. Brandegee hurried back to the Capitol and summoned other senators to his office, all those who were especially concerned about the exposure of Colonel Harvey to European entanglements.

He was excited. His voice was nasal. His language, in that select gathering, did not have to be parliamentary. He told the senators that they could expect the Versailles treaty by the next White House messenger; that "that whiskered,"--but nothing lies like direct quotes,--that "that whiskered" Secretary of State would soon get us into the League of Nations, being able for his purposes to wind President Harding about his little finger!

His excitement in such an emergency naturally communicated itself to his hearers. What to do? It was unanimously decided that the only adequate course was for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to resign as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by way of protest.

Henry Cabot Lodge running away from his chairmanship would be Henry Cabot Lodge behaving as romantically as Horace's wolf. The good are terrible, as Anatole France said in the words with which this sketch begins. It is not so much that you can not resist them, as that they lead you to make such fools of yourselves.

Mr. Hughes prevails, however, not merely by his virtue, but by his intelligence. His is the best mind in Washington; to this everyone agrees, and it is not excessive praise, for minds are not common in the Government.

Mr. Harding has not a remarkable one, the people having decided by seven million majority that it was best not to have one in the White House, choosing instead, a good heart, excellent intentions, and reasonable common sense. Mr. Hoover has a fine business instinct, great but diffused mental energy, but hardly an organized mind. From this point the Cabinet grades down to the Secretary of Labor, who, when Samuel Gompers, Jr., his Chief Clerk, addressed him before visitors as, "Mr. Secretary," said, "Please don't call me, 'Mr. Secretary,' Sam. Call me, 'Jim.' I'm more used to it."

"Call me Jim" is the mental sea level of the Administration, by which altitudes are measured, so let us not exalt Mr. Hughes' mind unduly, but merely indicate what its habits are. Its operations were described to me by a member of the Cabinet, who said that no matter what subject was up for discussion at a Cabinet meeting, it was always the Secretary of State who said the final convincing word about it, summing it all up, saying what everyone else had been trying to say but no one else had entirely succeeded in saying, simplifying it, and all with an air of service, not of self-assertion.

Mr. Harding, speaking to an intimate friend, said he had "two strong advisers,--Hughes and Hoover."

It is a satisfaction, even though it is not a delight, to come in contact with a mind like Mr. Hughes'; it is so definite, so hard and firm and palpable. You feel sure that it rests somewhere on the eternal verities. It is never agnostic. It has none of the malaise of the twentieth century. Mr. Justice Brandeis, when Mr. Hughes was governor of New York and a reformer and progressive, said of him, "His is the most enlightened mind of the eighteenth century."

I think the Justice put it a century or two too late, for by the eighteenth century skepticism had begun to undermine those firm foundations of belief which Mr. Hughes still possesses. For him a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,--Einstein to the contrary, notwithstanding.

Conclusions rest upon the absolute rock of principle, as morality for his preacher father rested upon the absolute rock of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no nuance, no on the one hand, on the other, no discursiveness, no yielding to the seductions of fancy, but a stern keeping of the faith of the syllogism; a thing is so or it is not so. Mr. Hughes never hesitates. He never says, "I must think about that." He has thought about it. Or he turns instantly to his Principle and has the answer.

You speak of Mr. Hughes to ten men in the Capitol, and nine of them will say to you, "Of course it is easy to understand; his is the one real mind in Washington."

Everyone is impressed, for, starting with no other initiation into the mysteries of foreign relations than having had a father born in Wales and having spent his vacations in England, probably in the lake region studying the topography of Wordsworth's poetry,--a certain oft detected resemblance to Wilson must make Wordsworth his favorite poet, as he was Wilson's,--in ten days was he not a great Secretary of State; and in three months the greatest Secretary of State? To be sure, back of him was the strongest nation on the earth, left so by the war, the one nation with resources, the creditor of all the others, to which a successful foreign policy would be naturally easy if it could only decide what that policy should be.

It was left to Mr. Hughes to say what it should be. His discovery of the word "interests," amazed Washington; it was so obvious, so simple that no one else had thought of it. Mr. Hughes' mind works like that;--hard, cold, unemotional, not to be turned aside, it simplifies everything, whether it be a treaty fight that has confused everyone else in the land, or a rambling Cabinet discussion; whether it be the mess in which the war left Europe, or the chaos in which watchful waiting left Mexico. His is a mind that delights in formulae. He has one for Europe. He has one for Mexico. It is an analytical, not a synthetical mind, a lawyer's mind, not a creator's, like Wilson's, with, perhaps it may turn out, a fatal habit of over-simplification. Life is not a simple thing after all.