Until I began sorting over my memories, and amusing myself with all the good things, bad things, and silly things that have happened to me in my fifty wonderful years, I thought memoirs ought to be locked in a box, a Pandora's box, labeled “Do not open.” In spite of my pleasure in books like Lord Frederick Hamilton's Vanished Pomps of Yesterday, and Dr. Rainsford's recollections of St. George's Parish, many of the rows of volumes labeled autobiography and memoirs seemed to me monuments to human self-indulgence and vanity. Such folly would never be mine. Then I began remembering “like anything” as the children say, and then I began to tinker with the idea of writing out a notebook for my grandchildren, little Bordie and Howland Russell. Now that the old house I lived in at 615 Fifth Avenue has been torn down, and the great steel bones of a skyscraper rest in the cavern that used to be my grandfather Jaffray's cellar, there must be some way, if it is only with pencil and paper, to give the children a share of the old, old New York and the castle that was an Englishman's home when “Grannie” was a little 0112girl. (You can see how easily I was lost. The children were just my excuses.) I haven't the least illusion in the world that I am an important person. It isn't that sort of vanity that makes me write down what I think about things. It's much more that I have been happy, and sometimes I think people would rather hear about happiness than cleverness. I am no writer and all sorts of people will say I didn't really understand everything that happened to me, but I think nobody can deny that I have always had through sheer luck what T., a lifelong friend, calls a box seat at the America of my times.

The first thing I remember at all is a sort of box seat. My mother was holding me up at a window in Brighton, England, so that I could see the Tenth Hussars, giddy in their blue coats riding by in the street below. I beat my hands against the cold window pane and danced on the air. “The Campbells are coming, Hooray, Hooray! The Campbells are coming, Hooray, Hooray!” Even today I get the most marvelous tinkle and tingle down my spine when I hear that tune, and enough memories to make a Durbar romp by in my mind,—Tenth Hussars at Brighton, parades in Egypt, in Bermuda, in London, General Pershing leading the American troops under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, banquets and celebrations numberless in New York. I suppose this is something which happens to every child. When once a sound has hit a baby's ear as a tune—whatever melody it is—it will ever after have power to stir. It's the same way with the Tenth Hussars. I always notice what happens to them as if they were My Regiment, just because they were my first 0123“jimmie lolos.” My uncle Jimmie was in the Seventh Regiment in New York, and lolo was the best my tongue could do with soldiers. “The Campbells are coming, Jimmie Lolo, Jimmie Lolo.”

What I remember next is a big red sofa near a fire-place in our townhouse. There were three little girls, one with moppy, yellow hair. That was me. The most important thing in the world was to sit next, absolutely next Grandpapa, a tall man with hair already white, holding in his lap a bound volume of the London Punch. The little girls squirmed and wriggled into the soft couch, and Papa Eddie, as we called him, set Biddy,—that was my youngest sister Elise,—and Appy Doll (Ethel) and Daisy Paisy which was me, off into chuckles with his tales of “Dizzy,” and Gladstone who figured as a sort of heroic Jack and Giant Killer who lived in a glorious place called London.

There were evenings on the red sofa, and there were breakfasts. What is left of my childhood now is a long procession of breakfasts, Grandpapa a distant and imposing figure behind a great silver hot-water kettle, who managed somehow between kipper and piles of toast and marmalade and oatmeal and tea to keep up a running story out of his newspapers,—Mr. Gordon Bennett's Herald, and even bigger sheets from abroad. It was all so simple. Sometimes today, I wish he could come back just for a single morning and read aloud to me and little Bordie and Howland about the entaglements of Europe and make thing clear. After breakfast we would all run to the window and shout one of Grandpapa's rhymes while we scanned the street for the morning mail: 0134 “Once there was a postyman Wouldn't leave the letters. Put his hands in handy cuffs And put his feet in fetters.”

Sometimes there were strangers for breakfast. A visiting Englishman in New York knew that 615 somehow belonged to him, and if he did not bring a letter to Grandpapa, he was soon introduced anyway and came to talk around the huge hot-water kettle. Other visitors, too, for Grandpapa, like Herbert Hoover, made breakfast an informal festivity, and his cordial “Drop in for breakfast” brought many kinds and varieties of men to talk with Edward Jaffray. Henry George was one, a grave man with feathery side-whiskers, fetching autographed books, and staying ever so long talking about free trade. Grandpapa was a Republican in politics, but free trade, absolute free trade, with no hitches about “for revenue only,” was a religion to him. As I look back, I wonder whether those free trade breakfast weren't my own political beginnings.

There was a Captain Robinson, wide as the doorway and around as a squash who set the table rocking with laughter. He told us a story about arriving at the London docks late for a dinner party, and of rushing ashore and asking a cabby, “Will you take me to the Savoy for a shilling?” “Yes,” answered the cabby, eyeing his shape and size, “if you get in quick and the horse doesn't see you.”

There was a Captain Grace who loved us dearly. He brought us a donkey from Ireland, but we named 014

Edward S. Jaffray The Author's Grandfather

Captain Larbush wasn't a seafaring man like the others, but he was one hundred and eleven years old! He had fought in the Napoleonic wars, on the British side, but when he came to our house he was shrunken like an old bean pod, and he sopped his bread in his coffee saucer. When Biddy and I were entranced at this habit, Grandpapa looked stern and said we could sop, but not until after we were a hundred.

Another man who figured around the hot-water kettle was Colonel Henry Watterson. Others were there for the exciting breakfasts during the Hayes-Tilden campaign. It was Grandpapa, by the way, who helped settle that difficulty by suggesting that the Supreme Court be appointed the electoral commission to decide the matter. To my mind, they decided all wrong. That incident was his sole active participation in public affairs, though his mind was ardently interested in politics both in America and England. He was a naturalized citizen and a devoted American—he had been a strong Union man during the Civil War and constantly advised his fellow English merchants not to deal with the South. Those who did and shared the bankruptcy of the South wished afterwards they had listened to him. Paying for wars, then, as now, is a bitter stretch, in which many private interests, just and unjust, are lost.

Dinners I can't describe at all. Children were neither seen nor heard at such functions and the best I could do was to hang over the railing from upstairs and 0176acquaint myself with tops of august heads like John Hay's and William M. Evarts' and President Arthur's, and catch wisps of talk about Congress and parliament and policies.

Grandmama was a daughter of the Rev. Dr. Phillips who was for forty years the minister of the First Presbyterian Church at 12th Street and Fifth Avenue. One of his elders was Robert Lenox, who owned blocks of real estate on lower Fifth Avenue. When it was proposed that the church install an organ, the Calvinistic Mr. Lenox was so outraged that he delivered an ultimatum. They could buy an organ if they would, he said, but at its first peal, he and his family—and there were pews and pewsful of Lenoxes—would leave the church forever. To the day of his death, the music consisted of Congregational singing led by a quartette, the bass striking the key with a tuning fork. Religion was a stern observance when I was a little girl, and I do not know what the Mr. Lenoxes would think today if they could see their churches hiring the same advertising agents that “sell” chewing gum and motor cars, to put religion “across.” When T. tells me tales of the Inter-Church World Movement, and of the little Jewish girl, former press-agent for a circus, who changed her Yiddish name to get the job and did stunts called “Prayers heard round the World,” he makes me feel very old indeed. I remember so well the old-fashioned religion with Judgment Day as real as the first of the month. My great-grandmother Phillips was really sorely troubled over one of her husband's fashionable parishioners who was buried in the bodice of her pink silk ball gown, and just a petticoat! “What will poor 0187Eleanor look like on Judgment Day?” she fretted. My Aunt A. was a forerunner of a more ribald generation. She professed great haste for “The Day.” She did so want to see the motley mob, and all the snobs obliged to rush helter-skelter with their own cooks and their rivals and their ancestors at the sound of eternity's trumpet.

It was all very solemn and beautiful, too. My father, an Episcopalian, used to mutter sometimes that Dr. Hall was the Presbyterian Pope, but that meant nothing to us children. Communion Sunday at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the minister with his uplifted and luminous face, surrounded by the elders, seemed to my childish imagination, as I looked on from the gallery, the Last Supper come back. I do not think the stern creed that there is only Right and Wrong and no compromise hurt me much. Though now they seem to me to have missed the great principle in religion, that the key to everything is Divine Love. And perhaps in a less severe church, my sisters and I would have been spared many troubled moments. We heard too much about everlasting damnation and unforgivable sins, and we used to shudder with fright when we discussed these things in the nursery at night and wondered what the unforgivable sin was, and if by any chance we had committed it that day.

Our father took us occasionally to St. Thomas's. He was a Church of England man, and also had a pew of his own at the little church in Irvington. We went there with him once after a long absence, and he couldn't find his pew. He spent so much time arguing with the sexton that when he came back for us, my 0198sister and I had crawled under a seat near the door, and were crying because he had left us like orphans. When we did get in and hear the sermon, that wasn't a happy experience either, because the poor Reverend Doctor used a shipwreck as a simile, and told how when hope was almost abandoned the supercargo was thrown overboard. “Donkey, Donkey,” my father kept repeating. Supercargo is a technical term for the men sent out by shipowners to keep an eye on the cargo, and my father, Frank Hurst, being chief of the National Steamship Company, couldn't believe any of the Reverend Doctor's gospel after a slip like that.

There were prayers after breakfast on Sunday, as on weekdays, and after that church twice, and Sunday School, and no Sunday papers, and only very pious books to read, and in the evening quantities of people came in to sing hymns. This was in the seventies, and I wonder if there is a house left in all New York where the seventh day is so spotlessly holy. Sometimes when I visit where Bridge is Sunday's sacred game, I feel like a furtive little girl, and half expect to catch my grandmother's reproachful eyes. Once we all went to the Broadway Tabernacle to see her in the pulpit, where she made a thoroughly rousing address for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She really cared about that cause. In the 1912 Presidential campaign an old gentleman wrote me a letter and told me my grandfather and grandmother would turn in their graves if they could see their Daisy on the stump. I laughed because I knew Grandmama would only be interested in whether I was speaking for a just cause. Her own life was all Christian devotion. It 0209was she who founded “The Open Door,” one of the first refuges for the mothers of “fatherless” children—fallen women they were called in those days. And she brought not only money, but great personal tenderness as well, to these girls. Breathless messengers—there were no telephones—sometimes came to call Grandmama to the deathbed of a girl in the Washington Square house. She always went.

My grandmother was a retiring person, not at all fond of going into society, though she was a very beautiful woman. A visiting Scotchman, gazing at her, with her erect figure and lace bertha dropped over her shoulders, said that she looked like a Duchess, and I puffed a little, gathering from his tone that that was something very fine indeed. I was not a little puzzled a month or two later when someone fetched us a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” and I saw my first picture of a Duchess. Of the real Duchesses I have met since, far too many seem to have stepped out of “Alice,” but the Duchess of Sutherland and the Duchess of Westminster were certainly as beautiful as grandmama, and I knew it was of such lovely ladies as these that the dazzled young Scotchman was speaking. Grandmama never prinked. Though I did surprise her in her room at Irvington one day, when she was making a veritable rite of putting cucumber-cream on her hands to banish the freckles. “It's because I'm going to meet the President tomorrow night at dinner,” she laughed. Grandpapa had gone off in his steam yacht to meet President Garfield and bring him up to Mr.Cyrus Field's. He 02110came back alone. The President had been shot at the station in Washington on the way to Jersey City.

It is hard not to be sentimental about 615. It was so nice! Such a fortress against the windy weather. Not against a troubled world. I was far too happy to sense that all was not so joyous in meaner streets. Life was too wonderful. “I am always happy” I used to write in the diary I kept, and I was. Such a sweet dreamy delight with everything, as if I had swallowed a rainbow-colored balloon, and something gay floated me up, up, up. The old brown-stone house was a twin to 617, known to so many people because in later years it became the National Democratic Club which stood until this very year, as a sort of monument for me to the happy seventies and eighties.

This spring when we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the man who wrote “Home, Sweet Home,” I wondered if New York children now would ever be so gloriously sentimental about their homes as I have been. Mine lasted almost a lifetime, but skyscrapers are too profitable. If figured out, I suspect we should discover that house-wreckers in New York demolish more buildings in a year than did the Germans in a year of war.

Change, change, change, cities and people hurry and change in America as they never have in the world before. Lately even Washington, which used to be content with three or four stories and leisurely spreading over space, has begun to be a clambering restless capital, spired with hotels and Harry Wardman apartment houses.

When I was a little girl at 615, we could look out of 022

Mr. and Mrs. Frank J. Hurst The Author's Father and Mother on Their Honeymoon

Next us lived a pleasant Jewish family, but we didn't “know” them. It's hard to believe, now when so many of the most honored citizens in New York are Jews, that in 1880, people were so narrow that that fact of birth was sufficient reason for not cultivating one's nearest neighbor. Across the street between the Heber Bishop's and the park where the Vanderbilt houses are now, were dozens of little shanties and billy goats that bucked, and nannie goats that baaed when you swished them as you passed. You could have bought any shanty and its goat for the price of a square foot of the land today.

There was a nice boy in the farthest shanty with the blackest goat. He and Jack Morgan helped me and my sister to skate up in Central Park. It is horrid of me to forget his name, because he was much the better skater of the two,—could do figure-eights and outer edges. Jack Morgan was only Jack to us, no J. Pierpont then, and his greatest distinction was that his beautiful mother came sometimes to watch him from the bank. She wore a seal-skin coat that came way below the knee, an item that completely won all the little girls whose mothers and aunts had seemed sufficiently elegant until that moment, in mere jackets of seal and plush.

My Aunt Florence, afterwards Mrs. Woodriff, went to the park with us often. My mother died when I was three, and my aunt postponed her marriage for three years, to look after us. There isn't anything one can ever do to express thanks for such sacrifices. Sometimes 02512she took as shopping with her down over the cobblestones to Arnold & Constable's at 19th Street and Fifth Avenue. A jouncy ride over cobblestones. They lasted for twenty years after that. When asphalt came to take their place, an old neighbor of ours said she couldn't sleep for weeks she missed the racket of the stages so. Poor old lady, how happy she would be with the squawking, snorting, tooting taxicabs, with and without insurance, with and without heat, at all times of day and night, that another twenty years have added.

Over my father's bed there was a picture of a rough sea and a tossing ship. He loved it, and how we children, who used to have supper at a little round table in his room, liked the stories that he told us about “Bnashee,” in the waits between our nursery supper and his own departure to dine. He would come out of his dressing-room in evening clothes fussing with his little white tie and we would plead, “Tell us about ‘Banshee’,” and he would begin with the high wind and salt spray sort of enthusiasm that characterized him. He was always thrilled about things, and if Kingsley was right in saying that enthusiasm is the greatest gift a person can be born with, father was very blessed. Sometimes the story of “Bnashee,” began way back about how he was born in Antigua where his parents had come form Bermuda, and howe he went back to live in the little white island, and afterwards across the sea to school in Liverpool. Then he went into the Army. At the time of the Civil War, in company with William Hewett, afterward Admiral Sir William Hewett, and Murray Ainsley, afterward Admiral Sir 02613Murray Ainsley, Hobart Pasha, and Tom Taylor, he came out to Bermuda and run the Blockade. “The Banshee” was the wicked boat he did it in. I say wicked, but only out of respect to my Grandfather Jaffray, who was such a strong Union American that when my father asked his consent to marry my mother, Grandfather found blockade-running the only blot on an otherwise perfect scutcheon.

As for father, his B. C. and A. D. were “Before the Blockade” and “After the Blockade.” I knew as American boy who was an ace in the Lafayette Esquadrille, and he had the same mad delight in risk and courage that father had. War simply wasn't war to either of them, and I don't believe father ever connected his own adventures in the Civil War with grandfather's bitterer experiences in draft riots, when a negro was hung to the lamp-post in front of his own house, and he had to save all the colored servants by sending a member of his firm to drive them in a covered wagon across to safer Williamsburg.

Father remembered a “Norther” on the gulf when he was second in command on “Bnashee,” making for Galveston with a cargo from Havana. “Bnashee,” found herself in the very midst of the blockading Union squadron. Almost jostling with the Union ships, she got away and slowly steamed out to sea. After another day and night of watchful waiting, they picked up the coast line, and sighted a post of Confederate soldiers from whom they hoped to get information about the tactics of the blockaders. They ran too far inshore among dangerous breakers. Their engine went dead and refused to turn. My father used to live 02714the whole story over, how “Banshee,” as daylight was breaking, found herself for a second time encircled by the Union fleet, and had to make a dash for the bar, with a startled launchful of northern blue jackets and marines on their port paddle-wheel too surprised to shoot. Then warning rockets were sent up. Ships began to fire. “Banshee” with wounded and splintered funnels steamed on. Suddenly they saw white water in the narrow channel and realized that they must go full speed and bump the shoal or stick fast and be lost. They went straight at it, took it in their stride as a horse would leap a stone wall in Ireland, touching the walltop and kicking off. And so to the wharves of the town where a crowd yelled and cheered.

I forget whether it was the Galveston run, or a Wilmington or Charleston one, father was telling about years after in the Union Club, when a small dapper Admiral crossed the room, and said, “I remember it all. I commanded one of those warships.” It was Admiral Upshur, and next night father told “Banshee's story to the nursery with more than his usual zest. The blockade was father's obsession, but that was just his enormous gusto for life. I'm like that. I'm single track, too, about things, one at a time when I'm interested in them. My daughter is more like Grandfather Jaffray, humorous, and original, with a facility for languages.

Once long ago at Mrs. Willard Straight's, I overheard Leila Bryce, afterward Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, say acidly to Lady Allan Johnstone: “I certainly don't see how Daisy Harriman gets across. Surely not brains.” Years afterward in the Mitchel campaign, when she and I first became great friends, she came to 028

“Banshee”—Blockade Runner —1864

Father should have had sons. Being an optimist he was easily reconciled and brought his three girls up just as he had planned to rear his boys. Every single day of our lives we walked half an hour with a book on our heads. That was to make us erect in carriage. Dear father,—nearly twenty years after, on the day before he died, I came into his room in my riding-habit, and crumpled on the foot of his bed. Ill as he was, his cheery voice commanded me, “Sit up straight, Daisy. You wouldn't want your father to remember you through all time with a crooked back?”

He had meant his son for the navy. “Now you'd be a midshipman,” he said to me when I was thirteen. “Now you'd be with Billy Hewett in the Mediterranean,” he said when Admiral Hewett took command of the Mediterranean fleet.

He mounted me on my first horse—a donkey—at the age of three. He tossed us into the water from the dock at Irvington. “It's the way to teach boys to swim,” he 03016said. He found a sergeant of the Buffs a waiter at the Union Club, and fetched him home three times a week to put us through army setting-up exercises. “Put the hull of your left in the hull of your right.” “Stand at ease.” “Hup, Hup, Hurrup,” he bawled at us. Father was occasionally caught drilling the men servants in the house himself. You can imagine a startled and pacific butler being ordered upstairs and treated like a raw recruit.

We went to our first school in Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house on 36th Street. Mrs. Lockwood kept private classes there and afterward on Lexington Avenue, where a few families sent their daughters for what I now see was a very sketchy education, but we did learn to spell, and we drilled in penmanship as soldiers drill in marching. Sometimes, on rainy days, grandpapa would drive me down in the brougham, and Mr. Morgan, who usually sat after breakfast reading and smoking in his sitting-room just off the entrance-hall, used to tap good morning on the window with his newspaper. Grandfather told me how Mr. Morgan had arranged when Mr. Cyrus Field lost his fortune and was very ill, that he should have an income, and never, never be told where it came from, and always left to think that it was a remnant of his own money. When grandfather told me about this, I wanted at once to do something nice for somebody who would never know it was I that did it.

In 1904 and 1905 when Mr. Morgan was godfather and general adviser to the Colony Club, of which I was President, I used to see him often. Because he had known my grandfather and father and 03117mother, I found him easier to put many of my troubles and decisions on. His eyes were wonderful. They went back, back, back to shining depths and his characteristic gesture throwing up his chest when he entered a room and came forward to greet you, was delightful. His air of owning the world wasn't at all autocratic or commanding. He made you feel that the world was his, but that you had a share in it, too. I met an old lady on the street one morning who greeted me with: “Thank Heavens, HE has arrived.” Mr. Morgan had returned from Europe the day before. “I never feel comfortable,” she sighed, “when he is abroad. I'm always afraid something will happen to the country.” Hundreds of people felt just that way. One afternoon he came forward to shake my hand, and accidentally pulled a clipping out of his pocket which fell at my feet. It was a newspaper paragraph calling him an “uncrowned king.” He blushed like a school boy and smiled: “I save them for the girls. Such nonsense amuses them.”

His daughters, Juliet and Anne, were in school with me, and Ruth Morgan, no relative of theirs. Even in school she was a peacemaker. I read about her only this morning in the New York Times as Chairman of the Committee on International Coöperation to Prevent War. All those years ago, she began her work by crying, “Oh, don't! don't! Do let her out,” whenever the tomboys among us made a roughhouse and locked an unpopular girl in the closet during recess hour. Flora Bigelow was the belle of the school. She was very pretty, and played the zither divinely. I felt we were kindred souls because she paid the most casual 03218attention to her books. She was the daughter of John Bigelow, Minister to Germany and afterward to France. It was while visiting her at “The Squirrels” that I heard my first lecture on woman suffrage. Mr. Bigelow, devout Swedenborgian, had a great deal to say on the subject, of which one rhetorical sentence, “If my Italian gardeners deserve to vote, why shouldn't my daughters?” lodged with me from that time forward.

Miss Clara Spence had come down from Boston to be our elocution teacher. She was the first woman I ever saw who did not wear stays. She left them off on principle, and we thought it very odd that such a pretty teacher should be so strong-minded. She now has a school of her own in New York, one of the best in America, and the daughters of the little girls who thought her queer, none of them, I dare say, have ever seen a pair of the medieval steel-stays that passed for a matter of course almost forty years ago. Miss Spence has been a lesson to me. So many “queer” people turn out to be possessed of a common sense of which the rest of us stood very much in need.

There was pleasant rhythm to my growing up, as our life swung back and forth from town to country. The long summers out at Irvington and the Saturdays there throughout the spring and fall, and sometimes in the winter, were always happy ones.

The tucks in the family discipline were taken out a little once we were up at Willowbrook, and the decorous little girls who walked with their aunt, or governess, in Central Park had marvelous days of running tomboy wild with only the drowziness of summer to hush them as they flung about the meadows and dabbled in the Hudson.

Willowbrook must have been very lovely in the days before I was born, with its flat colonial roof nestling down on the simple two-story building. It was a very old house. Washington Irving lived in it before he built Sunnyside on an adjoining estate. When we children were born, a nursery there had to be, and so it was clapped on the top of the house, under a hideous Mansard roof. The rooms downstairs were wide and quiet, and seven French windows in both the dining and the drawing-room let out on the piazza.

Trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, and morning glory vines bowered the white columns, and swarms of little burnished humming-birds feasted there all summer in 03420the tawny red bells of the trumpet vines. Their wings beat out a bright, contended, busy sound, a steady undertone to the drip and splash of Grandfather's fountain. Nurse never allowed us to wade with the goldfish, but oddly enough on very hot days, we often fell in, just accidentally fell.

The humming-birds, the cool spatter of the fountain, the pleasant grind of the mowing-machines on the hillside lawn, and the tinkle of one of the tribe of hand-organ men who came to Irvington grinding out “La fille de Madame Anjou” wove themselves together into a Willowbrook melody.

The journey up in the spring we used to make on pony-back, twenty-five miles of adventurous ride with an aunt or a groom to keep us from dawdling near the apple-blossoms or cantering down alluring side-roads. When we had arrived at Willowbrook, the little nearby side-roads had their way, and we galloped over the Saw Mill River Valley, and to the Irish settlement known as “Dublin.”

We rode to See store and back along the edge of Sleepy Hollow—not quite certain the Headless Horseman wouldn't join us—past Dinkel's corner to Dobbs Ferry, and sometimes on to Hastings where the Far and Near, one of the earliest lawn-tennis clubs, was a sort of Mecca. For years I kept pasted in my scrapbook a newspaper portrait of a young man in a blazer, “Winner of the All Comers Cup at Newport,” whom I had admired after a pony ride to the Far and Near for the autumn tournament. It was R. Livingston Beekman, who afterwards became twice governor of Rhode Island.

A few lessons and regular hours on the piazza learning the art of hem and button-hole by way of a dress for a slum child, and the rest of the day the world was ours. Saturdays there were trips on the Hudson, skylarking we called it because Grandfather's first yacht was the Skylark, and because he was inordinately fond of a thin little joke about Mrs. S. whom he had asked to go Skylarking with him, and who had replied blushing, “Oh, Mr. Jaffray, I never do things like that.”

We were not the only Irvington children who wove stories, once we got back to town, around Mike Mann. He weighed three hundred pounds! He was descended from a good old Dutch family, some of the early settlers in the Hudson Valley. He was found of coasting, and on a crusty winter Saturday we used to watch him apply a small sled to his tummy like a mustard plaster and come down Sunnyside Lane looking as if there were nothing between him and snow.

John O'Neil was our confidant. He had been a workman on our grandfather's place since the days when my mother was a little girl. We sped to him with every crumb of good, bad and astonishing news, as when a dappled fawn was born at Willowbrook, as there was, for three years running, on a morning about the 14th of June, a date I remember because everything seemed to happen at once, the fawn and the New York Yacht Club Regatta. John married a second time after I was grown up, choosing a young woman who might almost have been his granddaughter. I met him one day at the White Plains Country Fair and he stopped me to exalt his wife's virtues. He had led her to the altar 03722after a six months' trial marriage. “Sure, Miss Daisy, she's one foin woman. Why she washes herself all over every day just like a trout.”

Sunnyside, Washington Irving's estate, joined ours by the western meadow, and when my mother and her sister were little girls, he made great neighbors of them. My Aunt Florence treasured greatly some verses called, “The Lay of the Sunnyside Ducks,” “humbly dedicated to Miss Florence Jaffray,” which Irving wrote and sent her.

“By Sunnyside bower runs a little Indian Brook, As wild as wild can be; It flows down from hills where Indians lived of old To the mighty Tappan Sea.

And this little brook supplies a goodly little pond Where the Sunnyside ducks do play, Snowy white little ducks with topknots on their heads And merry little ducks are they.

And high up the hill stands fair Jaffray Hall Where a mighty chief doth dwell And this little Indian brook flows through his lands And its own little rugged dell.

And the Laird of Jaffray arose in his might And he said to his wife one day, ‘This little Indian brook, is an idle little brook And shall no longer have its way.

No longer shall it run down to Sunnyside pond Nor eke to the Tappan Sea. 03823I'll stop it, with a dam, and pump it up hill with a ram And make it work for a living,’ said he.

‘It shall run in pipes about our garden and lawn Making jets and fountains clear. It shall run upstairs and downstairs of Jaffray Hall, And into your bathroom, my dear.’

Then the Sunnyside ducks they quaked with fear And dolefully they did cry, ‘Oh Laird of Jaffray spare our little brook, Or we shall be left high and dry!’

But soon it appeared that this brave little brook Defied the Laird of Jaffray's skill; For though he dammed the little brook, and rammed the little brook The little brook still ran down hill.

Then the Sunnyside ducks again plucked up heart, And got over their quanda— ry, And the little brook still runs on to Sunnyside pond And the mighty Tappan Sea!”

Aunt Florence's reply, I suspect, was written by grandfather. Bits of it I recall ran as follows:

“Much beloved Mr. Irving I received your charming letter All about the Indian streamlet All about the topknot ducklings. How my Papa, very selfish 03924Tried to dam up all the water Tried to keep more than he ought to And his efforts all were fruitless. Naught could stop that knowing water On it would insist on going. Who could blame it for its action Who resist such great attraction? Was not Sunnyside before it? Was not Wolfert's Roost inviting? Was not he whom all look up to He whom all admire and cherish Drawing that sweet brooklet onward? Not for topknot ducks ‘twas running Not for water fowl or fishes Not to make sweet water fallings Not to course through rustic windings Not to spite my dearest Papa, But to get to you—'twas hastening You, whom all the Dux are calling Of the present age of writers. You're the Dux, the People's leader, And we all desire to follow And to go down hill to Wolfert's, Undismayed by any dammings, Coming down by gentle moonlight Or in darkness with a lantern— Should you ask me how my Papa Tried to stop the stream and couldn't I should answer, I should tell you In the drought of bye-gone summer People came with carts and horses Very early in the morning 04025And they stole away the water! Our ram (which Papa calls Longfellow) Author of the “Higher Water” Heaved a sigh and stopped his rammings Much to all our consternation. Papa said with indignation ‘Send for Tubbs, * and send for Chalmers, † I will build a wall and stop it.’ But without his host he reckoned. Little did the streamlet tarry But through crack, and leak, and cranny Found its way, and ran on coolly Laughing in its sleeve at Chalmers Laughing loud at Tubb's efforts Minnehaha! Laughing Water! Laughing at their foolish planning.

By the bye that just reminds me That to visit me you promised And to go with me to Niblo's. Will you come to us on Friday? Will you come and with us tarry? With regards to your sweet nieces, I'm your friend, the little Florence.”

Grandfather and Mr. Irving behaved to each other like affectionate schoolboys, and it was a family joke on either side the boundary line that when one had been to call on the other in the evening they were certain to walk back and forth half a dozen times seeing each 04126other “part of the way home.” In the last days of his life, when Irving was growing feeble, he used to bring his chair and sit under a tree, near enough to our house to hear our family songs. Ballads and hymns of all sorts floated on the twilight air, and I daresay he occasionally caught fragments of grandfather's harangues about the uneven quality of the hymns. Grandfather would lean over the shoulder of my aunt peering at the words and say, “Why should we insult the Almighty by singing to Him words with no metre, to the tune the old cow died of?” “Dum fi dum,” someone would start off, “Child of Sin and Sorrow—” and Grandfather would break in “Why should I have the impertinence to call my neighbor ‘Child of Sin and Sorrow’? I decidedly don't want him to call me that. I won't lie to the Almighty by asking Him to take me here and now to Heaven. I am perfectly happy and don't want to go anywhere else for a long time.”

From hymns no warm evenings on the piazza he would branch off into French songs that he had learned as a boy at School in Brussels, and from songs he would go into stories of how he had paid a shilling to stand on a table in London to see Queen Victoria drive by the day she was crowned. He was a young man then, just turned eighteen. A few weeks afterward he crossed the Atlantic to New York to enter his uncle's importing and commission house. Nearly all of his maternal ancestors had been in the British Navy; his grandfather in fact was in command of Governor's Island for six months during the Revolution. This seemed to me very romantic and accounted to me for my grandfather's great interest in all manner of boats, 04227in his prosperous merchant days. Bob Potter took me down a peg by sniffing, “Oh yes, the British Navy, the middle classes.” I think I concealed this slur from grandfather Jaffray, but I know now he would have laughed. Perhaps because he did not have my girlish ambition to be aristocratic, but a simpler one, to live a wide, well ordered, thoughtful life. It is possible for me to look back on him now as one of the few men I have known who lived a truly aristocratic life. He had earned for himself leisure, but he was never idle. His comings and goings to business were made into pleasurable ritual. He bought a steam yacht, the Skylark, and later the Stranger, and at seven, five mornings a week he left the dock at Sunnyside, breakfasting on board, and at 3:30 he left the dock at 34th Street, New York. People living along the Hudson below Irvington used to say that they regulated their clocks by the Stranger's passing.

Except perhaps days in Geneseo on a good horse when hounds were running and I up with the first flight of riders galloping along the top of the ridge, I think I lived with every bit of me most, the times I used to perch on the extreme end of the Stranger's bridge at national and international yacht races.

We saw every trial between the Priscilla and Puritan in 1885 before the Puritan defended the America's cup against Sir Richard Sutton's Genesta. Very much delighted with a minstrel show father took us to, we used to repeat at the breakfast table: “Tell me, Mr. Bones, why is the Genesta called the laundry boat?” “I don't know, Mr. Johnson, why is the Genesta called the laundry boat?” “Why, because she 04328takes all the Puritan's wash.” The next year, 1883, Lieutenant Henn challenged with the Galatea, and the Mayflower built by Mr. Burgess of Boston, was finally chosen to defend the cup, which was done to the queen's taste, or rather her distaste. The third year some charming Scotch people, Mr. and Mrs. Bell, brought over the Thistle, but she had no better luck that the Galatea. She was beaten by the Volunteer. What fun it used to be as we hugged the New York shore to get the last of the favorable tide, to all out in answer to the question, “Who won?” shouted by the crowds lining the docks—“America.”

In the middle and late eighties there was hardly yacht in the N.Y.Y.C., both steam and sail, that we didn't know all about and could recognize from her lines. We talked glibly about triple and quadruple expansions engines, and other engineering novelties.

My father was an even more ardent sailor than my grandfather. Grandfather believed in steam yachts; father clung to the cutter Active. When grandpapa would argue, “Frank, how can you be content to be so entirely at the mercy of the elements?” father would reply that a real yachtsman glories in the uncertainties, dangers, and difficulties attending sailing. He loves the storms which compel the shortening of sail, the lying-to, the scudding before the wind under a staysail, while on the other hand, he takes philosophically dead calms with sails idly flapping against the masts, and the reflection of his vessel in the mirrorlike water, passing the long hours of inaction in spinning yarns. “And,” grandpapa would add, “drinking cocktails.” Grandfather was never tired of telling how he 044

Frank Hurst, the Author's Father, as Treasurer of the N. Y. Y. Club Drawn by Thulstrup on the Annual Cruise at Newport

The New York Yacht Club, the first yacht club in this country, organized in 1844, held its first regatta in 1845. But my first acquaintance with it came in the late 70's, when father's Active won the sloop prize at the annual regatta in June, and when on holidays like Washington's Birthday, he took us to the old club-house at 27th Street and Madison Avenue and we sat, one on Lester Wallack's and one on Billy Florence's knee while we drank lemonade through a straw. They had been fetched home to let us give a professional matinée of Mother Goose, and even father had fond faith that Wallack meant it when he asked for a chance to make a great actress of Elise. I know how father felt, for when S. S. McClure took me aside and told me if I'd let him have my daughter Ethel to train, he would make her a second Ida Tarbell, he left me with a delightful sense of having produced a prodigy. Father used to be fond of gossiping with Billy Florence, and now that I know that round little man was the founder of the Shriners, I regret that we didn't tax him for grotesque fairy tales. A man who started hundreds and thousands of sober modern citizens into purple and green satin and plush baggy breeches and set them marching 04630beatifically down Pennsylvania Avenue, heels catching in soft asphalt, sun torrid on their Turkish caps, must have been a master of romance.

Taking Sunday walks with father—and I took them often being the oldest child and so the most companionable—led usually to the portals of his club. Frequently, I was “checked” with Jimmy the doorman at the Union Club while papa went in to inquire for his mail or chat to friend. One mysterious day after much mumbling with Jimmy and others, a portmanteau was brought out of the club. Father and I bolted off in a cab to some house away over on the west side. There was a very tall and very handsome man in the room where we were taken by a man who had opened the front door for us very cautiously. My father murmured in low tones, and gave the bag to the handsome man who called my father “Frinkie.” The room was full of men I had seen before, and just as we were leaving one of them peered at me and whispered something about “the child.” My father said, “Oh no, she doesn't understand.” “Monkey,” he said on our way home, “you must not tell anyone about coming here this afternoon.” I said, “No.” And I never did, for I worshiped my father, and his word was law. I didn't even question, and it was nearly twenty years later when I learned that the man to whom we took the bag had killed a policeman the night before when drunk, and that his friends had smuggled him off to South America on a sailing ship to escape the penalty. When he was able to return to this country I saw him often, and he would quizzically 04731refer to the strange episode in his life at which I had been a little with big eyes and not tongue.

In February, 1877, we children first saw Bermuda. Only those who have crossed the Gulf Stream in winter in a head sea, can imagine what our trip was like. We made it on an old blockade runner, not over one hundred and twenty-five feet long, and it took four days and four nights to reach the Islands. Our nurse collapsed at once, but father tethered us like little goats to the very center of the ship so that we wouldn't get washed overboard. Nurse wasn't missed; her place being ably taken by some young British officers going out on the Canima to join their regiment, who used to squat on the deck and draw us pictures with our colored crayons. We were only making a three days' visit for there were no cables in those days, and Grandfather Jaffray was never easy for long without news of the children. Every year when we came back on boats that reeked of onions and lilies, he would greet father at the New York dock with a worried shout, “Are they all there, Frank? Landing at Bermuda then as now, is like stepping into fairy land. In the old days on my first trip, and the trips we used to make every other year thereafter, father would wake me up at 1 A. M., and take me on the bridge to see us make St. David's Head. Then we would anchor in five fathom hole until daylight, when Gilbert, the very far negro pilot, would come aboard to guide us through the reefs.

There was always much palaver between father and Gilbert, for Gilbert was the very pilot who had led the blockade runners into port after their perilous trips with holds full of cotton in ‘63 and ‘64. And always 04832there was a gold piece ready for his palm for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. Very slowly we chugged past numberless little islands as we came up the bay, often so close to them that we could pass biscuits to the beach. Arrived at Hamilton quay we wasted a precious hour while two long spars were run out of the steamer's deck. Negro dockers climbed along on their hands and knees tying planks with rope between masts to make a landing stage. This crude method lasted until 1900 and when it was no longer there to grumble about, suddenly became one of the amusing features to mourn for as part of the good old days. Gone is the landing stage and gone are most of the dear old ladies in black silk with white caps, peaked in front like Queen Victoria's, who curtesied to the Governor, and who used to give my father and his little girls tea and tarts. There used to be silver candelabra with great glass globes around the candles to keep the light steady when sea winds blew, and little girls, standing on tiptoe, could see their round faces in the polished mahogany tops of tables, and the Bourganvilia ran so riot that sometimes it clambered in the window and made itself at home.

Most of those quiet interiors have vanished, but Bermuda itself is still the same. The blue waters are still as blue, the sunshine works the same copper and gold magic, the air has the same caressing quality, the cedars are as fragrant, the flower gardens as tropical, and the cardinals and blue birds brought to the Island on the trade winds are more plentiful than ever. Father used to take us walking up the white road to Prospect, telling us stories of my great-grandmother Hurst, who 049

A. J. Hurst of Bermuda The Author's Paternal Grandfather

My great-grandmother's husband used to give lectures to the Bermuda militia. One time, just as he was midway in a diatribe on bravery, down the road came the colonel's bull. He broke off his eloquence with, “Tree yourselves, gentlemen, tree yourselves—here comes Colonel Smith's bull!”

The two great events in the social history of Bermuda were the Princess Louise's visit in 1883, and the season of 1892 when the Grenadier Guards were sent out for a year, as punishment for regimental mutiny. I suspect the London matrons of taking a mighty interest in their pardon and return, for no sooner had they arrived in their island coventry than it became the gayest Eden among American winter resorts. The colonel of the regiment, now Lord Cheylesmore, married Bessie French, a tall Titian-haired beauty, an excellent foil for the dusky Florence Griswold, who married the regimental doctor, Mr. Cross. You can imagine the 05134excitement in the island when King George, then Prince George, in command of the Thrush, arrived in Grassy Bay. Only last winter they told me again with all the zest of fresh-chronicled news how such and such a shop was a very good shop, for wasn't it the shop where Hope Goddard bought material for a frock the time Prince George went with her to help her choose it.

I cherish the Bermuda frame for my meetings there with Mark Twain and with Woodrow Wilson. Mark Twain used to have the happiest description of the Islands. “There is nothing as white in the world as a Bermuda a house except the frosting on a birthday cake.” The newspapers back in the States criticized him for playing on the golf links with a noted capitalist. “What ails them?” said Mark Twain to me. “of course, his money is tainted! It's twice tainted! ‘Tain't yours and ‘tain't mine.”

Some day some enterprising movie man will make a cinematograph, like a patchwork quilt, of pictures of Society, extending over thirty years. On the screen it can be done. Words paint in a slow gray the vivid processional of good times and changing fashions from the eve of the nineties to the jazz dawn of “after the War” that I have watched. When I was a girl there were debutantes and dowagers, with a nice blending of statuses in between; now there are sub-debutantes and debutantes and there are no dowagers at all. In the old days, days of coaches and four-in-hands bugling up Fifth Avenue, if Society had any pass word it was leisure; now, not for Society alone, but for the whole world, a snorting Stutz or a whirring Handley-Paige gives us the pitch-pipe,—“Speed.”

Fuss and Feathers was my Grandfather Jaffray's half-ironical blanket word for all the trappings and trimmings, the comings and goings of his granddaughters. Sometimes, and especially since the War, Society has seemed to me like pink frosting on a cake,—cake in a world that hungered for bread. Parties seemed feathers and fuss, nothing more.

But that is only a mood. On the whole, I have loved balls, garden parties, and hunting, as a pony loves his paddock. I cannot be solemn about the snobbery and 05336the wastefulness. These faults have been a hundred-fold exaggerated by yellow newspapers and their favorite preachers. The truth is that snobbery is not so wicked,—it is usually very, very dull, and as for wastefulness, if one believes in private property at all, I think the Bradley Martin Balls that added to the gaiety of nations and set money in circulation were far more pious enterprises than unostentatious hoarding.

I went to my first ball in December, 1888. It was the Assembly at Delmonico's, then at 26th Street and Fifth Avenue, the heart of fashionable New York. My father took me down in the carriage—no girls ever went anywhere except with a chaperon or maid—and I can't remember which echoed louder, the clap of the horses' feet on the pavement or my own heart. Motors makes so much more noise now-a-days. Perhaps that is why no one hears the modern girl's heart go pounding childishly at first balls. I wore—it was regulation—a white tulle gown, with a satin bodice, and one of those monstrosities called bustles which were the vogue in England too as “improvers.” My father felt as young as I did, and entertained me with stories of how my great-grandmother had “come out” in Bermuda, and how she rode to her first “rout” at Government House on a horse, with one of her father's slaves walking behind with her party frock in a trunk on his head. There were no carriages on the Island. “How doll,” I said, feeling very modern in a hack, and never dreaming that motor cars and airplanes were just around Time's corner! I loved it, and so did father, all except hearing someone speak of him as “old Hurst, Daisy Hurst's father.” He minded that less, later in the winter, and 05437indeed invented an amusing middle-aged routine for himself when the young dancers danced too often. He used to fetch me to balls and then take a room at Delmonico's and sleep until time to take the livelier generation home.

Landers' orchestra always played. We waltzed to the “Blue Danube” and polkaed to “Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me.” Occasionally, there was a Lancers and the nearest we ever came to jazz in all my early days was a barn dance, which wasn't near at all. The cotillion I danced with Norman Whitehouse, one of our neighbors at Irvington. He seems not very much older today than the skillful partner who led me through the intricate figures thirty-four years ago. I saw his father and mother in Bermuda this winter. They have been married sixty-six years, but their sweetness and generosity have kept them in their forties. I went into supper with Bordie Harriman whom I remember first as an apple-cheeked boy with bright red stockings who used to march by my grandfather's house on his way to school. He told me that night that he meant to have supper with me every ball that season either as my partner or as a third.

Suppers and cotillions were very formal affairs. Society knew nothing about parties hastily concocted by telephone. Cotillion partners were always arranged for beforehand and sent flowers, chiefly roses, for Hodgson and Thorley and had not yet scoured the ends of the earth for orchids, anemones, and gardenias. Other men sent roses, too, if one were a belle, and a really great belle achieved an effect like a greenhouse bundleboy. Despite our limitations, a great deal was said 05538with flowers in those days and Bordie Harriman's three white roses which I tucked into my other bouquets at nearly every ball, always pleased me most. After supper, we seated ourselves in little gilt chairs set stiffly round the ball-room. It took an amount of art to sit down without crushing one's bustle. Young people now would never endure the discipline of a formal cotillion of the eighties. Today everybody wants to do everything all at once. I forget whether Worthington Whitehouse, one of our Irvington neighbors, or Mr. Elisha Dyer was cotillion leader that night. Those two were magnificent at inventing figures and had far more tact than any distributors of court honors in Europe, in giving out favors to those they wished particularly to distinguish without making the rest of the company anything but happy. Why it was such fun to leave a ball, cramming the carriage with tissue paper caps and parasols, bonbons and tin horns and other bright nothings, I do not know, except that the more one's dressing table looked like a five and ten cent store, the surer one felt that life was going well. Later it became the fashion to give cotillion favors of intrinsic value. Gold pencils and jewelled pins gave one a delightful sense of loot, and, I am afraid, gave their donors what Mr. Thorstein Veblen would describe as the satisfaction of conspicuous waste.

Mr. Peter Marie, a great beau, who made a collection of miniatures of all the New York belles of his very many seasons, took me into supper at a later cotillion and asked me: “Shall I introduce you as my fiancée or my daughter?” “Your daughter, of course,” I replied. The “of course” was fatal. Like a beauty 056

Daisy Hurst in Central Park—18 years old James W. Gerard in the background

Like a pile of colored jackstraws, memories of 1889 lie heaped. Brown, the old Grace Church sexton, had given way to Johnson as carriage-caller at all parties. You can see how small society was, if one Johnson could bind us all together like a simple barrel hoop. The most conspicuous debutante of my season was Sally Hargous. She had the most bouquets and the largest ones—and the rest of us marked them as opera stars do the curtain calls of their rivals. Her brother, Bobby, was always inviting people in for an H—of a dinner, and meaning nothing by it except that all the guests' names began with an H. Silly, simple ‘89. Amy Bend, now Mrs. Cortlandt Field Bishop, was the beauty, a dazzling blonde, moonshine and sunshine both in her hair; but there were others who rivaled her—my cousin, Maud Jaffray, who afterwards married Hollis Hunniwell, and Cora and Mary Randolph. Amy Bend and Beatrice Chapman and I amused ourselves a great deal by dancing with Prince Dhulip Singh, a fat little man, son of an enormously rich Indian potentate. He made a fad, in his Royal brownness, of dancing only with blondes.

I went home from one ball, my cup spilling over, for I had been asked down to the Meadowbrook Club the 05840following Saturday for breakfast and to hunt afterwards. I had hunted with the Westchester hounds, over ground now long since planted with suburban kitchen gardens and clothes poles, but never yet on Long Island, which was over the river and far away. Mounted on Mr. E. D. Morgan's “Honest John,” through the kindness of a charming Irishman, Mr. Jack Beresford, then acting master of hounds, I started forth that brilliant morning from the little farm house Mr. August Belmont and Frank Griswold had made into a club. It was a drag hunt and the pace fast, and the fences stiff. Of all the people who were so kind to me that day, Mr. P. F. Collier, who was both editor and owner of Collier's Magazine, particularly won my heart by giving me a lead over fences.

It was English influence, I believe, that made sports an increasingly important part of the social calendar of the eighties and nineties. All New York aped the English. Henry Dixey used to make fun of us singing “It's English, you know, quite English, you know.” New York society men, especially sportsmen, were slaves to the Prince of Wales to the last button on his coat. I've lived to see most of this die away, and some balance of exchange in fashions grow up between New York and London. One never thought then that a Mississippi River negro jazz band would be the choicest thing in London entertainment. The improvement in ocean transportation in the eighties made it possible for many more Americans than ever before to acquaint themselves with the traditions of English country life, and having found it the most delightful existence in the world, decided to fashion their own 05941upon it. Virginia, to be sure, was rich in English traditions, but Northerners were not quite ready yet to take their holidays in the war-scarred South.

However it came about, the flamboyant New Yorkers of the eighties, the bankers and the empire-minded railroad owners who were the economic power behind the new leisure class, looked for their fashion not to the old Dutch aristocratic customs that governed the families of the Van Rensselaers, Van Cortlandts, de Peysters and Stuyvesants, nor to the intellectual and political traditions that permeated fashionable New England, but to Britain. And Britain gave them sports.

My father brought from London one of the first sets of tennis, and the good people of Irvington, when they saw the net, asked naively if it were a new device to catch birds! My uncle had a wooden court built on his lawn, so that the new game could be played in all weathers, but there were so few people who knew the game that he had his English footman taught to make a fourth in emergencies. Mr. William Douglas, great friend of James Gordon Bennett's, used to journey up from New York for sets on the wooden court. Fine sportsman that he was, no price in time or money was too high for a good day's sport. He sailed his own yacht— men did in the eighties. The sailing, not the owning, was the thing. Once in half a gale of wind and rough sea, in a Goelet cup race off Newport, when all hands on his yacht Arrow were recruited to haul on the mainsheet, he stuffed into his pocket without reading, some telegrams from his broker that had come just as he was leaving the anchorage. Not until the race was over, did he pull them out of his 06042pocket—damp, undecipherable wads. By the time he telegraphed to New York “repeat,” the market had broken and he was the loser by many thousands of dollars. “A great race. Worth it. Couldn't be bothered with a wind like that,” was all he said, chuckling.

Newport in those days was one of the loveliest places in the world. It is still. But it is much more of a cinema reeling by, now that one may motor round the ocean drive twenty times in an afternoon. When I first knew it, and went up with my grandfather in his yacht Stranger, Mrs. August Belmont, Senior, used to drive in her calèche with four horses and postillions around only once in an afternoon. In still earlier years, men in frock coats and top hats and women in beautiful clothes appeared at the Casino at high noon, and listened to music. At three, they went to dinner! Not until Mrs. Paran Stevens, mother of Lady Arthur Paget, set the fashion, did seven o'clock or later, become the dining hour. About the same time as the Belmonts, Mrs. Stevens (Aunty Paran as she was called) put her servants into livery and introduced the European system of entertaining large house-parties, with breakfast at any hour. Both in New York and Newport, her house was a center. Indeed, Sunday evenings at 243 Fifth Avenue are credited with being the only salon that America has ever had. Many hostesses in New York and Washington have tried to recapture the charm for drawing together in one dazzling sparkle the wit and smartness of their time, but so far as I know, Mrs. Stevens came nearest. Once since then Mrs. Benjamin Guiness, who was Bridget 061

The Author's First Run with the Meadowbrook Hounds —1889 Among those in the group are—from left to right—Upper Row: P. F. Collier, Sally Hargous, Mrs. S. S. Sands (Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt), Miss Anna Sands, Mrs. Earl Dodge, Egerton Winthrop, Jr., F. G. Griswold and S. S. Sands Below: Mrs. J. Borden Harriman (seated third from left), Mrs. Sidney Ripley, Stanley Mortimer, Eliot Roosevelt, James Lanier, Van Rensselaer Cruger, and H. O. Herbert

In Newport, Mrs. Stevens had too good a cook. He was a chef fetched from Paris. His sauces were priceless, and his temperament was also. Once during a tennis tournament, she had asked a hundred people for luncheon. They came. They sat. But nothing happened. Downstairs the chef was saying that unless he had three bottles of a particular champagne he couldn't go on with his sauce. People left. Finally three starving young men found six bottles, made their way to the kitchen and laid them on the altar. She had the finest grapery in Newport, and the fortunate thing was to be asked to her house-parties when the grapes were purple. For it seems she had a dreadful penchant for buying her butter and cream from the corner grocery, neither ever fresh, and it was the custom for her guests to drive around the country-side in a pony-cart loaded with grapes and effect bargains with the farmers for newlaid eggs and clotted cream.

Mrs. Steven's name brings up a thousand stories. One year Don Carlos, pretender to the throne of Spain, with his suite which included the Marquis de Ponce de Leon, nicknamed by young Stevens, Pounce Lion, and the Marquis de Montsarratt (Mountain Rat), came to the Ocean House. Don Carlos was traveling incognito as the Duke of Madrid. For some days, while waiting for a full set of American false teeth, he wouldn't be entertained. Society was quite agog 06344from waiting when he finally came forth to be presented to Mrs. Stevens. Just as he started to bow, a slippery rug undid him and he fell flat upon his back. She was as quick to make excuses for him as she was when the social unfortunate was herself. Once when she was fifty minutes late at a dinner in New York, instead of making the convenient excuse “the horse fell down,” she came in with a rush, “Really, my dear, my memory plays me tricks. I told the coachman to drive me to the Waldorf, and before I knew it I was being shot up and down the sixteen stories in the lift inquiring for you at every floor. Then I suddenly remembered that you lived across the street.” As the Waldorf at that time was only a hole in the ground with its future wonders constantly cried in incredible advertisements, her fantasy delighted both hungry guests and hostess.

Which was the more glorious at Newport, yachting or polo, I could never decide. James Gordon Bennett brought polo to America barely seven years after it became the vogue in England, where the Tenth Hussars, “My regiment,” some of whose officers quartered at Aldershot, had read in a Munnipore paper about the ancient Persian game of Chaugan, first played in England in 1869. Particularly interesting was the time the Hurlingham team came from England to play at Newport and sold their ponies in order to take American-bred ponies home with them. Polo is responsible for the careful breeding of Texan and Mexican ponies that has gone on in the last thirty years. If I am romantic in my love for polo, it is not only because it is the most thrilling sport pageant in the world, and a 06445marvelous game where the sheer sportsmanship of beast and man is called to its highest pitch; but I also like to think of its traditions. A thousands years ago it was played somewhere pretty much as it is now, and always because of it, better animals have been bred, and fine sportsmen have ridden them.

There was a summer at Newport when the women sailed catboat races with one man crews. My brother-in-law, Lewis Rutherfurd, used to go with me. He couldn't touch the tiller but he could shout directions with a vengenace. One of the best-looking men in the world as well as one of the most delightful, he was as keen to have me win as if it were an international event. A rather clumsy boat had fallen to my lot, but he had her pulled out of the water and bought up all the vaseline in Newport to have her smeared hoping that would make her slip quickly through the water. When I have been dull about things, I imagine sometimes I can hear his voice again calling “mutton head,” “stupid, what are you doing now?” Anna Sands, I remember, won several of the races with a very fast little boat called Mr. Brown and with Mr. Tommy Hitchcock as crew.

Golf came in later. The first Newport links were not laid out by Mr. Theodore Havemeyer until 1893, just thirty years ago. When I look back and remember the jokes that were poked that year at the “rich man's game” that took whole cow-pastures to play it in, and the effete millionaires that tagged around after balls no larger than a parrot's egg, and then think how every town in the United States that pretends to any importance now has links, many of them public, I bless the 06546sportsman who had the money and the leisure to set a fashion that has led the tired business man into green fields and pastures new, and his wife and daughter into comfortable clothes. What I do not bless in this connection is the damage golf has done to conversation. Thirty years ago not a man in America had the temerity to spend an evening making a golf post-mortem. He was obliged to be witty and wise, or make a stab in that direction. Today, Presidents and caddies, the whole male sex do it, and I don't know why.

Coaching has faded while golf and motoring have come to life. The annual meet of the New York Coaching Club, founded in 1876 by Colonel William Jay, W.P. Douglas, DeLancey and Nicholas Kane and others, was a thrilling and colorful event. About fifteen drags usually assembled at the Brunswick Hotel in Twenty-sixth Street, and drove up to and around Central Park, and back in time for dinner at the hotel. The prettiest women in town, in crisp summer gowns and leghorn hats, with bouquets of cornflowers, daisies or buttercups, flowers to match the racing colors of the host, sat atop the coaches. The men wore the Coaching Club uniforms, green coats with gray top hats, and boutonniéres. Even the horses were dressed, with flower rosettes behind their ears. Harlequin couldn't have designed a giddier and more delightful show as they dashed along, past beautifully appointed victorias with high-stepping horses, up the Avenue and past the barefoot boys at the entrance of the park who sold clumps of fragrant lilacs gathered “out in the country,” meaning beyond the nineties. Sometimes in later 066

Ladies' Four-in-Hand Driving Club Meet—May, 1906 Mr. Richard Peters, Mrs. J. A. Wright, Mrs. Rawlins Cottrell, Mrs. Harriman (driving), and Squire Cowdin

Horses had always played an important part in my life. My father barely waited for me to learn to walk before he had found me a pony. So I was delighted when I discovered how much social life revolved around horses. The Westchester Country Club was inaugurated before the existence of golf, but it had a polo field, a steeplechase course and a pack of hounds. We called it the Country Club merely. Whenever I see a bungalow on the New Mexican mesa or the North Dakota prairie, country clubs of adjacent small towns, I smile to think that Westchester was the parent of all this joining together to have good times in the fresh air. My first run with the Westchester pack was on “Hungry Jim.” My father had found him hitched to a station wagon one time while making a visit and, noticing his quarters, bought him for me at once because he knew Jim could not help being a fine fencer. He was the ugliest horse I ever owned, but her covered himself with glory by winning the championship in the Garden that next winter and many blue ribbons at later horse shows. I wore an English riding habit at Westchester that day, an old one, often worn the year before, for park riding and hacking on country roads. I must have gained weight during the summer, for at the first check I was obliged to go to my uncle, an extraordinary man by the way, six feet six in height and perfectly proportioned, to tell him that my arms ached so that I couldn't go on. He took out a knife and slit my sleeves from wrist to shoulder. I finished the run with habit sleeves flying in the wind like a witch's 06848quite oblivious of the shocking sight I presented to the rest of the field. Now-a-days when people ride in everything except ball gowns, such a mishap would pass unnoticed, but in the eighties the strict regulations as to one's costume were a Prussian as the Potsdammer Guards. How I struggled to be absolutely tidy on horseback! A few months later riding around Knowlsley Park, Lord Derby's place near Liverpool, with a dear old friend of my father's, Sir Arthur Earle, I got a great dressing down because in mounting me he had noticed that the loops at the top of my riding boots were showing. Sir Arthur was always full of advice which he prefaced with, “I being in the autumn of life and you in the spring, I venture.” When my engagement to be married was announced, he said, “I give you one recipe, my girl, for a happy life with your husband. Mutual consideration and a good cook.” My father's advice was even more worldly. He fetched me to launch at Delmonico's and admonished me, “If you want to hold your husband, never nag him. And never ask him questions because if he wants you to know he will tell you and if he doesn't, perhaps he will lie.” At that, no unworldly advice could have been more charmingly given and I tried to take it.

Horse shows in Madison Square Garden were almost as dazzling as the opera. Beautiful women in the boxes divided the honors with the horses in the ring; and in my happy memory of tan bark and blue ribbons and myself riding “Hungry Jim,” two figures stand out. It was while watching her in her box one night in Horse Show Week that I finally decided that Mrs. John Jacob Astor, the present Lady Ribblesdale, 06949was the most beautiful woman I had ever known. Sir William Orpen must want a good deal when he shouts from Paris that he has never had a perfect model. For at least twenty years after her marriage to John Jacob Astor, New York society had a flawless beauty. It was not alone a beautiful face but the tout ensemble, arms, wrists, hands, ankles—a brilliant distinction that was unforgettable. The ring I can never recall without seeing “Fatty” Bates. He was a twin to Dickens' fat boy. His jolly round face was scarlet; his tan box coat was cut so that he looked like the Liberty Bell. He drove his high-stepping horses to a two-wheeled gig and circled the ring so fast that he made the corners on one wheel. More than once I saw him turn completely over. Once, when in court, arrested for fast driving out beyond Central Park, the judge asked him how long he had remained in a certain road house. “Only three whiskies,” he said. I wish he were alive today. He was an original, and now that his clock has stopped, he is one of the few men I would trust to be funny, not tedious about prohibition.

Fancy dress balls were always memorable. I suspect that a good many debutantes have learned more history costuming themselves as Mary, Queen of Scots, or as a lady of the Ghibellines, than caught their attention at boarding school. The winter of ‘89, there was a beautiful ball at the Academy of Design on Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Mr. Stanford White was the genius of the occasion, as he was of so many other and of so much that brought beauty and richness to New York entertainment. Credit belongs to him for rescuing New York from the clutches of Herterism 07050and from the “late Victorian and early North German Lloyd” styles of interior decoration. I met him first at a dinner given by Mr. Abram Hewitt, afterwards Mayor of New York. The table, set around three sides of a square, was covered with old Italian lace. Mr. White used a boar's head for a centerpiece, stuffed peacocks spreading their iridescent tails at the corners of the table, and then alternated candelabra with rare old tankards. Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, wife of the inventor, and her sister, Mrs. Burke Roche, went respectively as Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth, and no one could decide which was the more lovely. Harry LeGrand Cannon, a cotillion leader and beau of the eighties, was my dinner partner. He didn't dare take soup or anything else and after a course or two, half fainting, he rushed from the table to have some tucks taken out of his Henry the VIIIth costume that tortured him round the waist. We were a modest crowd. Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger went to the ball as Queen Louise and when she came downstairs with her dress looped up on one side so as to show her leg precisely as in the painting, prudish Victorian New York did not look away, but stared hard and criticized. I even heard someone murmur that it was a scandal because Mrs. So-and-so had let her innocent young daughter come as Marguerite.

The year of my début, Mrs. William Astor reigned supreme. Her scepter she held firmly, absolutely, and charmingly. Two years ago, so the story runs, a New York matron had iron shutters put on her house and when asked why, she said that she was expecting a Bolshevist uprising and that, of course, her rôle would 071

Dinner at Mr. Abraham Hewitt's before the Fancy Dress Ball at the Academy of Design—1889—Table decorations designed by Stanford White From left to right: Mrs. Welman, Mr. J. A. Waterbury, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt, Mr. Jones, Mrs. Burke Roche and Mr. Yznaga

The Four Hundred have grown to four thousand—perhaps I exaggerate—but certainly there are a dozen sets, each sufficient unto itself and yet interlocking, like directorates, that set the fashions in New York today. Before Mrs. Astor's time, every hostess had a carefully prepared list of friends and acquaintances which had a place on the shelf almost next the family Bible. Not Queen Victoria herself was more austere than most New York hostesses in crossing off the few divorcées forty years ago. With the episode of the Four Hundred invitations to Mrs. Astor's ball carefully weeded by Mr. Ward McAllister, her list became The List. Shortly afterward came the first volume of the Social Register. I remember Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley, saying to us one night after dinner at Sherry's, “Come on, let's go over to Bobby's,” naming a notorious but diverting social climber. “We're sure to find him in, toasting his toes over the Social Register.”

After Mrs. Astor's retirement, the Kingdom of New York and Newport was divided and we had, not one queen, but five or six grand duchesses. I met one of them first at my grandfather's reception. She arrived with: “I meant to go to the Vanderbiltsapos;, but on the way I decided I wasn't dressed well enough and so I came here.” The dear lady became afterwards one of the 07352most tactful hostesses in three capitals, and I hope she never saw the cartoon in Punch Du Maurier drew when my aunt, Edith Bigelow, wrote the anecdote to him.

One of the “duchesses” was Mrs. Ogden Mills, a perfect hostess and a great stickler for form. She was the leader of a small young-married set, which played cards and gave many house parties, a kind of entertainment Mrs. Mills led in introducing. Bordie Harriman met her husband one Monday and asked if he had had a pleasant week-end. “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Mills, noncommittal, “we entertained eighteen valets and maids.” Society house parties in those days were as tediously engaged as Royal visitings, but “motoring down,” the war, and before these Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, have done much to make American society simpler. It was she, who, Frank Crowninshield says, cut formal dinners down to fifty minutes and wines from five to one. Many people not “in society” like to think that the life of these celebrated hostesses is all froth. Nothing could be further from the truth. I never knew but one woman who devoted her life exclusively to the social game. She ended her days arranging dinner parties with paper dolls, a breakdown pitiful to watch.

For myself, even before I was bound up with the organization of the Colony Club, before I was a suffragist, when I was interested in politics only from the sidelines, sports and balls were but a part of my life. And so it is with scores of others.

I think it was when I was twelve that I came down to the dining-room for dessert and heard my father describe a handsome man in frock coat and top hat 07453who had been standing on Broadway about Fourteenth Street, distributing invitations to attend services that afternoon when father and some club friends passed by. “We liked his pluck so we took his dodgers. He's the new Irish rector of St. George's.” I had not idea then what a great place St. George's was to take in the life of New York, and mine, in particular. Dr. Rainsford I saw often at the Riding Club. “If you ever want work,” he would say to me, “come down to the Parish house and talk to the Deaconess.” On the train one Sunday night, after I was married, coming in from a house party where we had played golf and cards all day, I met an old friend of my grandmother's, Mrs. Bottome, and at the sight of her, a great wave of home-sickness came over me for the old-fashioned Sundays we used to have at my Grandfather Jaffray's house. I wanted an antidote for all the frivolities in which I seemed plunged. She wrote me out of a note, then and there in the jiggling train, to Deaconess von Brockdorf. Monday evening I began one of the most rewarding parts of my life; began to learn to work and organize and to understand some of the problems of the working people of America, from the contacts I made at St. George's with the lower east side. Mrs. Bottome was a wonderful woman, and had been a great power with a certain group in the eighties, holding prayer-meetings and Bible talks in the large drawing-rooms of her devoted followers. As a child, I had not appreciated her at all. She used to bring her little boy—he afterwards became assistant at Grace Church—to see us at Willow Brook and stand him on the table to sing in a squeaky voice, “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells 07554me so.” I scuttled upstairs as fast I could whenever I found her in the entrance hall of 615, her full skirts ballooning over the register, while she raised an echo with “Pull for the Shore, Sailor, Pull for the Shore.” She was the founder of the King's Daughters, and it was as a King's Daughter that I did my first visiting at St. Goerge's.

What one saw in the crowded tenements on Avenue A made one want to forget everything else in the world and pitch in cleaning things up. But Dr. Rainsford used to say, “Don't. That's just where the power of your class lies. Go to the east side. Then go home. Go to parties. And then bring the glamour and the health back with you to those sordid quarters. It's just because people like you aren't one-sided that you can be so useful in organized work like this.” It wasn't always easy for the rector to bring the two sides of New York life together. Once in a famous Brooklyn strike, when the Seventh Regiment was called out to protect the employers' property, Dr. Rainsford preached a sermon on the difficulty the strikers had in getting their side before the public and how unfair that was. The sermon created a sensation, and cost him one of his most valued vestrymen, Mr. Lanman Bull, a president of the New York Stock Exchange, whose son was in the Seventh Regiment, and who could not brook any suggestion that there were two sides to the quarrel. Because of Dr. Rainsford's fight for the institutional church and his progressiveness, he was always a stormcenter. But if his illness had not come when it did, forcing him to retire at a critical time, I think he would have been acknowledged as one of the great men of his 07655century. His influence was tremendous. When that great church was filled to overflowing and everyone sang his lustiest it was like worshiping with the Great Congregation. It was a real emotion.

Bordie and I never belonged to the Thursday Eve Club where what T. would cail the “intelligentizia” of the old conservative society had improving cultural evenings in each other's drawinng-rooms. Occasionally we went as visitors. Just after the Spanish-American War, however, a young, among whom were Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Robinson, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Damrosch, founded a club for intellectual treats. We had many delightful evenings, but the Thursday Club members no doubt looked on us as mere merry-makers. I sat next to Mrs. Robinson the night she had stereopticon views of Cuba shown, and every time her brother, Colonel Roosevelt, came on the screen, she burst out in delicious excitment. All Roosevelts have a delightfully mad enthusiasm for each other and one can't be fond of one of them without presently acquiring a contagious affection for all, and an amusing share in the family anecdotes.

Another night the intellectual Tuesday Club had an historical evening and every one of us went as Queen or King or Empress. New York society was used to crowned heads. A visiting Englishman at the Metropolitan Opera Hpuse looked around the dazzling horseshoe, and said, puzzled, “But I didn't know the Republic had so many peeresses!” One comical observer remarked that the smaller the lady's house, the larger crown she wore. Nothing more brilliant, I believe not even the Russia Czar's Court, was ever 07756seen than the jewels and gowns of the women who sat in their opera boxes twenty years ago. The music is still the best in the world, but the war made an end of the gorgeous display. The elder De Reszke, we knew well. Once I told him how all my life I knew I could close my eyes and summon the act of “Götterdämmerung,” where he, as Siegfried, told the story of his life as he sat on the fallen tree. “My idea of Heaven,” he said, “is to sing Tristan with an Isolde who isn't fat or old. Ah, if only some of the women with beautiful figures in the boxes could sing!” It was nice to know that the singers cared for the horseshoe as well as the gallery, for Rumor always had it that most of the artists put the gallery not only literally higher, but every way. And I don't blame them. Not a little of the success of the Metropolitan has come because New York is quite as much a great European city as an American city. Warsaw, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, bubble up from its very depths and those bubbles demand an artistic life. Washington, where society is distinctly cosmopolitan, is really not so much a world city as an American one. There I miss my artist friends.

A happy memory is a dinner party we had in our house on 36th Street, arranged frankly to interest E. H. Harriman in The American Academy at Rome. (He wasn't “interested” but it was one of the most amusing dinner parties of my life.) Major Higginson had come down from Boston, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hastings were there. At the time he was building the New York Public Library, and as always she was her witty self, well deserving the title of the “feminine Sydney Smith.” Frank Millet, the artist who was lost on the 07857 Titanic, had come with Saint Gaudens who was full of stories of his statue of Phillips Brooks for the square in front of Trinity Church. “I never had such difficulty with a face before,” he said, “the Bishop's soul simply will not come into the stone.” President Butler of Columbia was there and, of course,Charles McKim. I never knew him well until just a few years before he died, but his friendship was one of the rarely beautiful things in my life. Being with him was like bathing in a crystal pool. Mind and soul were purified. We saw much of him when he was building Mr. Morgan's library on 36th Street, which I think is one of the most beautiful buildings in America. It was because he was so interested in the Academy at Rome that Bordie and I were making a try to help him raise the money.

One year we crossed on the streamer with Charles Deering of Chicago, Alexander Harrison, the marine painter, and Andreas Zorn, who etched every day and was most patient about explaining processes to Mrs. James Wright and me. When we arrived in London, the three took us on a tour of all the galleries, letting us tell them our likes and dislikes and then telling us why we were right or wrong from an artist's point of view. I remember it was the year Sargeant's portrait of the young Earl of Dalhousie was hung. It showed the line of tan below where his forage cap worn in the South African war crossed his forehead, and white above. In Paris, our artist guides went on with our educations, and I saw first Puvis de Chavannes' “St. Genevieve Watching over Paris by Night” in the Pantheon, a picture that I go back to again and again when 07958I reach that city of Glad Faces. “He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps,” it seems to me to say.

Someone asked me lately what was the difference between society in New York and in Washington and why I was so certain that I would never come back to New York. I miss the cosmopolitanism that colors New York from top to bottom. I am entertained by its mercurial quality, interested in its Bohemians, at home with all the friends I have danced and dined and sailed and ridden with. But I am won by a city where one can live in the heart of the town, and yet have a garden, two gardens in fact, and in ten minutes be riding a horse on country trails. I have come to learn also that men—and women too—are most fascinating when they're talking “shop” and Washington has what to me is the most interesting “shop talk” in the world. Politics, national and international, are as much our shop as steel or motors are Pittsburgh's and Detroit's. We quote politicians and their works as other cities quote the price of stocks or wheat. Today there is a boom in a certain Senator, a slump in another. Since my two years on the Industrial Commission, when I first saw the vast economic struggle that is going on in America, and learned to watch that struggle indicated in the political happenings in Washington, nothing has been so important to me as to take my tiny part in shaping events. Official and diplomatic dinners may not be as gay as dinners before a Hunt Ball but they are vastly more important. We have all had our day of dinners where stocks and bonds were “the shop” and where for long periods at more than one banker's house “politics” was taboo. Now Roosevelt's name, now 080

“Fuss and Feathers”—Newport, 1895

Sometimes the precedents at Washington dinners are oppressive. One must have a memory for the Chinese language to remember who takes precedence of whom, that all ambassadors always come first and this ambassador ahead of that. More than one unhappy hostess has had a guest leave her dinner because she seated him wrong, insulting by a chair or two a “great and glorious people.” We can't all be Bryans and invent our precedents. Once when he was Secretary of State he decided that he wanted to give a dinner party to Sir Robert Borden and to Sir William Tyrrell and he wanted to ask the French and German ambassadors So he did. A suave secretary came to explain to him that an ambassador couldn't be asked to “meet” anyone. But he was not the great Commoner for nothing. He wanted to give a dinner party to his friends, Borden and Tyrrell, and he wanted their Excellencies to come to it. I think he must have mopped his brow many times in good Chautauqua fashion before he hit on his solution. The evening of the dinner came. Mrs. Bryan went out with M. Jusserand. Count Bernstorff sat on her other side, taking in Lady Spring-Rice. Then the Secretary brought in first Madame Jusserand, seating her one seat from him on his right. Then he brought in Countess Bernstorff to sit on his left. Then, triumphant, the Secretary of State went back to his drawing-room. He drew Sir Robert Borden to him with his right arm, and Sir William Tyrrell to him with his left arm, and escorted them in himself. One sat on each side of him. The ambassadors couldn't 08260complain,—the places of honor on either side of the hostess, they were certainly sitting in; but none could doubt that Bryan was giving a dinner to “meet” Sir William Tyrrell and Sir Robert Borden.

Washington deserves a chapter of its own. No one who feels about politics as I do, could possibly, even in fun, call the life of the capitol “Fuss and Feathers.” Nor does any society deserve that gibe except when looked at pleasantly after ten and twenty years. Bustles, croquet, the Waterbury circus where Bordie was an acrobat and I an equestrienne in a pink coat, bright blue days at Newport on the Mohican, one must look back at thirty years of these things with a little acid awareness of their unimportance; or be lost in sentiment, remembering!

I was married in November, 1889, a little dazzled by all the ceremonial, very charmed with the partner of my settling down, and intrigued by stepping into a new family somewhat different from the Jaffrays and the Hursts. I was always discovering more and more of Bordie in his family. My father-in-law had a smile that could charm a bird off a tree. It was from him my husband had inherited his sublime disposition. I never heard either one of them say a malicious thing. With amiable kindliness they would turn off an avalanche of gossip. “You don't know X,” Bordie would murmur, “he is not so bad as people make him out.” Bordie, who had an amazing number of friends, knew how to play and amuse himself much better than his father. The older man had, like so many of his generation, thrown himself so deeply into business, and devoted so much time and energy to it that soon after he retired came an early break-down in health, and he felt an emptiness that nothing could make up for. He had no hobbies and pastimes ready to be expanded into pleasant occupations. He and my mother-in-law were always deeply devoted to each other. My mother-in-law was very austere and until I grew to know her better, she frightened me a great deal. She had a sense of caste that none of us at Irvington had been brought 08462up to. She would take me out in her brougham to call and leave cards in the afternoon, and she was very kind in giving lessons to her daughter-in-law about just the right social thing to do.

“Now, my dear,” she would say, as she looked at my list of friends, people who had come and gone in my grandfather's house, “it won't hurt you a bit to drop so-and-so, and so-and-so,” and she would name some pleasant old-fashioned unworldly friend who wasn't—she was quite right there—of the slightest consequence in society. How could she know, and I certainly didn't, that life being the kaleidoscope it is, some of those very humble, simple, black-listed friends would become, as they have today, what my mother's mammy would call “the top of the heap?”

Getting Jo Harriman for a brother-in-law was all plus. He was always a frank, most forthright companion. E. H. Harriman, who was a first cousin, not a brother of Bordie's, proved to be a treasure of simplicity. Like a patriarch of old, on one of my first visits to Arden he took me up a steep hill where he meant to build his home, looking down on a fair valley. I was young and husky, but I panted as I tried to keep up with him. It was like a story-book to watch his power grow in the financial world. One of my last visits to him was in his house in New York. He was at his desk in his library. He said, “Daisy, I have a new plaything. I have just bought the Erie road for five million dollars. I think I will call them up now.” The office was closed and only the night watchman answered the ‘phone.

His brilliancy made him intolerant of intellectual 08563mediocrity in his business associates, and so he left a great monument behind him in the constructive railway work he did throughout the United States. He was a model husband and father.

The sister most like Bordie was the eldest one, Emmie, now Mrs. Stephen Olin. She and her first husband, William Earl Dodge, a brother of Cleveland, who lived such a pathetically short time, had been neighbors out at Riverdale, where Bordie and I spent the first few months of our married life in what had been his summer home as a boy.

Emmie was a joy. She had what is always to me the chief glory in a woman—it is nonsense to talk about hair—a beautiful soothing voice that made her every visit like a bit of music. When she used to come to my grandfather's house as a girl, I remember my delight in finding what a soft voice she had to match her lovely face, and I have found through the years that she is one of those women whose beauty does not fade. She was always busy. She had the fingers of an artist. She kept her needlework constantly by her, and I used to say to myself as I watched her, that she could knit and tuck and embroider herself a living if ever it were necessary. Even then I had a vague notion that a woman should be able to do something in the workaday world, and I had never heard of anybody's making a living riding to hounds or jumping hurdles. However, I didn't give it too much thought. Life was so exciting, and a few months later we were off to London for our first season. There is no place more hospitable than London, and I fell in love with all the old customs, and worshiped the solid masonry of the town itself, 08664and laughed and learned, and found myself with the many friends we made. What I liked best about England is that the people even in sets and cliques are so individual. It seems to be easy enough in America to find six of a kind and half a dozen of another, but in London each of my friends seemed one of a kind, and nobody seemed to be struggling to be the sort of person who was fashionable that year. Their game of lionizing one particular person a season delighted me, and I was the more entertained because that year Buffalo Bill was the hero of the hour. Shades of birthday treats in old Madison Square Garden and Buffalo Bill with his long rope sending the sawdust flying! But, there he was to be found at all smart entertainments in great houses pursued by duchesses and waited on by lords.

On the Fourth of July, the American held a reception at the Grosvenor gallery, I think it was. Suddenly the bank struck up “God Save the Queen,” the crowd parted, and I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the Prince of Wales. Not at all! It was Buffalo Bill in all his glory swinging down the expectant avenue of visitors, with Mrs. John Bigelow on his arm, she with a great bouquet, bowing to right and left. “Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he American?” a young Englishman who was with us breathed into my ear, and before I could answer he was off trying to get a word with H.R.H. Bill. The whole thing amused and puzzled me, for the English were in such earnest about the great man; and I being only nineteen and having been reared in a pro-British household was equally serious about all the little gusts of English opinion. I 08765could have cried at an American wedding at St. George's Hanover Square, when I overheard Mr. Jack Leslie, who was in a pew behind us with Mr. and Mrs. Moreton Frewen, Clare Sheridan's parents, whisper with a sniff, “Are they all Yanks here?” as if being “all Yanks” was very second rate.

That London season helped me a great deal to understand the reaction of some American diplomats and others when they live long in England. The British are truly wonderful, but it is very hard for an American when first impressed with them not to have one of two reactions,—either an almost craven enthusiasm, or a much too blustering and defensive self-respect.

Later in June we went down to Epsom to see the Derby run, and no one has ever been able to tell me since that there is something superior about the way the Latins make fiesta. There is nothing so joyous in all the world as the road from London to Epsom on a sunny Derby day. Motors, bicycles, coaches, donkey carts and milk wagons, charabancs, and hansom cabs—the most good-natured processional in the world winds down in the morning, everybody betting, everybody munching, children calling, “Throw your mouldy pennies out, throw your mouldy pennies out.” Bordie and I saw the race from a coach opposite the Jockey Club stand. The Prince of Wales, not yet Edward VII, Lord Rosebery, the Duke of Westminster—now I looked at the celebrities, now I looked at the horses, now at the crowd, little cockneys arm in arm, jostling, chaffing a party of M.P's and their organdie-frocked ladies. Sainfoin won the Derby. Then back to London through beautiful green country lanes in the long 08866twilight, past hawthorn hedges, and miles of regal lawn. Other countries have gardens, but England is a garden.

The next year we had no London season, but later Bordie's pneumonia made it necessary for us to take a holiday and so we set out for four months in Egypt. More than ten years before I had known the map of Egypt by heart. All during the Egyptian war Biddy and Ethel and I on our hands and knees used to crouch around a large map spread out on father's bed. My father's finger pointed out just where the British troops were according to the morning telegrams and where the enemy. I was a little disappointed to find only Arab vendors of Egyptian dates and scarabs instead of red coats and flashing swords at Tel el Kabil, and instead of Sir Garnet Wolseley and his generals in Cairo, we found the young Sir Herbert Kitchener just made Sirdar. However, within a day or two we met up with the one other person I have known in my life who had as much enthusiasm as my father. Richard Harding Davis and Bordie and I found Egypt a fairyland. Lord Cromer, Governor-General, stopping to look on at out tennis, spoiled our game. We were too thrilled! Lord Milner, “writing a book on Egypt, I hear.” That thrilled us too. Miss Mary Lee of Virginia, daughter of General Lee, was stopping at Shepherd's Hotel that winter, and held a little court of her own like the Russian emigrée princesses of today. Beautiful Mary Leiter, later to become Lady Curzon, was pursued by all the marriageable men in Cairo. Lord Kitchener was square and silent, even more silent than when I met him in later years. His teeth seemed clamped together 08967and he never wasted a word, kind or unkind, if a nod or a frown, or the drawing together of his heavy brows would do for an answer. The fact remains that next to entertaining or impressive talk, a thorough-going silence manages to intrigue most people. I would have been interested in Kitchener later anyway, for when his brother was appointed Governor-General or Bermuda, and became our warm personal friend, we managed from year to year to take a family interest in what happened to “Herbert.” Walter Kitchener was a nice, enthusiastic Irishman—not silent at all, and most sympathetic, very deep and very democratic. One particular time walking home from church when he was at our Mt. Kisco place, he was telling me stories about his brother; then tacking off, he said, “Herbert is a big man, he is a big man, but not a great one, and some day the world will realize it.” He was tremendously fond of his brother, but for once family perspective seems to have been a modest one on the hero.

From Cairo we dawdled up the Nile, reveling in its mauve banks at sunset and feasting on its temples by moonlight. It was a particularly unsettled year in Egypt and one fine morning we woke to find the Khedive's Palace surrounded by troops when the Khedive had dismissed Mustak Fehmi, and appointed Fahkri Pasha Prime Minister in his place. The Black Watch regiment and a squadron of the Queens Dragoon guards were headed off on their way to India and brought to help impress Egypt's ruler with the strength of the British protectorate. The protest of the British Government was successful.

We were at Elm Ridge Farm out at Scarsdale when 09068my little daughter was born. I call that day the best Christmas morning of my life. When the nurse used to bring me that smiling little bundle I had the realization, fresh every morning, that I had a child of my very own. It gave me the same start of joy I used to have once a year when Mammy threw open the nursery door and shouted, “A Merry Christmas.” Ethel became to me what the blockade had been to father. I set my dates before and after Ethel. Just after Ethel, we moved to Mt. Kisco where Bordie and I had built our home, on a plateau about a thousand feet above sea level, among the glorious Westchester hills. Camilla Leonard Morgan, whose husband, Pat Morgan, had built our house soon after his graduation from the Beaux Arts, and just before his early death from typhoid fever, always called the place Happy Hill. Peter Dunne said we ought to have named it the Borden House, only the food was too good. But somewhere I had found a poem called “Each in His Own Tongue,” and one verse seemed to have been written of the very place we had come to live; on a golden October day I had first seen it: A” haze on the far horizon, The tender infinite sky, The rich ripe tints of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high. And all over Uplands and Lowlands, The charm of the golden rod, Some of us call it autumn, But others call it God.”

We called the place “Uplands.” For twenty years we owned it, and for sixteen we lived there many months out of every twelve. When I first visited Newport, one summer there was a young man, much fêted as a tennis champion. He used sometimes to stand on a terrace, overlooking the ocean and turning his face up to the moon; then draw in a breath of utter satisfaction as he said, “Yes, I am twenty-one and it is summer.” I was equally at peace with the gods at “Uplands.” I wouldn't have lived any place else in the world, not even in Surrey. Once the house was in order, I went to work living out one of my theories.

The best thing in the world is creative work, but I did not know that then. What I did know was that being busy was tremendously important, and I knew that the worlds was so full of a number of things that no one need be dull. I used to lecture a friend of mine, “Everybody should have at least three hobbies. You put all your eggs in one basket. You get all the fun out of business. Business is fascinating, but after you have collected money in stocks and bonds, you can't go to the country and sit quietly enjoying money and stocks and bonds; even postage stamps are more fun to look at.” I began in my amateur way to collect books. I liked the excitement, to a true bookworm very crude excitement to be sure, of speculating on values. I always made a point of getting first editions of those men whom I believed from the first were going to be permanent figures in English literature. I bought all the early Kipling, Gorge Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson. Saving money itself seems dull, but I always pretended that it was really saving money to buy a beautiful old book 09270for “Ethel's library.” Nowadays twenty times the number of people haunt book auctions; in those days there were but few book stores which made a specialty of rare old books, and the little group of New Yorkers who haunted them and hob-nobbed with Mr. Ernest Dressel North, the dealer, took an enormous interest in each other's searches and finds. Mr. Robert Hoe, Mr. Henry Poor, Commodore Morgan, Mr. George de Forest, Sally Hargous' brother-in-law, who afterwards sold his collection to the Commodore, and Mr. Archer Huntington, who fished for Caxtons and often landed the golden Whales, were a wonderful group.

Grenville Kane was working on his collection of American revolutionary documents and autographs, which he afterwards sold to Archer Huntington. I hardly call collecting like his a hobby. It was really rendering a distinguished service to history, something quiet different from the way I contented myself by bearing home editions like the first of “The Leaves of Grass.” I enjoyed greatly having my treasures bound. We had no really great binder in America, but Robert Hoe had brought together several foreign workmen in “The Club Bindery.” When that was discontinued the workmen went out to Garden City where they are now known as the French binders.

Mr. Cobden Sanderson came to New York, founder of the Dove's Bindery, London, and a man whose own tooling brought fabulous prices. I asked him one night at dinner if he had seen Mr. Morgan's library and on his saying, “No,” I wrote asking leave to take him. The commodore showed him about himself, but didn't seem very interested when I spoke of the Master's bindings. 093

Group at Premium Point, New Rochelle, New York— 1889. From left to right—Standing: R. Livingston Beekman, C. F. Havemeyer and Miss Hope Goddard. Seated: J. Borden Harriman, Miss Camilla Moss, Oliver Harriman, Jr., Daisy Hurst, Joseph Harriman, William Boyle and Mrs. Jaffray

Since the war I crossed the ocean one spring on a ship with Mr. Henry Smith, of Dutton's. He and his nice young wife used to let me go with them when they explored old book shops in Soho and the Haymarket. Tucked away under heaps of volumes covered sometimes with dust and cobwebs we unearthed many a treasure—a first set of Surtees, a first Sir Walter Scott.

I had my baby, the house, the garden, the horses, a husband who smiled at my hobbies. Books, porcelain, old glass and furniture—I collected them all, finding it fascinating to pursue these things, not merely for themselves and for their beauty, but for the new world of art and artists they opened to me. I had only to buy a new piece of French furniture, and I was busy for days with the history books trying to find out what there was in the life of the time that made the artist create it so.

One Christmas I gave Bordie a first edition of Walter Pater—being so obsessed that I thought everybody was yearning for what to me seemed a treasure. “You might as well have given me a set of sables,” he confided to me later in the day with his sweetest smile, and I went out hastily and got him a cigarette case.

In June, 1912 a party of us decided to go to Chicago for the Republican Convention, and then back to Baltimore to see the fun with the Democrats.

There was a time in my life when election year was nothing to me, but in 1912, I joined that great army of Americans who drop a stitch in their routine every four years, and give themselves up to backing first a candidate for the nomination and afterwards a nominee. From the time Mrs. Alexander and I gave the Colony Club dinner I watched with increasing interest and excitement and growth of the Woodrow Wilson boom. My husband's friends seldom foregathered without heated, not to say bitter, discussions of the man and his chances. Bordie was for him; he always had been for him in the old Princeton dispute. For a week before we arrived in Chicago the newspapers were full on the deadly struggle for delegates. I remember the Missouri split, Taft getting eighteen and Roosevelt eight. Yet in spite of this warning, I went to Chicago a babe, fed on the orderly blue-print pap that comes in school books about civil government. It may be, of course, that a national political convention seen a long way off, is just such an affair of neat democratic selection that the professors analyze. But to me 1912 in Chicago was a strange phantasmagoric unbelievable 12399chaos of sights, sounds, and smells, slogans and emotions, that made the school-book version of the American political system seem very tame.

“Chicago in 1912” brings back to me a flat, flat lake, sizzling asphalt pavements, bands circling and zigzagging along Michigan Avenue, tooting and booming, “Everybody's saying it, Roosevelt, Roosevelt.”

The Coliseum—red-faced, perspiring men—one's frocks sticking to the back of the chair. Monotonous roll-call of states,—“Alabama, Arkansas.” Coats off and flashing fists—delegates pummeling each other. The sultry air was charged with dynamite. Rumors flashed like lightning. Delegates talked of drawing pistols and knives over the disputed seats. Everybody jostled, pushed, whispered. Day and night the excitement grew, monotonous, continuous. Savages in the African forest, hearing the distant roll and boom of the tribal drums could not better have been worked into a furious pitch of expectation than were the Americans who quivered and hoped and feared in the medley of trombones and telegraph tickers, hoarse oratory and shrill battle cries of the Coliseum medicine men. The heat was terrific. The manager of Roosevelt's Indiana contest came out saying the convention would last a month. We groaned and believed him.

Beatrice Bend, Bordie, W. G. McAdoo, Henry Fletcher and I sat two rows back to the left of the delegations. Just across from us were the Longworths. One noon, pushing out through the crowd, Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Review, Roosevelt colors in his coat, met me, swept his hand toward Senator Root and others on the platform. “How is it,” he said, 124100“how is it they do not see the hand-writing on the wall?” Hundreds of familiar faces. Coming down in the elevator at the Blackstone Hotel, I met Nicholas Murray Butler, his hand lightly patting his dispatch case. “Right here I have the platform of the Republican party,” he said. “Another nail in the party's coffin,” murmured Mr.——in my ear. Senator Root, as permanent chairman, never lost his icy self-control, except for a momentary flash each day when he turned to beam good morning to two friends just behind the speaker's platform. When he made his opening speech a groan from the Rooseveltites moaned through the hall, and people began to leave. “Work faster, kid, they're walking out on you,” shouted somebody and got a laugh from the crowd, but a glacial shadow of expression was all that crossed the face of Root, as he beat with his gavel for order. Our faction was not his faction, but it was impossible not to appreciate the imperative style in his gaveling, and to envy the stand-patters such a magnificent attorney.

Heney of California and Bill Flynn of Pennsylvania kept up a quarrel as an obbligato. Hadley, Governor of Missouri, in frock coat and with clean-cut features, rose, was recognized, and moved to substitute the names of about eighty Roosevelt contesting delegates, who had been put on the temporary roll-call by the committee. Such a racket. The next day was marked by fifteen-minute demonstrations for Hadley. Too long. Lieutenants shouldn't loom in the foreground. Perhaps this was the dark horse. Roosevelt backers suddenly began to be nervous and sent out word for their delegates to “get busy.” Governor Stubbs, of Nebraska, arose in 125101the Press Section and began shouting: “We want Teddy.” Out of the nowhere of an upper gallery appeared a Mrs. Davis in a cream-colored frock, fitting snugly to a noticeably handsome figure. She let down over the railing a lithograph of the Colonel. The Teddyites went wild. Senator Root, exasperated, invited the presiding angel of the lithograph to come down and run the Convention. She took him at his word. Fifty-two minutes the cheers lasted, but cheers butter no ballots. When the lull came, there was Root calm as ever, and master still. Sand-paper rubbed together and a shrill toot-toot kept the steam-roller image vivid for the protesters against the impassive implacable Root. A delegate rose to a point of order. “The steam-roller is exceeding the speed limit,” he said.

The hall was full of heroes,—men and women who could quote Mrs. Roosevelt, or better still the Colonel himself. Little knots gathered to hear them whisper, “Last night Mrs. Roosevelt said”; “I have just come from the Colonel.” I was not a delegate, I was not even a Republican. I was only a spectator, but no one's sympathy could have been more active than mine for the progressive element of that Convention. I was as excited as the rest when the rumor would go around that the Roosevelt leaders planned to seize the convention hall. But I was too much on my way to Baltimore to see the nomination of that even greater progressive, Woodrow Wilson, to be really one of them. The two men, Wilson and Roosevelt, were very different, but in their followers there was often the identical thing, the same passionate yearning for better times for the whole people. When Bryan passed through Denver on his 126102way to Chicago, and came to sit in the press-pen while the enemy chose their general, he was met by Judge Lindsay. “I have been a follower of yours and of Roosevelt's for a long time,” said the Judge. “Well, you had better not follow any longer,” said Bryan. “You might get cross-eyed. We are going in opposite directions.” But that afternoon in Chicago, I felt we were all on the same road.

The steam-roller rolled along. Now Taft had it! As we surged out of the Convention of that afternoon, someone came up to us and said behind his hand, “Be at Orchestra Hall at eight for the launching of the Progressive Party.” A messenger brought us tickets for a box. We saw the Bull Moose born. We heard T. R. proclaim that he and the forces with him were at Armageddon. It was pure drama as it always was where Colonel Roosevelt ruled the stage, and one was discontent to be either supe or spectator. One wanted to get up and shout and hew through some obstacle following with the host he led. That curious Rooseveltian power to make you want to do something was what brought him so many followers among the young. But that night there wasn't anything to do. There were only trains to catch. The terrific heat had left the faithful weary. There was some “pep,” the old “pep” that there always was in the ring with “Theodore,” but this one time in his life it was not quite enough to command us all. Far in the east the Woodrow Wilson cloud floated over Baltimore.

Next morning we were on our way east, on the same car with Senators Root, Sutherland and Borah. Alice and Nick Longworth were there. Alice kept saying 127103“Toot toot” every time she passed Mr. Root, a little way of making a face of his steam-roller methods. Senator Sutherland took infinite pains—he was born to be a judiciary—to explain to us ho impossible legally it would have been to seat the Roosevelt delegates, and argued very solemnly that the Taft people were not at all “Second-story men,” as the Colonel had dubbed them. A friend of Senator Root's, choosing words that had often been used about Root, himself, in Chicago, remarked that the Senator thought Wilson intellectually dishonest, for which reason he hoped that the New Jersey Governor wouldn't get the nomination. I made no comment, being rather uncertain whether this was an intended insult, or a species of clubby opprobium used by lawyers.

When Beatrice and I left the train at Baltimore, our friends crowded the platform and called after us, “Be sure to nominate Clark,” and we answered, “No, we won't. We want Wilson. We want Wilson.” Arrived at the Emerson Hotel where the queue at the registry ran in tedious loops, we ran into more friends, among them Mr. Henry Morgenthau, whom I had learned to respect through various municipal enterprises in New York. Baltimore was hotter than Chicago, or so it seemed, and I began to think Mr. Dooley had been right when he said at Chicago, “Us dimmycrats won't know the worst till our own convention meets.” Worse it might be, but like an old war-horse smelling powder, I only felt myself at home, and on meeting Charles Murphy for the first time that night, jumped in roughshod with, “Why aren't you for Wilson?” He turned his mask to me and said, “The boys don't want him.”

Some of the Independent members of the New York delegation, McAdoo, George Foster Peabody, Morgenthau and others came up, and the big question was asked at once. “What is Bryan going to do? What is Bryan going to do?” Chicago had been gloomy. Baltimore was the Donnybrook Fair all over, housed in the armory under a canopy of yellow and white cheese-cloth festooned there for some acoustic purpose. “You got to quit kicking my houn' around,” the Clark men set up their tune, “quit a kicking my houn' dog around,” and into the middle of the drawling chant would cut the staccato, “We want Wilson—we want Wilson—we want Wilson.”

The fight over temporary chairman ended in the election of jovial perspiring Senator James from Kentucky. This was good, for Judge Parker had too much about him of the flavor of Elihu Root, and his defeat gave a feeling to the convention that Chicago never had. In Chicago the machine could say who should be nominated. In Baltimore the machine knew from the first that the most it could do was to block action. It could not hope to lead. There was Ollie James on the platform; seated in the midst of the Nebraska delegation on the floor was the man in the alpaca coat, a man who really believed in democracy, who was ready to let the country exert pressure from without on convention in session. Here the nomination would be made in response to what “the people” busy on the farms and in the mills, were wanting. Beatrice and I had had an orchestra seat in Chicago, However, here in Baltimore, the worst seats were the best. Politicians 129105from the floor climbed the stairs to gossip with us.

Champ Clark was put in nomination. Pandemonium broke loose—cheers and cheers and more nasal celebration of the houn' dog. Then just as we were almost wilted by speech after speech from incurably eloquent throats, Judge Westcott, of New Jersey, rose and put Woodrow Wilson in nomination. After its flowery predecessors his speech was electric and to the point. He captured and carried his crowd because he was so terribly in earnest and the speech was so dramatically delivered. He told me afterwards one day, when we were lunching with the Governor at Sea Girt, that he had felt so ill the day of the nomination that he had walked about outside the hall, feeling that he couldn't possibly get up on the platform. When his turn came, the audience so inspired him that he entirely forgot everything but the fact that he was urging the nomination of Woodrow Wilson. “New Jersey believes,” he said, “that there is omniscience in national instinct. That instinct centers in her Governor. He is that instinct. We want Wilson.” Crowds in the gallery took it up. I turned to a woman sitting near, wife of a delegate on the floor below. “How do you know about him? What makes you want him?” She was from Iowa. “Oh, we've heard. We've read. Long winter evenings on the farm I've been making his acquaintance in the magazines. Wilson's an ideal to us.” “We want Wilson, we want Wilson.” The absolutely stirring quality of Judge Westcott's speech was particularly interesting to me because he had been a political foe of Wilson's in 1910, when it was he who 130106was chosen by the New Jersey progressive democrats to place in nomination for the Governorship Mayor Katzenbach of Trenton. After M. Wilson's speech of acceptance at that time, the Judge sought out the nominee, although he had left the hall in disgust when Wilson was nominated. The two became great friends and when chosen by the Governor to make the nominating speech at Baltimore, the Judge had been delighted.

I don't mean to say that the galleries were all for Wilson. Clark flags flapped there too, and the houn' dog tune was always in our ears. I sat not far from a pretty southern woman, who was very strong for Underwood, and was one of a group who let white doves out of baskets when he was out in nomination. By the end of the Convention she had prattled to me about her whole life-history including a love-match with an elderly congressman husband, and ended with an appeal, “Mrs. Harriman, you seem to know all the powerful people among the Wilson backers. I just wish that you'd tell them to make my husband vice-president. He is such a good man and such a clever man, and his selection would please so many people.”

The balloting began, “Alabama, Arkansas,” echoes of Chicago,—“Kansas, Kentucky.” The Texas delegation, 40 strong, plumped for Wilson. So the ghost story was true. The little colonel from Texas was not there, but the shadowy myth that he had sewed up Texas solid and had stolen away to Europe, knowing that from the first ballot to the last, the Texas delegation would never waver, was so. At the end of the first ballot Clark was leading with nearly 400. The balloting went on. There was a dark moment three evenings 131107later when Clark forged ahead, and it looked as if he were going to get the two-thirds necessary for nomination. McAdoo went on giving statements to the press that the nomination of Wilson was “inevitable.” George Marvin leaned over my shoulder in the gallery. “McAdoo looks like an American eagle,” he said, “and that ought to be an asset to him in politics.” “Certainly,” I said, making a speech en tête-à-tête. “He is and eagle. He is a fierce fighter. He knows what he wants, goes straight after it and usually gets it. He has dash and boldness.” Anyhow, none could say that Mr. McAdoo was just an ordinary man.

Rumors flew about. Champ Clark had come to Baltimore. His followers were divided, some wanted to bring the old man into the hall, some thought the chances would be better if he stayed away. Balloting went on. On the eleventh ballot Clark reached his zenith. Then Mr. Luke Lea, of Tennessee, asked that the Tennessee delegation be polled. That made the Clark vote drop from 554 to 547 ½, and from then on, Wilson picked off a vote here and a vote there. It was like a crew gaining inch by inch on its opponent in a boat race. Every time they polled a delegation they found scattered Wilson votes. There were 6600 Wilson votes under cover, a fact the Wilson leaders knew from the first. The excitement and the pandemonium grew more intense. We never left the galleries even for a meal. We hung over the railing nibbling Peters chocolate and drinking sarsaparilla out of bottles.

I had met a newspaper editor from North Carolina, Mr. Daniels who was a slow talker, a cross between thoroughly unassuming old-fashioned character and 132108a very courtly southern politician. He had promised to introduce me to Mr. and Mrs. Bryan, if I would come to the Bellevue Hotel at nine-thirty the next morning.

We arrived before Mr. and Mrs. Bryan were ready to receive and found the hall outside their room jammed like the assembling point of a Fourth of July parade, with men wearing Bryan buttons, “longhorns from Texas, jayhawks from Kansas,” Lindsay would say, a nice hot western crowd. Then the door opened, and I was presented to Mrs. Bryan, a handsome woman with a motherly encompassing smile, serene as the prairie on a fine spring morning. Behind me the “Bryan boys” as they called themselves, made a truth at the Commoner who stood in the center of his bedroom, wearing the inevitable alpaca deacon's coat with panama hat, and clasping a palm leaf fan which he pressed to his chest when there was a pause in its steady breeze-making. Over on one side of the room Mrs. Bryan and I talked. She reminded me that eastern people had been unfair always to her husband. I nodded, she was right, I knew. Here was I, the wife of a broker, living in a Wall Street atmosphere, remembering how I had been carried away by the general furore about free silver, and how I used to which Bordie walk in “sound money parades,” and go with him to hear Bourke Cockran hymn the gold standard in Madison Square Garden. Mrs. Bryan talked quietly and I was echoing, “True.” Most of the progressive measures in American politics that other people had adopted had originally been sponsored by the prophet from Nebraska.

When there was a chance to get near to Mr. Bryan we moved over, and I asked him if he were a candidate; the newspapers had kept printing that “Bryan plays the grandmother game and is really seeking the nomination for himself.” He looked me straight in the eye, and gave the same answer that he gave Judge Westcott later in the week, giving it with great earnestness and positive sincerity: I can never again be the candidate for the presidency for three reasons: first, my stand on prohibition, second, my attitude toward the Roman Catholic church, and third because I have run unsuccessfully so many times that by some people I am considered a hoodoo to the party. I then said what I had come to say, that the real progressive democrats from New York wanted Wilson. If Clark were nominated and elected we felt he would be controlled by Hearst. That we didn't want. “If Wilson gets in, you will be secretary of state, a fine combination.” I no sooner had the idea than it popped out of my mouth and I couldn't tell whether there wasn't just a little flicker of amusement around his crow's-footed eyes. We talked. Mr. Bryan ended the conversation with the very direct, “I will never cast another vote for Clark.” When I reported my conversation to my New York friends I deleted one sentence. They listened and then exclaimed when I told them about his never voting for Clark again, “If he leaves Clark, he'll have to come to Wilson.” They were satisfied. Then I confessed my fault—“I've done something dreadful”; and I repeated my bright idea 134110blurted to Mr. Bryan about the secretaryship of state. “Well, your saying it doesn't make cabinet members.” I heaved a sigh of relief, delighted to be a person of no importance, and particularly not a culprit impulsively offering eggs that hadn't been hatched and that never would belong to me in any case.

At the next ballot Bryan switched; things were coming our way. There were little incidents, a group of Clark men brought in a banner on standards, quoting from an old speech of Bryan's in which he had praised Clark, and held it in front of Bryan. This maneuver made it hard for the hundreds of eyes constantly seeking the face of the Commoner for their leadership. Presently the banner was disposed of, and Governor Francis of Missouri, who afterwards became ambassador to Russia, apologized in courtly fashion for the ill-temper of his fellow delegates.

By this time Clark's “houn' dog” song had faded out of the picture, and Wilson, by picking off votes, like currants, was far ahead. The tired delegates sprawled across a field of varnished chairs, as we watched them in the hot pale-blue fog of the armory.

Just in a line with my eye every little while, a lean stoop-shouldered, shirt-sleeved figure would stand on his chair leaning against a pillar and hold out his hand for recognition. This was “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma; the first time he had particularly drawn people's attention was the night that he drawled out: “There's one thing I know, Oklahoma ain't going to follow Tammany Hall.”

On the 63rd ballot the machine gave up, Wilson 990, Clark 84 and Harmon 12. McCombs, Wilson's 135

Woodrow Wilson Accepting the Democratic Nomination Reading from left to right: Woodrow Wilson, William, Jennings Bryan, Senator Ollie James, Miss Margaret Wilson, Thomas Riley Marshall (the nominee for Vice-President), William G. McAdoo, Gov. Foss of Massachusetts, and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman.

On notification day, some of us went down to Sea Girt. Ten minutes before the ceremonies commenced, one of the Wilson daughters, Eleanor, I think it was, drew the attention of the first Mrs. Wilson to the fact that she hadn't changed her dress. “Oh, my” she exclaimed, “I was so busy getting Woodrow ready, I had entirely forgotten about myself.”

Down in Bermuda, when I first knew Mr. Wilson, I used to tell him jokingly that some day of course I would go on the stump for him, as most certainly he was going to be President. After the nomination I sent him a message of congratulation and added, still mostly in fun, that I was ready to keep my promise. Archie Alexander, who was his aide, as Governor of New Jersey, suggested that since Mr. Wilson had done a great deal to improve the laws protecting the women and children of New Jersey, there ought to be a women's organization to help elect him to national office. Archie's mother and I were both enthusiastic, and the result was the Women's National Wilson and Marshall Association all drawn up on paper, only needing to make it come to life a prominent woman at its head. We naturally went after Jane Addams first. But she had already thrown in her lot with the Progressives, 137112because their platform declared for woman suffrage. We hurried on to Lilian Wald, and so on until we exhausted our list. All our birds had gone to perch on the suffrage plank. When Florence Kelly sent me a letter refusing to be a member even of our organization I was worried.

In the midst of our predicament Archie Alexander was taken ill with typhoid fever, and his untimely death took his mother out of active service. She was not as nationally known as were many of the social workers, but her splendid work in New Jersey used to make Anne Morgan in the early days of the Colony Club look at her and say palpitatingly, “Just think, she herself has gotten bills through the legislature.” She would have been a fine leader for us. Time went on; we had to have a head. At the bottom of the list, as a last resort, was my own name, and when no one else would take the job, I had to, knowing very well that I was far from the ideal chairman; but there was nothing to do but grit my teeth since the Bull Moose had gobbled everyone who was ideal.

One of the first things I pitched off to do was to go west to form branch committees there. It was a tribute I think to Ruth Hanna McCormick's broadness, bigness, generosity, and ability that without hesitation I went to her at once when I arrived in Chicago and said, “Tell me what Democratic women I ought to see.” Engrossed as she was in the Progressive Party campaign, she sat down then and there, gave me hours of advice and furnished me with lists. Every woman she mentioned turned out afterwards to have just the talents and capabilities she commended them for. From 138113that day to this my admiration for Ruth has continued, growing more from year to year. In her own right she is one of the most disinguished women in the country, and she is my ideal of the kind of companion and helpmate the wife of a public man should be.

Back in New York, the Women's Department at National headquarters, wagged like a little tail to the campaign dog. The publicity department loved us. “I can always get stories about this department on the front page. Bless you for space,” was the pat we got. Mrs. Frank Polk, Mrs. James Eustis, Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and Mrs. Oswald Villard were active members of the executive committee.

In those days women in politics were a novelty and therefore, news. The first weeks were full of agony when I used to open the morning paper and see the most unflattering portraits of myself, generally with my mouth open, addressing open-air meetings. Many of us had been brought up in a school where it was considered bad form to get one's name in the press, much more one's picture. A few had been a little broken in when the Colony Club was opened, though at first every single governor had balked at the newspaper demand for photographs. Civic Federation work tamed a few more reticent conservatives and after the 1912 campaign I personally had no modesty left.

Many, many years ago dear Mr. Charles Lanier said to me: “How can Fellowes Morgan allow B. to play in tennis tournaments where it necessities her name being dragged into the papers?” And grandfather Jaffray had much the same feeling. Less modesty there may be in these days, but we make up for it by 139114being less self-conscious and exclusive. My sense of humor tided me over, but I must say that it took a lot to keep us the chuckle when in 1916 the very men who used to come into my office four years before to thank me and my reluctant aides for our noble advance on the front page, turned up with: “No sirree, we don't want a women's department like that any more. Why, they got more advertising in 1912 than did the candidate.”

My first open-air meeting was in Union Square. Not literally of course, but almost, I waded for days in literature about the Jeffersonian democracy. Still I couldn't decide what to put in my speech. A Senator came to my desk very impressively. “Be sure and tell them the cost of living will go down.” I thought myself that would be a good thing to tell “then,” but he didn't explain to me why it was going down. As I started off to make my speech this phrase came to me, “Why, everything is so high now that if you wanted to throw a bad egg at me they're so expensive that you couldn't afford to do it.” With great gusto, after some banal patter, I got this off. There was a roar of laughter from the mass of people crowded around the band stand and then a voice from the rear yelled: “What will make eggs cheap? Does Wilson lay them? Of course, that almost broke up the meeting, and the turmoil was complete when Mrs. Jimmie Eutis, looking as pretty as a picture, hoping to better things, began distributing Wilson buttons. She and the other volunteers were forthwith mobbed by all the small boys in town who clambered and clawed for buttons until the police rushed in to rescue our political Santa Clauses.

At another Union Square meeting, I was asked to get up and say “anything” that would hold the crowd until the Governor could get there. I rather enjoyed being a curtain raiser. There was something very comforting in knowing one might be interrupted any moment by the arrival of the great man. Women made the best curtain-raising speeches. We were still decently, timid, quite unafflicted with the passion of oratory, and devoutly grateful for all the interruptions.

One night I was asked to speak in the outskirts of Brooklyn, at Brownsville. I was amused by an old friend of mine, a member of a conspicuous Republican family. “Brownsville,” he said to me firmly, “is a very rough foreign district. You shouldn't be allowed to go alone to a place like that.” So he came along in the motor though he wouldn't deign to go into the meeting. As soon as I got on the platform I knew I had my hands full. The hall was jammed. Every time I opened my mouth the crowd groaned and hissed and wouldn't let me go on. Suddenly, holding out my arms, I went to the edge of the platform and told them that I had something important to say. “My own father was an immigrant like so many of yours and like some of you yourselves and so I am very sympathetic with you. You see that although I am, as you are telling me, in better circumstances than you are, I do understand, and some day, if you are diligent, you children will probably be as comfortable and prosperous as I am.”

There was great applause and they let me go on to the end of my speech without another interruption. I had a hard time keeping them from carrying me out 141116on their shoulders at the close, to my gallant Republican escort. I have a very hyper-sensitive sister, and when she saw in the papers the next day that I had proclaimed myself the daughter of an immigrant, she didn't like it at all, and was with difficulty deterred from writing to the press that my father might be an immigrant, but not hers.

The last few weeks of the campaign I missed and had to spend recovering from a motor accident I had had a year and a half before going home from a board meeting with McAdoo, whose car it was. He was then a mere acquaintance, but we had since become great friends, and appreciating my enthusiasm for the political game, I think he and the others at headquarters really felt less badly about my injuries than about having me miss the last events of the campaign. I wanted to see it through and there were so many nuances to observe at headquarters. McCombs was away, ill, and McAdoo was left behind to regulate with the greatest delicacy all the inevitable tensions that came about. By election night I was well and present, when all factions foregathered to hear the returns. The party was almost dull. We knew we had it. So we had.

Not long after Mayor Gaynor's election in 1909, there was a big meeting at which the city officials who had won on the Fusion ticket were to show themselves and discuss the fulfillment of their pre-election promises. Among them was the President-elect of the new Board of Aldermen, who had formerly been in the office of Commissioner of Accounts. It was the first time that a good many of us had seen or heard of John Purroy Mitchel, grandson of the Irish patriot John Mitchel. At first glance he looked like a slim young boy, but the piquant earnestness of his pointed features drew us—pointed ears, nose, eyes, chin—he was an intriguing subject for a cubist sculptor. And to overuse the word, his way of speaking was pointed, too. His sharp content and simple delivery made him easily the most impressive figure of the evening. Not until the next spring did I have any personal acquaintance with him. Then someone asked me to help push an appropriation for a proposed children's court building, and I was asked to lunch with young Mitchel to see if he could be interested.

Mere slipshod enthusiasm I could have expected from any affable politician as soon as he saw that a good many influential people were behind the scheme, 143118but Mitchel was at once critical, practical and really helpful. I left the table feeling that here was a collaborator the women of New York would be proud of, someone it would be great fun to work with. Later when the members of the New York Milk Committee decided to institute a unified system of milk depots throughout the city, where mothers could come and get a certified supply of pure milk for their babies and at the same time a lot of practical information about child care, we went down to Mitchel, sure beforehand that we had a friend.

“I'll tell you what,” he said to me, “if your committee will organize and support such a chain of depots for six months, and if your experiment does cut down noticeably the death-rate among babies, I pledge you my support toward getting the city to take the depots over as a permanent public charge.” We started off the campaign for $200,000 at a Colony Club meeting. Mrs. Sabin and Mrs. Root and many others worked like troopers at the house-to-house campaign for funds. We districted the town by precincts and by blocks. Not Tammany itself was cleverer in getting at the people than we were in this great-great-grandmother of the war-time drives for funds. Mrs. E. H. Harriman and Jacob Schiff gave us golden checks, but part of our money came in nickels and dimes and quarters, and many a tenement kitchen heard the story of better milk and better babies from one of our enthusiastic collectors. We raised the money. The depots flourished. We brought the statistics to John Mitchel. Together with George H. McAneny and Comptroller Prendergast, he fought for and obtain the appropriation 144119which made the stations one of New York's permanent good works.

By the time the campaign was finished, John Mitchel was not only my political associate, but our warm personal friend. He and Olive, his wife, used to come to Mt. Kisco where they were welcomed by shouts of joy from Ethel. With the rest of us, though he always looked boyish, he often was earnest and solemn as an ancient, but with Ethel, he was just another child. More than once the pair of them staged wrestling matches in the motor car, Ethel shrieking and giggling and both of them pummeling each other, and I laughing too much to make them stop. His whole political life with its arduous tasks he undertook from a sense of duty, but he remained at heart play-boy and lover of the out-doors. Nervous and nettlesome as he was, it was great good fortune for him that Olive, to whom he was deeply devoted, should have been one of the most placid women in the world.

One very hot day in July, 1913, I was called to the telephone at Uplands and asked if I would come down the next morning to an office downtown on some important business connected with Mr. Mitchel. When I arrived a little after nine I found there among others Frank Polk, Montie Hare, Bertram Kruger and Mr. Mullan. They said it had been decided by a group of people to ask young Mitchel to run for mayor. What they wanted me to do was to send telegrams that day and call on people whom they hoped to interest.

They made out a list and then the names were divided up. Among the names which fell to me were Colonel Munroe and Mr. John Agar. All that day I shot up 145120and down in elevators. At first, “Mr. So-and-so is in conference”; minutes passed; then the secretary, as it were, would take the tea-cozy off her chief, and I would be let in on my mission. It was delightful and memorable experience to find so many older men enthusiastic about young Mitchel. The next day following, Frank Polk, as chairman of a small delegation that made up in quality what it lacked in elderly members, waited on Mitchel, the Collector of the Port, at the Customs House and asked him if he would allow his name to be used as a candidate.

The first step was to get our candidate accepted by the Committee of 107 which had been formed to nominate the fusion ticket for the coming municipal election. Besides Mitchel, an independent Democrat, two older men, Charles Whitman and George McAneny, were in the running. It was very exciting; it was like betting on a three-year-old at his first race. The summer before, during Mayor Gaynor's vacation, Mitchel had pulled off the Coney Island clean-up and attracted the attention of the whole city. John Collier used to tell me what an impression Mitchel had made on many social workers who ordinarily took no interest at all in politics.

Mitchell started out the weakest candidate; he was so young. However, a small nucleus in the Committee of 107 who believed in him gradually added to its numbers until the night of the balloting. The night they nominated I was at Uplands, very eager and fidgety when a man, who was representing labor on the Fusion Committee, and pulling for all he was worth for Mitchell, called me up. “Say, Mrs. Harriman, 146121how are you feeling tonight?” Oh, anxious,” I said, “terribly anxious. I am so afraid Mitchel won't get in.” “Oh, say, Mrs. Harriman, don't you worry like that. Just say G—D—Herbert Parsons and turn over and go to sleep.” Herbert was leading the Whitman forces. I have often laughed with him about this, but I didn't take the advice. Instead, I sat by the telephone most of the night and wished very hard that women were further along and I could have been in the committee room. Every little while the telephone would ring, for a friend of mine on the committee ran out after each ballot and called me up to tell me the result. Then I called Mitchel at his flat on Riverside Drive and repeated it to him. Inch by inch our candidate was winning. One final ting-a-ling told me that by a narrow margin the nomination was ours. I called Mitchel in New York at once, to congratulate him. Then I ran upstairs to tell my husband. “That's that,” I said. “That's the nomination.” Then drawing a deep breath I said, “Now for the campaign.”

Mrs. Gordon Bell took the chairmanship of the women's wing of the campaign. Miss Wald, Mrs. Cornelius N. Bliss, Jr., Mrs. Dana Gibson—most of whom idolized the young candidate because of his shining record in our Milk Station drive—felt for the moment that woman's place was on the soap box. We hired wagons, had them backed up to the curb at various downtown locations, and at noon when the canyoned streets ran black with voters, we motored from cartforum to cart-forum and made our speeches to bank clerks and to Tim Healy's longshoremen. We had a dream of good government and we had a candidate 147122whose record was spotless. I am afraid we promised everything, a new heaven and a new earth. Even bathtubs for all and paved streets! It was in the days before radio, but sheer enthusiasm was our amplifier, and I didn't care a bit when a soggy sea-faring man who hung on the edge of a crowd in Bowling Green yelled to me, “Gee, Lady, but you'se can shout.” Indeed I could. I had something I wanted to say, and I was experiencing the keen joy of letting myself go in the push and shove of a big campaign. I think I could have made myself heard to the thirty-second story if an interested bookkeeper with a ballot to cast had put his head out of the window. Gradually as the campaign wore on, Mitchel, who had not particularly worried the political bosses at the start, rolled up a backing in unexpected quarters.

The candidate himself was not a good campaigner, but this was a defect born of his virtues. He could not understand sham or posing and that was the way he felt about the necessary campaign stunts that before now had elected to office candidates with talents for the vaudeville stage. I remember one time during his administration coming into City Hall and hearing some local politician harangue him about being a better mixer. There was a county fair out on Long Island and Mitchel was on their books to come along and “give the glad hand.” “What!” he ejaculated half embarrassed and half angry, “go out there and have my picture taken kissing babies and playing to the gallery. Never!” However, we got the different mixer in that first time. He did not have his picture taken mowing the barley to get the farmers' vote, sweeping 148123the streets to get the white wings' vote, or juggling a hash tray to get the waiters' vote. We got him in with no moving pictures of a grandchild, and so far as I know no portrait of himself in a bathing suit at Palm Beach or Coney Island, to give the public a necessary ration of affectionate intimate view. We got him in on his record and on the fact that once in so often, like the century-plant, New York's dream of decent municipal government blooms hopefully.

After his election he set about choosing his cabinet, not a crafty politician would have chosen it, but as a man with an ideal of city administration. He did not seem to care much about party or creed or the personal popularity of the man who was suggested to him. He wanted to know what the jobs were in the cabinet, and he wanted experts for each kind of work. He chose carefully. Arthur Woods from the first, was in the back of his mind for Police Commissioner, but he felt that out of the whole country he had to choose the best man. General Goethals would have been a good man, but Goethals wanted the Commissioner's office to have more power. He wanted to be able to remove members of the force without the usual long check-and-balance system of review, but the law could not be altered so easily. Recommendations of all kinds of people poured in to the young mayor. Sometimes he would show me the list. “Help me find out more about these people,” he would say. “You look them over. Tell me how you size them up.” He had a strange faith in the opinions of two or three of us. It was not because he thought we were subtle judges of character, but because he knew we would be honest with him and tell him everything 149124we knew or felt—all the queer little intuitions of trust and distrust unprejudiced by any jobbery reasons for getting anybody in particular into office. My eyes were opened by Mitchel's experience. Somebody recommended X to him as police commissioner, and when I started investigating, I found that X had been for some years the victim of delirium tremens. Also he went down to Washington and talked with General Wood who felt, as we all did, that the police commissionership of New York was one of the most important administrative posts in the country. One day the Mayor-elect asked me to call on George Creel. Someone who had greatly enjoyed Creel's performance as police commissioner of Denver, had recommended him for a Broadway production.

I went to see him at his flat, as he had a broken leg. The handsome Blanche Bates received me in a lovely flowing tea gown, with lowered pink shaded lights. Her husband learning on his elbow talked at me with amazing velocity from a chaise-longue. I went back to Mitchel and reported that I'd found the interview more exciting than a matinée of Sherlock Holmes, but hadn't an opinion. He would have to go and see the play for himself.

Another time Mitchel called me up and asked me what I knew bout Katherine Bement Davis. Other members of his cabinet had suggested that a woman should hold the commissionership of corrections. As I had known Dr. Davis for some years, having been on the Bedford Reformatory Board when she was superintendent, to which I had been appointed by Governor Hughes, I knew how well she could fill the position, 150125and I was very pleased at having a woman recognized my office.

Mitchel himself meant to be a good suffragist, but somehow he would always rather appoint women than let them get things for themselves. He would make a long and ardent intellectual speech accepting all the suffrage points, and then in a sudden peroration arrive in all gallantry and kindness on the other side of the fence.

Afterward when Mitchel's cabinet used to murmur a little accusingly to me that Dr. Davis was “difficult,” “well, rather difficult,” Mitchel himself was silent. He never wistfully looked back to a cabinet of all men, and kept on asking my “hunches” on various appointments as they came up.

When the cabinet was finally picked what a rare circle of men there were at the City Hall in the years ‘14, ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17. I have moved to Washington, but whenever I came back and saw the youngest mayor of the largest city in the United State—the second largest in the world—sitting in deliberation, surrounded by such men as George McAneny, Comptroller Prendergast, Arthur Woods, Commissioner Adamson, Corporation Counsel Polk, and others, I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I were dreaming. The city business had never been in the hands of more honest, intelligent, public-spirited citizens. If the group had any fault it was that it was too academic. The thing that was best about it was the very thing that in the end seemed to make it impotent. The magic, I think I shall say the black magic of the “human touch,” was never quite made up for by the avalanche of scientific 151126statistics that were the background of the good administration. Mitchel and his associates, in building for the city's welfare, often did lose sight of the fact that the public is like a spoiled child, constantly crying for strange striped candies. City administration does need something of the clever mother who flirts with and coddles her child as well as of the stern father who lays down the law, if the childish voter is to be kept contented without a change of government.

Mitchel's happiest visit to Washington was at the very beginning of his term. He came down for President Wilson's diplomatic dinner. He was stopping with us, and after the dinner he came home radiant. The President had taken him aside, and together they had sketched a plan of harmony between the national administration and the new municipal government of New York City. There was to be agreement on certain New York appointments. Each had tossed off a glass of statesman's hope that governing can be done in peace with no one making a row over patronage and jobs. His least happy visit was the time he came down and told me what he meant to do about the child-caring institutions. Commissioner Kingsbury had uncovered truly terrible and indescribable conditions. I, myself, had gone on some of these expeditions and had seen the filthy beds, the vermin-ridden children and scanty food they were getting; so I had a sick sense that here was an acid test for a decent government. The public money was spent for the care of these children, and the public officials ought certainly to have the right to set some minimum standard of care and consideration below which no institution trusted with the 152

President Wilson and Mayor Mitchel at the Burial of the Vera Cruz Victims in New York —May 17, 1913

Mitchel was a devout Catholic, and let that never be questioned, and so was his mother, the daughter of a Spaniard and a woman of great charm and dignity. He was a devoted son; he telephoned or went to see her every day, and was always guided by her practical advice. When he came down to us at Washington he was in evident distress about the situation. He knew quite well that many good churchmen and all of the crooked politicians who had long been looking for a savory bone to pick with him would not forgive his backing Kingsbury in the exposé. “However,” he said briskly, “I have made up my mind to do this thing.” I listened to him. “I went to my mother,” he said. “There is no better churchwoman than she. I gave her all the data to read, reports on every institution. She said what I knew she would say, ‘John, there is right and there is wrong. You have always stood for the right. Of course, these sordid facts have got to come out.’”

It was a good day for the poor children, the day that wonderful fight started, and a bad day for John Mitchel's political career. It was not the only time I was to see him do something that he had to do, but did not want to. I had an ache in my heart when in 1917 he yielded to his friends' persuasion that it was his duty to run for reëlection. He knew that he had no chance, and longed to answer the call for fighting men overseas, 154128but there was a small handful left of New York people who had stood by him through thick and thin; Cleveland Dodge for one, had been especially loyal and fine as always. They felt and he knew they felt that he was pledged to be their standard-bearer once more in a municipal election.

It was a cruel campaign. As I have said before, Mitchel had not the knack of building an organization to back himself, and the Fusion Committee which had nominated him the first time, had, like all such reform groups, been a sporadic growth which disappeared overnight, once its members supposed their purpose accomplished. We were good reformers, but we weren't good enough. We elected a candidate and then, busy with our own affairs, we left him hanging in mid-air. Reformers are such part-time pillars of society! We crowed soo soon. We won a victory at the polls one year, and thought it was real enough to last. Tammany, which goes on like a brook forever, laughed at us. I know now that as soon as Tammany loses an election it begins to prepare for the next. They are never down-hearted in “The Poor man's club.” As an organization it knows its purposes can wait a year or two. In 1916 and 1917 Tammany did not shout from the house-tops, but down all the back streets and by-streets where the vote is heavy and early and often, its henchmen planted the seeds of distrust of the Mitchel Administration. There were many poisoned pellets, untrue tales of the Gary School System. Resentment and misunderstanding sprang up all over the city. Puzzled and irritated, what could our amateur 155129band do to vanquish the veteran octopus of the New York City Hall?

On November 4, 1917, Mitchel went down to defeat. The Sunday after that sorry election day, he telephoned from Cleveland Dodge's place at Riverdale where he was lunching and asked if he and his wife might come to see me at the Colony Club as soon as they could get there. He explained on arrival that he had been anxious to ask me if I thought that his wife could get a job to go overseas with the Red Cross if he could get a commission. I said that I was afraid the law was then so strict that nothing could be done to get the wife of an officer over. He told me that day that he should not be very surprised if he would have to go into the air service. I expostulated with him, and suggested that I go to see Secretary Baker the next day in Washington. I did this and the Secretary listened to all I had to say. Said that he thought a great deal of John Mitchel and would like to do anything possible for him. He agreed with me that he would be very valuable on a staff. I wrote the result of the interview to Mitchel and then I sailed for Europe. The next thing I heard of him he was walking the streets of Washington trying to beg, borrow or steal an opportunity to serve his country in Europe. Nothing else being forthcoming he finally went into the air service.

One day in July he took a new machine up at Gerstner Field. The machine was ticklish and turned quickly, the belt unfastened, as had occurred with many others, and all was over. However, he would have been the last one in the world to kick about the 156130way he went out; to him it would have been just part of the game.

On July 10, 1918, the city paused at high noon as a flag-draped coffin was lifted from a gun carriage and borne into St. Patrick's Cathedral. From the humming aeroplanes flying overhead in battle formation, roses generously dropped upon it. The strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” floated out to the street and were taken up by the waiting multitude. The crowd wept. And yet, hundreds of those very people had signed John Mitchel's political death warrant just eight months before. The ways of democracy are strange. As the funeral procession moved off from the church that day, Mr. McAneny turned to me. “I have been intimately associated with John Mitchel for fourteen years, and I never knew him to make any but the right decision on a big question.” The thought in my heart was that in all my life in little as well as big things I had never known a nobler Captain, or a more loyal and lovable friend.

One day during the 1912 Presidential campaign, an editorial writer on the New York Evening Journal named Ferguson, a great pro-Wilson mand and author of a strange book called “The Revolution Absolute,” came in to see me at Democratic campaign headquarters. He was an ardent suffragist and felt that women were going to give the old parties just the volatile progressive spirit that they had heretofore lacked. He told me that he had a letter from a “lawyer in Kansas City.”

“He hasn't decided yet whether he is for Wilson or for Roosevelt. He has a great deal of influence with the voters out in his state.”

I was interested immediately. Ferguson went on to say that he thought that if the Influential Undecided could see and talk to Governor Wilson, he would be for the Democratic candidate and would bring in a number of other votes with his. Whereupon I said, “Wire him to come on at once.”

He came. And so one torrid July day Frank P. Walsh and I journeyed together down to Sea Gate where Woodrow Wilson had his summer cottage. After lunch Eleanor Wilson and I went off to an adjacent rifle range, leaving her father and Mr. Walsh alone on the piazza. By the way, the man in charge of 158132the rifle range was introduced to me this year as the new Senator from Iowa, Mr. Brookhart.

When we came back to the cottage, there was Mr. Walsh, convinced that Mr. Wilson's progressiveness was more progressive than the Colonel's; and within a week Democratic headquarters hummed with the news that a bureau for social workers was to be established as part of the Democratic campaign and that Frank P. Walsh of Kansas City was to be in charge of it.

I did not see much of Mr. Walsh again until the next July after President Wilson's inauguration, when the President named the personnel of the Federal Industrial Relations Commission. This Commission had been created during Taft's administration by Act of Congress at the suggestion of a group of public-spirited citizens under the leadership of Jane Addams. Its purpose was to investigate the causes of industrial unrest in the country. The MacNamara case had vividly called public attention to the fact that through the length the breadth of the land there was armed warfare between the wage-earners and the profit-makers. Taft had named people to serve on the Commission, but his nominees had been considered too conservative, and Congress had refused to ratify their appointment. Also, President Taft had named men only and it was felt that at least one woman representative should be on the Commission.

The whole question of the Commission had then hung over for the new Administration, and one year of its life was lost. The Commission had nine members representing equally Public, Capital, and Labor. 159133After Mr. Louis Brandeis had declined the Chairmanship, the office fell to Frank P. Walsh.

With my appointment as one of the Commissioners representing the Public, began a new chapter in my life. Heretofore I had been interested in labor, but it was “on my own.” I felt now that it was tremendously important for me to thoroughly understand the industrial was because I was a public servant. I also felt that I was on my honor as a woman, the only one on the Commission, to make as few mistakes as possible. There were too many critics of women in public life, not to speak of the women specialists in industrial matters like Florence, Kelly who had, I presume, reservations about the selection of a comparative amateur.

I prepared to move to Washington. Bordie, enthusiastic as ever about the things that were happening to add interest to my life, fell in love with Washington as I had. Our moving filled a break in his life too, because after his illness and forced retirement from his firm, a new scene was doubly stimulating to him.

At one of the first parties I went to after we took the New Hampshire Avenue house, I met Mrs. Patterson, mother of Cissie Gizycka and Joe Patterson. She was a stately but lively figure with her pretty face and rich white brocade dinner gown and ropes of pearls. She gave me a sharp look. “So you're the dangerous woman who's come down to take all our money away from us?”

As curtain-raiser to the two years that followed came the incident of Mr. Garretson's telephoning to me from New York to Mt. Kisco on July 1st, ostensibly to say 160134how glad he was about my appointment, but also to tell me that a strike vote had been taken by the four railway brotherhoods and that within forty-eight hours, traffic on the eastern railroads would be tied up unless some means of arbitration could be agreed upon. Mr. Garretson was President of the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors at that time.

I had been hearing of his danger all through June from various Civic Federation officials, but Garretson's message brought the thing home to me as imminent disaster, and, as I stood there at the telephone, I suddenly felt that the responsibility was mine. Everybody has that experience in life, especially people who are impulsive by nature. All sorts of things seem social responsibilities, but one “lets George do them,” and then suddenly some situation is singled out by impulse, and one plunges into action. I asked Garretson to meet me the next day at my house in New York and for two hours we thrashed over the situation.

I found out that the men were demanding higher wages, and that the railroad executives were answering them by declaring the roads too poor to pay more to their employes, until they were given authority to raise rates. The railway executives had refused to arbitrate strikes under the Erdman Act because they considered three persons too small a board of arbitration. The Newlands Bill was then before Congress as an amendment to that Act. Under the proposed Newlands Bill, both sides, Garretson assured me, were willing to come together. The solution seem simple to me, for I was still young in the ways of governments.

Unabashed by the fact that the President had already 161135gone to Cornish for the summer, I called up Tumulty at Avon, New Jersey, and arranged to bring him all the facts I had the next day. July 4th, at seven o'clock, I journeyed down to Avon in the heat, going over and over again in my mind all that Garretson had told me.

I had talked with Tumulty hardly ten minutes before he exclaimed, “Why, this is serious! It won't do at all for this strike to take place. It would seriously damage the Administration.

I saw the machinery of government started, and came home. Within the week the President returned to the Capitol and the Newlands Bill, as the newspapers said, was “jammed” through Congress. There was no strike. And my faith in arbitration, and the setting up of peace machinery, grew like the bay-tree.

I went to Washington with what I presume now was a false hope—that everything was possible, or that the Industrial Commission would be able to make it so. My first approach to the task was a vivid curiosity about the personalities and backgrounds of my fellow commissioners.

The Commissioners representing the public besides Walsh and myself was Professor John R. Commons, of the University of Wisconsin. The best description of John R. Commons came from the President of the University of Wisconsin. He used to say, “Commons in a Thought.” Professor Commons was always anxious that something scientific and constructive should be done.

So much happened in the two years that followed my appointment as Walsh's fellow commissioner, until the last stormy hours when I refused to sign his report, 162136that I cannot recall what my very first impression of him was. My opinion of him now is that he would have made a very good labor representative, but I still seriously question his suitability as one of the representatives of the public. He was, I feel, quite sincere in his desire to better labor conditions, but quite unjust in many of his conclusions about capital. He is a born agitator with a very engaging personality, and has his place, but not in the position of judge. To me he was always the lawyer, not the judge,—always cross-examining as though capital were in the dock and always helping labor with the sympathetic spotlight. It may only be, of course, that the thought of himself as a French juge d'instruction, who investigates rather than weighs.

I, a woman anxious that there should be peace in the world and eager to understand both sides of a human quarrel, really did represent the public, I believe, as did Professor Commons. My ideal for the Commissioners of the Public was that we were to be judicial and impartial.

One of the Employers' representatives on the Commission was Mr. Harris Weinstock of California, a citizen very enlightened on industrial matters whose political ideal was Hiram Johnson. According to Weinstock, there was no question Johnson couldn't solve and nothing he couldn't do better than Woodrow Wilson or Roosevelt. There was something humorous as well as touching about his enthusiastic awe for his hero.

Thurston Ballard, flour-mill owner of Louisville, Kentucky, was another of the Employers' representatives. 163137He was one of the most amusing and original men I have ever met and the most completely outspoken. Walsh had appointed me resident commissioner, and I used to go to see Mr. Brandeis and other people whom we were consulting. Ballard complained of me to the chairman before the whole Commission, saying that he didn't think it fair of me to go alone. The first time he spoke up, it took me by surprise and embarrassed me. After that I did my best to see that he missed nobody, and we went about and learned the ropes of Washington together. And I grew to like his forthrightness. I've never seen people enjoy being in the public service and doing a government job, more than did Ballard and his charming wife whose name was “Sunshine.”

The third representative of the Employers was Mr. Frederic Delano, a delightful and cultivated gentleman, greatly in the confidence of both railway owners and railway employés. He had a real restraining influence on our Chairman, and it was after his departure to become a member of the Federal Reserve Board that Walsh's “truculence” became so marked.

Of the Labor men, Garretson was the strongest. Mr. John B. Lennon, of Illinois, Vice President of the A. F. of L., was particularly kind to me. He was one of the most sympathetic men I ever knew. Distressing testimony would make the tears run down his cheeks and yet he was always tolerant of the employers' side. Mr. James O'Connell, the other Labor representative, didn't believe in women in public life, and the first made me feel like a specimen from the zoo, but after a few months his voice lost some of the growl and I liked him. I discovered through him and others that Labor 164138is just as uncordial to women in politics and industry as are business men.

In the first few months of the hearings when employers were subpænaed, I began having interesting experiences. Men whom I had casually met once perhaps in my life years before, would write and remind me of the acquaintanceship and ask if they might call. Lovely flowers would come to my H Street house from those about to be cross-examined the next day. No matter how self-complacent I may have been, I couldn't entirely put down these sudden outbursts of emotion to any personal charm. It was an obvious appeal to feminine vanity, for the sake of indirect influence. Most employers, however, treated me exactly as the Labor representatives did, as one of the members of the Commission. The Commissioners themselves let me taste the joys of being “just a person” instead of a lady, and took off their coats and smoked cigars, and we were all comfortable on the job together.

The Commission's work was to have been two-fold. There were to be hearings to which witnesses from both sides of various industrial disputes were to be called, and there were to be scientific and academic investigations made. In the end, most of the money and time went toward mere hearings. We did succeed in dramatizing the hidden facts of industrial warfare, and it is true that for the first time labor felt that a branch of the Government was giving them a real say and a square deal. Walsh made them feel that you way but the Commission was named to do more than that and we didn't do it. T. comforts me by saying that the eleven volumes of our published hearings are not dead.

“Those eleven volumes,” he prophesies to me, “may seem to be sharing the mouldy fate of most government print, but they are the comédie humaine of America. They tell from a thousand angles the story of industrial unrest. The war is still on. Most of what the experts advised is still undone.” He argues with me that the most important thing, ten years ago, was to make people conscious of the economic drama. “It had to be staged,” he says, “and your unjudicial chairman was just the impresario that was needed. What could your experts do with a country that wasn't ready to admit that it needed them?”

I had been acting as resident commissioner for about two months when trouble broke out in New York over the re-signing of the Peace Protocol, the instrument under which the cloak and suit industry had enjoyed a fairly amicable four years of arbitration since the big strike of 1910. Telegrams from many sources were sent appealing to the Commission to come to New York and hold hearings so that the whole difficulty could be thoroughly investigated for the benefit both of the public and the industry itself. Chairman Walsh was away in Kansas City. I hastened to consult Mr. Brandeis. From the time Anne Morgan and I had gone to him during the Lawrence strike, he had always been ready to talk with me about industrial matters. He advised our accepting the call from New York and seemed to feel that our going might save the Protocol from breaking down. I got Walsh on the long distance telephone; he was in the middle of trying a case but told me to go ahead and preside at the hearings. My ideal for the hearings may have been a calm review of causes, but 166140what I had on my hands was heated and noisy dispute. I wielded my gavel like a pickaxe. The chief clerk of the board of grievance of the cloak trade, and the secretary of the Garment Workers' Union started to rush each other. The principals in the dispute, which was bitter, as I now know all economic disputes are, were not the only ones that kept me pounding for peace and quiet. Our own Judicial Mr. Ballard, hot and gallant Southern gentleman, during the testimony of how in a certain strike, a foreman had insulted a girl, jumped to his feet. “I am from Kentucky and in my state if a foreman grossly insulted a girl he would have got a beating, and been left three-quarters dead instead of being remonstrated with. A strike wouldn't have been the weapon.” Much shouting and denial followed.

Our sessions were stormy, but in the end the Protocol was signed again, all of which redounded to the Commission's good name.

Sometimes we were sent for by workers and by employer, who wanted the national attention focussed on their own districts or industries. More often we made lists of those who had special information on one of the many subjects assigned to us by the original enactment, and subpœnaed them to give their testimony.

I had had a fairly broad experience of life in New York, in Bermuda, in Egypt and in England, but this study of industrial relations yielded not only broad but deep experience. What we examined was a cross section of America, From John D. Rockefeller himself down to the widows of his miners who had been shot by state troopers.

I think I can say that during those two years the work of the Industrial Commission—its probe into the causes of the misery and unrest of the workers—held the pubic's attention, not only in the United States, but over the entire world. Our sessions were at all times open to the public and to the reporter. Even we members of the Commission were surprised at the eagerness of the young reporters to give news of the sessions to their papers; surprised, too, at the great discussion and interest which those reports aroused when printed next day. Editorials and feature stories, written from all angles of the problems of Labor and Capital, appeared in both American and foreign papers.

As we moved from city to city over the United States, now concentrating on some specific strike, now trying to find out what the efficiency engineers do, not only to increase production, but to make the factory system more tolerable for the worker, now trying to trace the history of the I. W. W. and their hold on the migratory workers in the lumber camps, now touching on the problems of immigration both from Europe and the Orient, now inquiring about child-workers, about illiterates, all kinds and varieties of people, with every sort of economic standing and religion, came before us. Each bore witness to what the economic struggle looked like from his angle, and many attempted to say how conditions might be bettered. There were immigrants and Yankee-born, there were meat-cutters and butchers, street car conductors, mayors and governors, miners and mine owners, Italian immigration officials, members of mill owners' associations, engineers and school teachers, railroad telegraphers and dispatchers, 168142agents and signal men, truck builders and statisticians. There were doctors studying child hygiene, social workers from homes for Chinese working-girls, directors of schools of industrial arts, plumbers and pull-man porters, superintendents of motive power on railroads, bankers and professors, manufacturers of ladies' cloaks, carpet layers and blacksmiths, owners of newspapers and reporters, secretaries of associated charities, boiler-makers and ship-builders, managers of placement bureaus and vocational advisers, merchants and cavalry men and state guards, councillors-at-law and plasterers, officers of child-welfare associations and structural iron workers, bricklayers and operating potters, men from bureaus of municipal research, painters, decorators and paperhangers, managers of docks and cargoes, bishops, the Minister of Labor from the Canadian Government, I. W. W.’s, and members of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, settlement-workers, cigar-markers, civil servants and Chinese interpreters, seamen and detectives, farmers and wives.

What they told us was told again in the newspapers. We gave the gift of tongues to many people.

One day in Washington the maid told me that I had a visitor. I came down and found in the garden a little old woman in a tidy bonnet, at first glance, the sort of benign little body, if one lived somewhere on Main Street, one would like for a neighbor. You could go to her to find out about the children's croup or mixing bread-dough. She said she had come to see me because she wanted to know what I was like. She wanted to know if I was good for anything, and she wanted to tell me about her boys. From the moment she began 169143to speak I put away the word “benign.” Her eye had seen something more than Main Street. I wanted to laugh and cry at the little bonnet strings under that chin, for it was Mother Jones, known for forty years down every mine-shaft in America. Her boys were the two-hundred thousand members of the United Mine Workers of America, and hundreds of thousands more besides. For the next two years I was to find her name a legend wherever we went summoning the down-trodden to speak for themselves at our hearings. I still think she is the most significant woman in America though her life has been alien to everything comfortable American womanhood is supposed to stand for. She has been a mother to men. She has kept alive their hunger for freedom. She has been a fire-brand, foul-mouthed and partisan, a camp follower and a comforter in the industrial war. Humble men, rough men, men who speak the languages of every country in Europe and Asia are among her “boys.” Something she said to a group of women out in Denver finally gave me the key to her. It was in the midst of Ludlow and she was addressing a group of polite and earnest Denver club-women. “I want to say to you,” she shouted to them, “that you have had the ballot for twenty-one years and your children will yet se the day when they will blush with shame at your indifference to these miners' women and children. I have never had the ballot, but I have raised hell anyhow, and I have made the nation know that I am alive and on the ground.” She called it raising hell, and her enemies called it raising hell. To me she was only alive, felt, above the ground. Other people seemed dead beside her, themselves not feeling, 170144and unfelt. Sometimes her talk was scattered, incoherent; still you were stung by her spirit to pity and to awareness of the struggle about you.

Once two years later at one of the City Hall hearings in New York, Mother Jones said something complimentary to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. “I'm afraid you flatter me, Mother Jones.” She retorted, “I don't throw bouquets, I am more used to throwing bricks.” Worse than bricks. She always told people exactly what she thought. In the beginning seeing how I felt about her personally, I think she had great hopes of me as a recruit to the labor cause. She kept telling me over and over, “You can't do anything worth while till you get over minding what people say.” She had put her finger on my greatest weakness. From the time I was a child I have hated being criticized or disliked. When I was a young woman I felt depressed all day if a butcher-boy looked cross when he came for orders in the morning.

I think of Mother Jones and John D. Rockefeller together, and what I think of them throws less light on the problem of Capital and Labor than it does on my own philosophy. I had for some years thought of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as a psalm-singing, cold-blooded capitalist. He came to us as a witness in the Ludlow strike, for he was one of the principal owners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. I found him intensely human. Even Mother Jones felt that he was making an effort to do right. The tragedy had occurred. If it had not been for us he might never have gotten close to the terrible drama for which, because 171145he was Capital, he was in the last analysis responsible. Around such men as Rockefeller there is a wall of steel. Their underlings tell them pleasant things. The rich must have imaginations indeed if, wrapped away as they are in cotton wool, they are to know the sufferings of the laboring classes and be moved by the misery that now exists everywhere in the world.

I remember one witness we had, an automobile manufacturer worth many millions of dollars. I had no particular interest in him at the time. I had heard of him, nothing more. He gave his testimony in an absent-minded kind of way. I do not mean absent-minded. It was vague. He had gentle eyes like an animal. He told us about how he had left his first job and gone from Detroit to work for Thomas Edison as a machinist. He had never had very much schooling except a little while at business college. One thing he said seemed very important to me.

“I went to the Edison Illuminating Company. Within a year I took charge of the plant and I shifted that into an eight-hour working day. It was twelve hours and I shifted it into eight hours, without adding any men, and found that we could run on eight hours with the same number of men better and more economically than they could do it on twelve.”

The man who told us that was Henry Ford. I never forgot him. And whenever Judge Gary had given out a statement on the twelve-hour day, I remember the young machinist who reorganized his shop twenty-five years ago and told about it in such a simple straight-forward way.

At the end of spring, 1914, I was very tired, and as it was necessary for Bordie to go to Carlsbad, it was decided that we should go abroad, and stop in England to collect various reports on British methods of dealing with the labor problem.

In a way I suppose Bill Delano is right. When I first embarked on this business of writing a book I let him see a handful of old notebooks I was revising. “Why, it's nothing but a string of names,” he exclaimed. Names. People have to have names. My diary is dotted with names, pegs to hang my own memories on, and for the summer of 1914, I would rather like to give the bare outline I find in my journal. All the historic dates are there so casually set down, with no prevision of the awful chaos that was to ensure. It makes me realize now that in spite of the efforts of prophets and peace societies, the next war, too, will come to most of us out of the sky, catch us laughing again at garden parties. And yet no war really comes unexpectedly. The drums are beating long before a single shot is fired. But I generalize too soon.

Monday, June 22d, 1914. We left New York on the Vaterland. It is the most luxurious steamer afloat, and we have had a perfectly smooth and clear trip, arriving at Southampton tonight at 6 P. M. Ethel is better. Bordie just the same. Margaret and Ogden Mills are on board. Margaret and Bordie and Ethel were frightfully bored when Ogden and I talked politics and so they escaped directly after coffee. Ogden is certainly a reactionary Republican; but he is making his career like a good 174148workman, running first for a simple state office. My belief is that he will be in the United States Senate before he is forty-five. The Eni met us at Victoria, and here we are at the Cavendish Hotel, Jermyn Street.

Tuesday, June 23d. Sir William Tyrrell called this afternoon. He is as keen on Sir Edward Grey as a young boy for an older one at a public school. He says Colonel House is doing a great work over here, but is an mysterious as the Colonel about precisely what the great work is. It has something to do with European peace. Ran across Alice Long-worth at tea with Mrs. Woolcott, who is in the hotel. She is just back from Spain and her brother Kermit's wedding to Belle Willard, daughter of the Ambassador. Colonel House came in after dinner, and we had a long talk. He says he has taken me into his confidence, and I presume that means that I may not take my diary into mine. He is a wonderful man.

Wednesday, June 24th. Dined with Lord and Lady Sheffield. Sir William Tyrrell there. He talked about his hero and I talked about mine. I really can't do justice to mine without giving away some of the “in strictest confidence”; so justice isn't done. Went on to a “small and early” at Lady Bell's. In the afternoon Ethel and I went to Ranelagh, after lunching with Bridget Guinness. She hasn't had time to transform her house, but I should like to see it in another month. More than anyone else I know she is always creating variety about her. Bordie says she os the best and most loyal friend he has ever known. Her house is always pleasantly full of old friends and gently spiced with new ones.

Thursday, June 25th. Lunched with Colonel 175149House. Went to the American Embassy “at home.” Sydney Brooks talked at length about Lloyd George. He is breakfasting with him tomorrow. He and others tell me that L.G. was enchanted with Alice. European princesses seldom come so brilliant and pretty.

Friday, June 26th. Lunched with Bridget. Mrs. Cornwallis West, Countess Torbay, Lady Cunard, James Thomas and others were there. Mrs. Pat is amazingly the same as she was long ago in New York when he would ask every one, “Do you love your husband? Have you a lover?” Lady Cunard wise and witty as usual. If England had grand duchesses she should be one. Dined at the Ritz. Mr. Fowler, private secretary to the Ambassador, was with us, and went on with us to see Ina Claire in “Belle of Bond Street.”

Saturday, June 27th. Went down to Brighton on the 3:13 to spend the afternoon, and dine with Cecilia May. I hadn't been in Brighton since I was two years old. Kept looking around for the Tenth Hussars. All the Wiborgs were down for the week end. I agree with Bordie that Cecilia's face has the loveliness of saint's, which only makes it more entertaining when she opens her mouth, and is witty, in her own quaint worldly way.

Sunday, June 28th. Colonel Munroe and Mr. James Byrne took Ethel, Bessie Enos ad me to Maidenhead by motor for luncheon. We walked back as far as Cliveden along the Thames. Perfect weather, and the river gay with all manner of craft and people. Dined at the American Embassy with Colonel House, Ralph Pulitzer and his wife, and all the Pages. Mrs. Page looks like an early Victoria 176150pastel with her parted hair and shy stateliness. No wonder the English are charmed with her. The Ambassador talked at length about the bitter feeling everywhere here caused by the pending Home Rule Bill. Says the Embassy cannot give a dinner party without finding out who can be invited with whom. Very old friends have ceased to speak to each other. People are really cut to the heart and cannot stand the thought of what they call “the break up of the Empire.” Colonel House was the only one who seemed gravely concerned about the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir-presumptive, in some little Bosnian town.

Monday, June 29th. Took Ethel shopping and then lunched with Thérèse Laughlin, Mr. Page, and Lady St. Helier. She is a member of the London County Council, much interested in all civic questions. She asked a great many questions about my industrial commission work, and is having me to dine on Friday to meet several people engaged in social work. Had tea at the Ritz with the Pulitzers. Was pleased to find Ralph Pulitzer so friendly about Mayor Mitchel. Eddie Jaffray dined us at the Berkeley and took us to the Hippodrome, where we saw Ethel Levey and Frank Tinney. Isn't it funny? American actors are the rage in London and London actors are the rage in New York. Ogden Mills and Neil Primrose came to speak to us just as we were leaving. Found a telephone message from Ava Astor asking us to her dance. She had just heard we were here. Too late to get ready.

Tuesday, June 30th. Lunched with Ethel Burn, Colonel Burn, and Lord Leith, and afterwards to the Flower Show at Holland House. I never saw such 177151sweetpeas and begonias, the latter much larger and more delicate in color than anything we have in America. The heat is intense, and I am much too weary to go to Bridget's “At Home.”

July 1st. Lord and Lady Sheffield came for luncheon to meet Colonel and Mrs. House. The party was arranged so that Lady S. might in turn bring about a meeting between Colonel House and Asquith, the Prime Minister. The Colonel too ill to come today. However, the Houses are lunching tomorrow in Downing Street as arranged by Lady Cunard. This afternoon on the way to the Diplomatic Gallery in the House of Lords, Ethel and I stopped at Grosvenor House to see an exhibition of Nineteenth Century French pictures. As we passed through the Prince's Chamber, Lord Ribblesdale and Lord Leith came forward and spoke to us. There was intense excitement over the Home Rule Amending Bill, 2nd Reading Debate. After some preliminary business and when Lord Saye and Seal had finished a statement of his part in the Army Scandals, and when Lords Crewe, Lansdowne and Halsbury had paid tributes to the memory of Lord Wemyss (just died), the Marquis of Crewe formally moved the second reading of the Government of Ireland Bill.

Lord Willoughby de Broke rose to a point of order. The Lord Chancellor (Viscount Haldane) replied. The heat was so intense that we wondered how the latter could endure his wig and gown. Lord Morley for the Government made a good speech. Lord Lansdowne for the opposition made a good one, and then Viscount Bryce—the old Ambassador 178152to America—made the best speech of all—so temperate.

All of the Lords speak very quietly in a conversational tone with no gesticulations. Sir Edward Carson was the most intent spectator. Only met him for a moment. He has a larger frame and is of course much younger, but he bears an astonishing resemblance to the President,—the same Presbyterian sharpness of feature and studious concentration. In between times, we had tea on the terrace with Mr. Geoffrey Howard, Government Whip, Captain Guest, John Burns, John Redmond and Watson Pasha (Lord K's aide in Egypt), who spoke most affectionately of Walter Kitchener. Mr. Howard took me into the Ladies' Gallery in the Commons, where from behind the grating we heard Mr. Montague (Financial Secretary to the Treasury), Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Leif Jones (Labor), Mr. T. Healy, etc.

I hated to leave at 7:30 to go to the Opera at Drury Lane. Chaliapin has great gifts, the chorus was splendid, and the house brilliant.

July 2d. We dined with Lady St. Helier and I sat next to Lord Sydenham, M.P., late Governor of Bombay, and was taken in by Mr. Montague Barlow. When Princess Marie Louise, daughter of Princess Christian, came in, I didn't catch her name and so didn't bob, but when she left I made up for it by making my best curtsey. She kindly asked me to go with her Monday at 11 A. M. to see a girls' club and other philanthropies in which she is interested. They are rather out of the line of my present inquiries, but I couldn't do less than accept her kind offer. Queer how philanthropy and a real adjustment 179153between capital and labor don't quite mix. An interesting Mr. Gilbert was at the dinner, talking on educational matters, also a Mr. and Mrs. Guinness, the former a son of Lord Ivor, and experimenting in emigration.

Saturday, July 4th. I lunched with Sir George and Lady Askwith. Sir George seems the best informed man on industrial questions that I have met yet. He is the Chairman of the Industrial Council; said that for settling strikes the Council had proved a complete failure. Alas! I imagine though that it hasn't as broad powers as we would recommend giving to a council in the States. I am to meet him Monday at the office of the Board of Trade at 3 P. M. Ethel picked me up after luncheon and with G. Minot and C. Russell, we went out to Hurlingham to see the finals of the Inter-Regimental Polo. The 12th Lancers beat the Life Guards after a good game on lumpy ground.

The King and Queen and Prince of Wales were there, and I nearly wept when I saw the International polo cup on the table in front of the King. A man called Hucks made some splendid flights in an airship, doing the double loop, and remaining on his back twenty seconds. Helen Crocker, Bartow Farr, C. Russell and Minot dined here, and we all went to see “The Cinema Star,” and on to supper at the Savoy.

Sunday, July 5th. Motored with Aunt Nelly to Richmond to lunch with Eddie Jaffray. Aunt Nelly looked as young as she did ten years ago and not as stout as the last time that I saw her. I loved seeing her again. Coming back Aunt Nelly set us down in Chelsea, and we had tea with the Fanshawes and 180154then walked all the way home, much to Ethel's disgust.

Monday. Went to see the Princess Club, 106 Jamaica Road, Bermondsey, S. E., with Princess Marie Louise. It is a factory girls' club where they can get their dinners. Dined at the House of Commons with Mr. Montague Barlow. Met there Mrs. Preston (Mrs. Grover Cleveland) and Esther. The room was full and we sat on the terrace for coffee. It is a more beautiful scene than any in Venice with that grand building as a background. What a pity Americans haven't such a terrace on Capitol Hill. This afternoon I went to Sir George Askwith's office where he told me much about the Industrial Council. The Council was to keep track of strikes in three ways, through a press department, a statistical department, and Labor Exchange reports on imminent strikes. He suggests for the United States a central office in Washington, with the best man we can pick at the head, aided by a small executive committee, and one office in each State. “Be sure to keep from setting up a body that thinks it can compel,” he said. I agree with him, but, I sometimes wonder, if it can't compel, who will be seduced into respecting it? Sir George loaded me with data to take back to Walsh and Commons.

Tuesday, July 7th. Hoytie Wiborg, Neil Primrose, Thérèse and Mr. Laughlin, and Geoffrey Howard lunched with me. Mrs. House and I went to see two hospitals. The first, I was told by the Princess, was th average, but the second, “Kings College,” was the most perfect hospital in every detail I had ever seen.

We dined in the evening with Lord and Lady 181155Leith and afterwards stayed for a dance given for Lorna Burn. A nice Captain Clive took me in to dinner. His handsome wife thinks of coming to Washington next autumn.

Wednesday, July 8th. Lunched at Blanchie Lennox's 18, Kensington Gardens. She is one of the most agreeable and attractive women live, and just as diverting now as when she went to Washington for the inauguration of the Fine Arts Commission in Commodore Morgan's party, and annexed statesman after statesman without the least apparent effort, and with a very catholic fancy for types as varied as Mark Hanna and McAdoo.

Thursday, July 9th. Liverpool. Spent the morning at Labor Exchanges and the Dockers' organization with Mr. Williams, who tells me that they ultimately aim to have large shelters about the docks, quite like the ones we, on the Industrial Commission, conclude would be wise for New York. He says there isn't a single non-union man working on the Liverpool docks; and that the Liverpool way is a real solution of the casual labor problem. He described to me their joint committee of eight with impartial chairman, assisted by six area committees which regulate the industry. Talked a great deal about labor exchanges, unemployment insurance, and labor colonies like the one at Merxplax, Belgium.

Friday, July 10th. London. Mr. R. Williams took me down to see Mr. Beveridge. Mr. B. says it costs $200,000 to run the Labour Exchanges in the United Kingdom, and about a half million for unemployment insurance administration. They have ignored private exchanges in England. He says it's not worth while having an exchange unless there are 182156over 10,000 people in a place, and then only if there is no insurance. He warns us to avoid sending people to jobs in priority of registration. “Send the man who will fill the job best—he must please the employer.” “You lose more than you gain by supplying strike-breakers,” he says, “and avoid at all cost the demand of the trade unions that exchanges should refuse to deal with a job unless the wages are standard, i.e., trades-union wages.” He says the central principle for their exchanges is that they collect information and hand it on.

July 14th. We started for Carlsbad, via Dover, Calais to Paris, and spent the night at Hotel Castiglione. Sent Ethel to Pont l'Evêque to stop with the Baldwins, and went by the six o'clock to Carlsbad. Mr. Munsey was on the train and we dined together.

Thursday, July 16th. In the morning we breakfast at Kaiser Park where we walk after Bordie has drunk several glasses at the spring. Then we walk back to the hotel about eleven, except when we play golf at the pretty little links next to Kaiser Park.

Tuesday, July 21st. Dined tonight at the Arburg with Mr. and Mrs. Blumenthal.

Thursday, July 23rd. Breakfasted at Freund-schaffstahl with Mr. Schmindlapp to meet Madame Schumann-Heink. She sang “Heilige Nacht” and “Old Folks at Home” most touchingly and beautifully. Kreisler and his wife were also there and a nice Scotchman, Sir William M'Cormick. Austro-Hungarian note sent to Servia demanding undertakings for the suppression of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy.

Saturday, July 25th. The Austrians have turned down the reply from Belgrade.

Sunday, July 26th. There was an aeroplane exhibition right near the hotel by a man and women. They were discovered to be two French spies who had been making maps of the country and were both imprisoned.

Mr. Black, Bordie and I drove to Elbogen together, and to the old castle near Carlsbad.

Monday, July 27th. News of Sir Edward Grey's proposal that the four great powers not immediately interested in the Austro-Servian conflict should endeavor to arrange a settlement.

Tuesday, July 28th. Vienna has declared war. At breakfast the other day Kreisler received a wire ordering him to join his regiment. Don't know what to think. Every one else seems utterly at sea. I wonder where Colonel House is now.

Wednesday, July 29th. The papers have telegrams from all over Europe. Everybody is doing something; preparations, precautions. We can't tell whether everybody is going to war or is trying not to. I had a hunch that I had better get Bordie away from Carlsbad while the going is good. So we left hastily by the 2:34 for Paris. * I am still dazed by our journey. All afternoon we saw from the car-window interminable lines of troops marching, gray uniforms winding like a great writhing serpent over the white roads between the yellow wheat and rye. Like ants swarming out of anthills—those gray moving things might have come up out of the earth, mobilized from nowhere. * This proved to be the last train to cross the frontier out of Carlsbad. Thursday, July 30th. Arrived at the Hotel 184158d'Albe, Paris. The atmosphere is alarming. Belgrade bombarded. Jaurés the Socialist leader, was murdered this evening.

Friday, July 31st. General mobilization in Russia. News of martial law in Germany. Ethel has arrived and I discover all the Mays are here at the hotel. Cecilia, Ethel and I went round to see the Ambassador this evening and spent about an hour and a half talking with Mrs. Herrick while the Ambassador was closeted with someone in the dining-room. Two or three secretaries and Mr. and Mrs. Harjes came in. The Ambassador said, as soon as he saw me, that since Bordie wasn't very well, he advised us to leave Paris as soon as possible, and told us to come for passports to the Chancery the next day. Half a dozen times he repeated that in all probability there would be a socialist uprising in Paris.

Three or four days later I find an entry so hastily put down that I can hardly read the handwriting. We had managed to get to London. Telegrams from friends, newspaper despatches, rumors, had broken it to us thoroughly that war was on. “The Germans have declared against Russia, and invaded Luxemburg. Hostilities on Franco-German and Russo-German frontiers,” I had written down. “Bank of England rate ten per cent.” Obviously something that Bordie kept repeating as his way of registering the alarming upset. Then I recount at more leisure how we had gone early Saturday morning to the Embassy in Paris to get passports and had been treated with the greatest courtesy. The second secretary, Mr. Susdorff, took 185159us into a private room and made out our passport at once, notwithstanding the large crowd in the hall. Then the Ambassador sent him to the hotel to arrange passports for Bordie and Isabel May. Isabel was ill too. The Ambassador came into the Chancery while I was there and took me aside, saying, “I have something to tell you that will interest you. I have just been asked to take over the German Embassy. Last night when I kept you waiting I was talking to the German Ambassador.” I cannot pay high enough tribute to the kindness and calm poise which made Ambassador Herrick a tower of strength, not only to Americans, but to all who leaned upon him in those terrifying days. The rest of that morning I seem to have done nothing but run after taxi-cabs. Finally Ethel and I were picked up by Arthur Kemp, who let us down at Morgan's to get our money to make the trip. The bank was full of people all agitated and all in a hurry. Mr. James put us through. We got back to the Hotel d'Albe to find that practically every man in the place had been called to the colors. Cecilia, Ethel and I fetched the luggage, and bumped the large trunks downstairs. Our maid was crying hysterically “because Mrs. May's maid's brother has gone to the war.” To be sure she had only met Mrs. May's maid the day before.

People ran every which way; tears were in the air. We ran with the rest into the Champs Elysées to stop a fiacre. We could stop plenty of them, but other people ran up and bribed the cochers away from us. Success at last, and we piled our luggage into two and sent the maids off mounting guard. A motor we 186160achieved by the new-learned method, bribing I don't know whose chauffeur to take us off to the station. Dear Harold Barclay and Helen were in the hotel and I bless him always for the way he sat with Bordie during all the excitement, to prevent his rushing about. Bordie was so wretched and so determined to be active, and so upset at seeing Ethel and Cecilia and me turned into porters. What happened to us I suppose was what was happening to everyone. No time to think about the war or European civilization. The chaos was upon us, and each one of us, fiercely intent, elbows pointed, minds shrewd and calculating, did what was immediately to be done. Our luggage was halted a good block from the station. Cecilia and Ethel captured a third-class carriage somehow for our invalids, and the maids and the luggage were mislaid among the mobs of people and mountains of trunks that swarmed and cultured the Gare du Nord.

It took us until morning to arrive at Boulogne. Every station that we passed was like the one we had left behind in Paris; reservists were leaving for their regiments and French families in tears crowded to say good-by. They were French, and they knew more than we Americans what the tocsin meant. So packed was the Channel boat that we all sat flat on the deck. A friend of Bordie's took him into a stateroom to lie down. It was 4 A. M. when we arrived in London at the Cavendish Hotel. Our baggage was I don't know where. In the afternoon I went to the Chancery, crowded like the Embassy in Paris with Americans telling their troubles. Both the Ambassador and the 187161Counsellor were in the country, which shows how unexpected it all was.

That afternoon in Westminster we saw Cabinet Ministers continually going and coming in motors between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, received much more of a demonstration than anyone. Whether it is because Churchill himself is so popular or whether it is because the British love their fleet beyond anything else in the world I don't know.

Poor Bordie hadn't even a clean collar and busied himself trying to decide which friends of his had the right neck-size for borrowing, since all the stops were closed and all our trunks were lost.

All during the week that followed the declaration of war, one thing struck me and it was that which moved me more than anything else.—the way England mobilized. Once the plunge was taken, something calm and stolid seemed to come over the people who had settled to such a gigantic and terrible task. Members of Parliament would stop and say good-by to you, casually, quietly, leaving as if they were certain to see you tomorrow. Yet tomorrow you knew they would be in France. Every night crowds marched through the London streets. What they sang was the “Marsellaise.” One night we followed a procession to Buckingham Palace. There was moonlight on the balcony where King George and Queen Mary stood. Below, the vast assembly sang first the French hymn and then slowly, solemnly, “God Save the King.”

That night stolidity was lost in overwhelming emotion. By day regiments moved through the streets as 188162if marching to peace-time barracks. There were no cheers. This was no time for cheers. The business in hand was much too serious.

August 9th, I started to write in my diary something about the actual events of the declaration of war. But my pencil stopped. I wrote in twice the fact that I had heard Mr. Redmond make his speech pledging the support of Ireland to th war. We had heard both Asquith and Sir Edward Grey make their historical addresses but at the time it was Redmond whose action I noted most.

On August 15th, I wrote in my diary:

Every day is like every other and yet quite different. On every corner we meet a newly-arrived friend with tales of wonderful adventure in getting out of Europe. The Ambassador is too wonderful, and so are his aides, beginning with Mr. Laughlin, in trying to quiet people's fears and smooth out their pathway home. Mr. Page oscillates between the Chancery and the Savoy where a Mrs. Hoover is doing most wonderful work in carrying for the refugees.

Dear Mrs. Delia Field is at the Ritz lending money to everyone who wants to find lost relatives in Belgium, giving Ethel and me long suede gloves to cover our nakedness until the trunks are found, and generally being a good angel to all stranded Americans. She always makes more people happier than anyone I know. The funniest people appear at our lodging asking for the most impossible things. One woman wanted me to promise that she might share a stateroom with Bordie and me whenever we were lucky enough to get transportation for 189

J. Borden Harriman

I cannot write much about the autumn of 1914. We came home on the Adriatic, the first armed cruiser to come into the port of New York. She was held there and her guns taken off. Except that the ship was overcrowded and that we showed no lights at night, the trip was not exceptional. War news came by wireless, distressing news, but not really comprehended. A few people talked about long wars but nearly everyone expected that the next message would describe a decisive battle and that all would be over.

Ethel went back to her school at Catonsville and Bordie and I opened the cottage at Uplands. The doctors were not very hopeful about Bordie's health, but those lovely September days his vitality was so wonderful and his pleasure in all the beautiful things at Uplands so great that my heart sang.

At the end of the month I went down to Washington and took a house on H street. I made little pencil sketches of where I wanted the furniture to go in each room of the new house and O'Brien, our trusted and extraordinarily intelligent superintendent at Uplands, 191164brought a carload of things down, and made our home for us. On the first of October Bordie was taken seriously ill. The doctors gave him up. Bordie only laughed at them and I would have none of their decree.

“He simply must get well. I know that the will,” I wrote in my book. Day by day he grew a little better and talked with zest about going to Washington. On the first of November we made the journey in a private car.

Bordie loved the new house. He seemed to have stood the trip very well and we went about from room to room laughing at the exact way O'Brien had arranged things—mantelpieces and little corners that were precise replicas of the way things were placed in Uplands. Bordie was so gay. He knew too that the doctors thought him doomed. But all through November he made a gallant fight. On December first the end came.

All during the journey to New York for the services in Grace Church, Ethel and I could not quite realize it. It was one of those things that couldn't be true.

There is only one entry in my notebook for December:

It is difficult to think how anyone could do more good in the world than by being always considerate of other people's feelings, and never thinking or doing evil, so as to bring sunshine everywhere, as Bordie did.

I did not want to be parted from Ethel, and so I took her with me at Christmastime, though I knew we were bound for the terrible scene of the tent-colony fire at Ludlow. It seems unfair to relate the circumstances of that famous Colorado strike without first pointing out how difficult it is to be fair. There was no villain, unless perhaps the publicity agent who worked for the corporation and falsified the statements he gave out about it. Behind the dispute that grew so rapidly into civil war, were all the problems that our Commission had been formed to study. There were immigrant workers, uneducated and far from their native land. Here was a corporation behaving like a monster though the individuals who owned its stock were human cultivated men. A corporation has no soul. Men had not learned how to give it one. I think now of the Colorado strike always in little broken images. In the City Hall in New York, Mayor Mitchel had lent us a court-room for our hearings. The place was crowded. Many times we had heard the story from other lips. Each time it sank deeper home that something must be done to make such conflicts impossible. I can hear Mrs. Pearl Jolly's voice yet as she stood there, Melinda Scott behind her, telling how a miner's wife saw it all:

“Well, a week previous to the strike,” she said, “my husband went to Trinidad to do a little shopping down there. When he came back ... they wanted to know what his business was in Trinidad. He told them he was down there on private business. They asked him if he was a delegate to the convention at Trinidad that the United Mine Workers had held there before. He said no. They told him that they did not need him there any more; that he was to get out of camp. I think it was fifteen minutes that they gave him to move his furniture and everything. ... I went down to a farmhouse below and spent the week there until the Ludlow tent-colony was built. ... From my first experience in the Ludlow tent-colony the gunmen would come there and would try in every way to provoke trouble. ... We did not want to have any trouble. At one time the gunmen came to the Ludlow tent-colony, just as near as they could get, fired two shots into the tent colony. Our men took their rifles and went to the hills, thinking that by so doing they would lead the fire that way and keep them from firing on the colony, where the women and children were. ... After that our men took and dug pits under the tents so that if the same thing should happen again there would be some means of escape for those women and children. ... When the militia came in there we made them welcome; we thought they were going to treat us right. They were escorted into camp with a brass band. They attended all of our dances. They came down and took dinner with us two or three different evenings, but when they were in there two or three days they turned, we could see that. ... One of the women, I believe, told them that they could not be on two sides at once. ... Finally it got so that whenever one of the women went out of the grounds she would meet with insults. ... One time myself and three or four different women started for the Post Office one Sunday morning. When we got about half way there a 194167detail got up in front of us and fixed their bayonets and their guns and told us we couldn't go any further. ... That afternoon we went to the Post Office. While we were there they went to search the Ludlow tent-colony. This happened in December, in real cold weather, snowing at the time. One of the women with us had a baby six months old in her arms. When we started back they would not let us go into the homes. I don't know why. They were already in the camp searching. They told us we could not go in there. They put a detail in front of us and kept us out in the field in the snow. The baby was screaming, it was so cold....

“On April 19, we had a baseball game. The militia had always been in the habit of attending the baseball games, but never before had they attended with their rifles. April 9th was a Greek holiday, Sunday, and they thought perhaps that our men would be drinking, and those men, if they were to go down there with their rifles, would be able to stir up some trouble. They stood right in the diamond with their files. ... One of the women said to them in a joke: ‘Don't you know if a woman would start toward you with a beebee gun you would all throw away your guns and run.’ He says, ‘That is all right, girlie you have your big Sunday today, but we will have the roast tomorrow. It would only take me and three or four men out there to clean out all the bunch;’ and they cleaned out the bunch on the following day....

“They put guards in our camps Sunday night. ... Monday morning, about 9 o'clock, five militiamen sent in for Louis Tikas, a Greek and a leader ... when Louis Tikas came back he told us the machine guns and everything were set ready to wipe the ten-colony. The next thing we observed was Louis Tikas coming from the depot waving a white handkerchief. There were about two hundred tents in the tent-colony and about one thousand inhabitants, about five hundred women and 195168five hundred children. ... He was waving this white handkerchief, I suppose for us to get back. While he was running toward us and waving the white handkerchief they fired ... they turned the machine gun into the tent-colony and started to firing with rifles. Our men decided if they would take to the hills, take their rifles and go into the hills, that they would lead fire from the tent-colony into the hills and thus protect the women and children in the tent-colony. There were just forty rifles in the Ludlow camp. They will tell you there were five hundred or so. There were forty in there, and I would swear to that before any jury in the United States. ... They kept the machine guns turned on the camp all day more or less....

“They got the machine guns set better and at better range. ... Between 5 and 6 o'clock they set fire to our tents. When they set fire to our tents we decided that we would go from cave to cave as fast as we could ... getting the women and children together. ... We had about fifty when we saw on little Italian woman. She is not same, I don't think. Her three children were killed out there....”

I had no business to take Ethel to the scene of all this tragedy.

As we came back in the chilly dusk in the motor car, Ethel, cold and tired, suddenly broke out against all uplift and uplifters. “Why don't they stay at home and attend to their own affairs?” she turned on the poor young man who was conducting us about. With a nervous torrent of words she overwhelmed both him and me, and I thought how curious it was that I should be the mother of such a Tory child. But the next spring at her school in Catonsville she wrote a composition on the Colorado strike for the school paper. 196

Ludlow Tent Colony 1914 During Colorado Coal Strike

In March of 1915, we went down to Dallas to hold hearings about the land question in the southwest. I looked forward to it as one might when going south for a vacation. After Ludlow, I longed to come to a bright chapter. Governor Ferguson, of Texas, was the first witness. I thought him a fine upstanding man, and 198170was shocked afterwards to have my Texas friends make fun of my judgment. Le Seur, dean of the Law Department of the People's University, spoke, and Kirkpatrick, President of the Industrial Congress of Texas. The problem was that whereas forty years ago practically all the farmers in Texas owned their own land, today more than half were “renters,” and there was growing up the same bitter antagonism between landowner and tenant-farmer as we had seen between capital and labor in industry. Complaints about absentee landlordism came into the testimony over and over. I understood at last why my grandfather sympathized with the Irish.

As usual, it was not the statistics, none off the orderly facts, none of the accounts of various forms of tenancy, or history of crop prices, but two human beings who made the most impression on me. I will never forget the hours and hours we spent getting bit by bit in answers to our questions, the life-story of a farmer and his wife named Stewart. The man was forty-five and his wife, a tired-looking woman in a sunbonnet and a calico dress, a year or two younger. They had always lived pretty much around that part of the country. Hour after hour the monotonous inquiry went on. Levi Stewart was one of eleven children—all but one “renters” like himself. He had married a neighbor's daughter when she was fifteen. They had eleven children, eight still living. They worked. “We got up early and stayed with it late,” he said. They went into the fields “by sunup.” He plowed and hoed. And his wife hoed. There were no amusements at all during “crop times,” and crop time was from the middle of 199171February to the middle of July. We asked who picked their cotton. “I and her picked it around them times.” He had some railroad land for a year but cotton went down, and everything got balled up and he couldn't pay for it. He had cleared three acres of land and built a house with his own lands. One year he had “no wagon.” His oldest boy never got more than one year's schooling. He'd had only one suit five years and the whole family, the year they kept account, spent only seventy-four dollars for clothes. Wearily it went on. Year after year they raised corn and cotton, cotton and corn. He'd been obliged to give chattel mortgages and had to pay ten per cent interest. He'd always had to pay extra credit prices for his goods at the store. His wife never went to town, except once when she had erysipelas, he'd carried her to town. Always he was looking for a better place. He lost his tools. They had sunk seven hundred dollars in debt the year they moved to Mulberry Bottom. I remember one story he told about going to work for a man. “I was a tenant once on one place,” he said, “and a fellow had some Bermuda grass and Johnson grass on the place and he came to me and he says: ‘If you will take that place and kill that grass and fix them ditches, you can have it as long as you want to.’ And I went up there, and I killed that grass and I took my team and filled up the ditches and got it in nice shape, and then he came round and says: ‘I want to work this myself and you can go over to this place of mine, I have got some Bermuda grass and Johnson grass on it, and you can clean that up and you can have that.’” What luck the man seemed to have. He was always having fever 200172and chills. Most of the farmers down there did have. Chairman Walsh had me do the questioning of his wife. My own back seemed to ache as she went on with the story of their life.

As the second year of the Commission hearings progressed I found that these tragic hearings of Labor's grievances took more and more time, with the result that the academic study of legal and scientific problems involved in the administration of labor laws was being neglected. There was just so much money left of our Congressional appropriation. It seemed to me that this money should be spent for finishing and publishing expert investigations that Charles McCarthy, who had acted as Director of Research, and Professor Commons, both felt were the most important part of the Commission's work; or if not the most important, quite as valuable as more labor hearings would be.

Imagine the surprise of the Employers on the Commission and of Professor Commons and myself when we learned that Mr. Walsh had summarily dismissed McCarthy and had put Basil Manly at the helm in his place. Those of us who had stood by McCarthy felt as though we were on a train that in some wayward fashion was tearing east just after the station-master had sold us tickets for a point west. The life of the Commission was almost over. How were we to go on record? Without so far as I know having consulted anybody but the labor members, Mr. Walsh had Manly draw up a report summarizing the testimony of the thousands of witnesses we had been hearing in the last two years, and make many recommendations. 201173Walsh signed it himself, the three labor men signed it, and every effort was made to get my signature.

Mother Jones suddenly appeared on the scene again and pleaded with me by the hour. I afterwards heard that Walsh personally had paid for her pilgrimage. She used to talk to me a lot about John Mitchell. * “He was a fine fellow,” she would say; then with intolerable scorn, “Poor John, he couldn't stand feasting with the rich. He is no good to his own people any longer.” She said I would be a traitor to the workers if I failed to sign Walsh's report. What she could never understand was that the Employers were my own people, that all human beings were my own people. It would have been disloyal of me not to understand the problems of Capital as well as the problems of Labor. And it seemed to me that Walsh's report was a high-handed Labor report and nothing more. It did not appreciate the technical problems of production.

Professor Commons and I wrote a report of our own which was in reality the majority report of the Commission, for Commissioners Ballard, Weinstock, and Ashton also signed it, making five.

It is audacious of me in a few paragraphs to try to characterize and compare the two reports for they both ran to many hundreds of typewritten pages and were in fact a digest of eleven volumes of testimony. Professor Commons' big proposal was for permanent national and state industrial commissions to be created ‘for the administration of all labor laws. We believed that probably the greatest cause of industrial unrest was that our American statute books were uncumbered 202174by labor laws that were conflicting, ambiguous and either unenforceable or partly enforced. People were losing confidence in the making of laws by the legislature, the interpretation of laws by the courts and their administration by officials; so they came naturally to taking the law into their own hands. I quote from our report:

The struggle between Capital and Labor must be looked upon, so far as we now see, as a permanent struggle no matter what legislation is adopted.

But we believed that there were certain points where the interests of Capital and Labor were harmonious and could be made more so, and we believed that the field where no real conflict existed was much wider than at first might be imagined. We believed that by recognizing these two facts of permanent opposition and progressive coöperation, we had a starting-point from which to reduce antagonism.

The minority report, which, as the staff report, took precedence of ours in the publication, seemed to me far less concerned with setting up permanent peaceful machinery than with reciting anew the grievances of labor. I was quite as shocked as they discover the number of American families with no privacy, to learn that in many working districts thirty per cent of the workers keep boarders, and that in New York City one corpse out of twelve is laid in a pauper's grave; but it seemed to me that their recommendations were idealistic and socialistic, not practical.

Walsh himself, in a supplemental statement, italicized the following:

We find the basic cause of industrial dissatisfaction to be low wages; or, stated in another way, the fact that the workers of the nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil.

Later he says:

The responsibility for the conditions rests primarily upon the workers who, blind to their collective strength and oftentimes deaf to the cries of their fellow, have suffered exploitation and the invasion of their most sacred rights without resistance. ... Until the workers themselves realize their responsibility and utilize to the full their collective power, no action, whether governmental or altruistic, can work any genuine and lasting improvement.

Statements like that seemed to me incendiary and revolutionary. It was like using the Government to organize one class for swallowing up another.

However differently all of us saw the next steps, not one of the Commissioners failed to recognize the historic value of the hearings. Capital and Labor had been brought fact to face and in the very airing of their misunderstandings, in the articulation of their bitter hatreds, they had come to understand each other better. The age in which we live became more conscious of the causes of its own unrest.

I still believe with Professor Commons that the permanent industrial commission is to be the next great step toward intelligent minimizing of the friction between employers and employed. But it must wait until Labor asks for it. Now there is not enough faith among the workers to trust the government to erect such an instrument.

More happened to me in the six crowded days from March 22nd to the 29th, 1915, than ever before in my life. The Industrial Relations Commission hearings at Dallas had been particularly depressing. The misery of the tenant farmers made me feel that the social scheme of things had gone wrong at the root. When I discovered the Commission was not to sit for a week and friends at an Army post on the border telegraphed urging me to take a holiday, I decided to leave the comforts of Dallas, which for all the delightful company there seemed curiously unsatisfying when one knew of the land problem that was the skeleton-in-the-Texas-closet, and fare south.

I left San Antonio, where I spent two days en route, and slept Monday night in the border town of Mission. Early the next morning I went to ride along the Rio Grande. The army officers laughed at me when I sat down under a palm tree and tried to assure them that the Rio Grande was sister river to the Nile. Some national boundaries when seen are not nearly so convincing as dotted lines on the map, but the Rio Grande, in spite of the fact that it occasionally shifts its sandy bed, is one of the most convincing dividing lines I've ever seen.

“That's Mexico,” said Major ——, “and this is the 205177U. S. A.” My eye followed the flourish of his hand. I think I half expected to find the two banks totally different. With the vanity of patriotism I looked to find our bank a cleaner, greener, more superior side of the river. Not at all. As I looked across to Mexico their side was quite as lovely as ours, the sloping green banks just as green, the gold and purple and pink wild-flowers even more plentiful than along the road I had ridden this morning with the officers of the —— Cavalry. Behind the trees on the opposite shore I saw occasional Mexicanos. Some rode but more sauntered along leading their mounts. Sometimes between the palm trees I could see little groups of six and eight, all with sombreros and blankets gay as Easter eggs. Captain —— pointed them out as stragglers from Villa's army of the north. All the ponies I could see were white or cream-colored, so like Buffalo Bill parades that it made me thirsty for pink lemonade. A stray shot now and then whistling over our heads meant nothing except that one of the motley Mexican voyagers had an eye to a duck for his evening meal. I rode back at sundown, very happy, along a road fragrant with orange-blossoms and mimosa, with the crescent moon directly in our path cutting through the daylight. Going back to Mission with Uncle Sam's olive-drab efficient troops I had a little secret longing to see more of those “barbarians” who went to far so gaudily on circus ponies and brought along guitars.

Next morning our destination was McAllen, a town fifteen miles down the Rio Grande. When we arrived we found on the opposite bank of the river, thousands of Villaistas who had made camp over-night. In response 206178to a request from General Rodrigues, the United States Army Officer in command gave permission to the Mexicans to cross as individuals and unarmed, to the American side in search of supplies. Just as fast as the row-boats and the flat-bottomed barge could ferry them, they came, and soon that little border-town was doing a rushing business and gambling every available bag of flour and bale of hay for miles around, against Villa money at twenty-five cents on the dollar.

While we picnicked on peanuts, chocolate and sardines on one shore, the cooking fires for six thousand Villaistas were sending up their smoke, not one-hundred yards away, on the other. Horses were being led to the river to drink, and the poor little Jeanne d'Arcs of Don Pancho's army, many of whom on later acquaintance I found surprisingly young and pretty, were seizing this opportunity for a dip in the river—a lick and a promise.

I expressed all sorts of doubts about the primitive unmilitary Mexican way of taking your wife or your sweetheart to whatever wars were on, and letting her scramble about as commissariat, but old-time border men in our own Army told me that although the theory was all wrong, the strange business was astonishingly efficient. And after I had though it over a little and remembered both some of the homesick rookies I had seen and the plight of many an underpaid and overdriven factory girl in the States, I found I was only intrigued at the though of these young women frying frijoles, darning and patching the uniforms of their warrior companions, trudging along with the pots and pans all trussed up in the choking dust raised on the 207179march. I confess that even when I was told that they often had to take the place of their fallen lovers in the battle line, I didn't feel sorry for them.

Consistent with the Administrations's desire to preserve strict neutrality in regard to belligerents all over the world, the officers of our army were forbidden by Washington to cross the border or to hold conversations with either Villaistas, Carranzaistas, Zapataistas, or any other king of ‘istas; so Mr. C., our Immigration Official, this time reversed the order of procedure and, instead of checking off the names, ages and general possibilities of the thousands of refugees from the prospective terrain of civil war, offered to accompany me into Mexico.

As we landed there we were at once set upon by the Mexican soldiers begging us to buy Villaista money,—as insistent and annoying as the beggars of Egypt demanding backsheesh.

Most of the soldiers were nothing but boys, good to look upon, some of them almost beautiful, with their dark skins and bold childlike eyes. I don't think I saw an officer who looked more than twenty-seven, even the General. The only gray head I saw was a novelty. Dashing General Rodrigues, who traveled with his staff in a high-powered motor of foreign make, and who boasted of amazing speed-records on foraging trips, was a charming fellow. I pause to quote, considering the feminine note in my war reporting, what Peter Dunne once told me was Mr. Dooley's opinion of a war expert: “A war expect is a man ye niver heerd iv before. If ye can think of anny wan whose face is onfamilyar to ye and ye didn't raymimber his name, 208180and he's got a job on a paper ye didn't know was published, he's a war expert.”

We walked two miles back from the river to Reynosa, a jaunty multi-colored Mexican town which had been captured by the Carranzaistas from the Huertaistas two years before. When the Villaistas marched in the other day they found it deserted. All the Carranza sympathizers had had news of this Army of the North down the wind and decided that the American side of the Rio Grande was a prudent move in their civil war.

The “ragged Villa army” was a thing of the past. Every man we saw seemed well equipped with a mauser and ammunition. We asked a good many questions as to what the civil war was all about and what they were fighting for, and we got a strange potpourri of answers. Their voices were so soft, and Spanish itself is such a musical speech that their replies seemed even gentler than they were. Several told us that there really wasn't going to be any battle. It was certain, certain as Santa Maria herself, that they were going to walk in and take Matamoros, their, objective, without any real trouble at all. Was it not well known, one confident young fellow told us, puffing up his chest in the main plaza of Reynosa, that the Carranzaistas were such cowards that they wouldn't even attempt to defend their town? The General said it was quite true, his scouts had brought him word, that the Carranza army had already deserted Matamoros.

During the night following my visit to Reynosa, after twenty-four hours' rest the Villaistas broke camp and silently stole away. In the morning when we went back to the bank where we had picnicked, the stirring, 209181gabbling crowd was gone. One tragic figure alone, with arms thrown out cross-fashioned, staring up at the sky, lay there unburied. Lieutenant —— told me it was the body of a boy shot before a firing squad for having struck an officer.

Friday night our party arrived in Brownsville. The town was full of news that the villa troops were twenty miles from Matamoros and were expected to attack at dawn. Their army had made a phenomenal march, one hundred and eighty-three miles in five days; women on foot, and all. The artillery of twenty-five guns had been left at Reynosa awaiting the mending of the railway bridge. Carranzaistas under General Nafarrate had been ready for this attack for a week and were in trenches about a mile from the town.

Saturday I was awakened at 7 A. M. by our own troopers galloping through the streets. I am ashamed now by the thrill I had, aware that the great show, civil war, was about to open. Yet it was not only morbid interest that caused me to throw on my clothes so hastily and clamber to the roof, where all the day long, through a powerful fieldglass, I was to watch the “Battle of Matamoros.”

At first the shooting was rapid and insistent. After noon it grew more desultory. I could easily see the Villaista cavalry grouped on the hill. Suddenly all the men dropped from their horses' backs and I thought that they must be preparing to make a charge on foot. Only afterwards I learned that what I saw were men falling dead or wounded. Presently a single Red Cross ambulance began to make many trips back and forth from the International Bridge with terrible regularity. 210182This bridge was guarded by the United States Cavalry, and bullets were dropping thick around them all day. Fortunately we paid no toll for the enforced interest we had to take in the other side of the river.

General F——s, a Carranzaista, arrived from the south too late to be allowed to cross to Matamoros. The port was closed during the battle and the agitated man ran back and forth from the hotel roof to the Carranzaista consulate across the street. With him was one of the Carranza aviators. The two of them had been flying to Matamoros, but their plane broke down a day too son, a few miles out of Brownsville.

The General, robbed of his chance to fight, kept giving way emotionally. Now he would beat his breast about the sins of the Villaistas. Now he would beat his breast out sonorous abuse of the rival chieftain. He said that all the worst American soldiers of fortune, scum and scalawags, were fighting with Villa. Rumor had it that both the Villa and Carranza guns were manned by men from the U.S.A. and not by Mexicans at all. In my brief Cook's tour, however, I didn't see a single American “ista” on either side.

When the sun went down, things grew quiet and news poured in of a crushing defeat for Villa. All that night and all the next day the wounded poured into Brownsville.

Sunday morning I learned that a theater near our hotel was being used as an improvised hospital, and that many wounded there were in need of care. I went to offer my services and found about fifty boys and men lying on the floor. Here a doctor, who had been up all night, and a Christian citizen of Brownsville and 211183his splendid wife, who dropped in by chance, were trying to bring some comfort and help to those poor, brave sufferers. Such stoicism I never expect to witness again, as was shown by these men—these children! One little warrior of ten was shot clear through the body, but he stood the dressing and probing of the wound, without uttering a sound and had no anæsthetic. Throughout that day and the next, not a murmur was heard, although their agony was so intense that at times the tears would pour down their cheeks, and they would nearly bite through their fingers. Numbers of boys of fourteen and fifteen had serious head-wounds, and as soon as they were operated on and dressed, they would beg for cigarettes or something to eat. Gradually more volunteer helpers arrived and cots were brought from furniture shops, so that the theater began to take on some semblance of a hospital.

Sunday night and Monday morning some of the worst cases were transferred to the Charity Hospital for severe operations. This hospital is a long, low group of one story cottages, each of the eight or ten rooms giving on a picturesque garden at the back. The operating room is as meager as the others. There are no conveniences of any kind. And this is the only hospital in Brownsville. It is run by the personal efforts and labors of the self-sacrificing daughters of a retired Union Officer. Besides the Mexicans, there were two United States soldiers, both down with appendicitis.

In a corner of one miniature ward, hemmed in on three sides by all that was left of his command, lay a Villaista Colonel, desperately wounded. He moaned of the blunder by which one day's casualties had 212184mounted to upwards of five hundred wounded, and four hundred dead, and eight hundred, he groaned, eight hundred horses. He seemed to think that the order to retreat, which cause the slaughter, given when the Villaistas were within ten yards of the Carranza trenches, was the work of a traitor in their ranks, no officer being responsible. The unhappy Colonel lay there wondering how to storm the Matamoros trenches with the big guns from a position that would be effective, without firing into Brownsville, and did not know that he was dying.

The whole border business is a curious mess. Our cavalry does wonders policing the border and putting down smuggling and illicit trading, but there is something a little ironical in refereeing a civil war. We Americans are so part of the situation and so out of it. So many complicating things happen. Often whole districts get panicky and run to the Army officer in command. And before he knows it he finds himself in the rôle of a military governor; he knows very well, too, that pacific citizens far from the border are worried by what may happen next.

When I saw an Army surgeon go into a Brownsville loft where over two-hundred wounded lay helterskelter on the straw, and with the help of a few privates bring order out of chaos, arrange the patients on cots, bathe them, number and catalogue them according to the type of the wound, I began to think there was something in our rôle of referee.

The Carranza Consul here in Brownsville held out for a long time against letting me cross the bridge to Matamoros, giving as excuse that the Villaistas were 213185expected back to attack at any moment. Only just as I was about to leave for the north did he send a member of his staff to guide me to the besieged town. The plaza was quite empty and we heard no sounds in the long, silent streets or from behind the closely shuttered housefronts. The women and children were refugees seeking a haven on American soil and the men were in the trenches.

We drove the military headquarters, the one corner of the town where there was life, and I was introduced to General Nafarrate, “the man who never smiles, the most fearless general in Carranza's army.” He looked neither Spanish nor Italian; more like a tall, ungainly Englishman. The Villa officers often spoke French and English as well as Spanish. This man had to use an interpreter when he plied me with eager questions, as he did when he discovered that I had watched the engagement a few days before with my own eyes from a Brownsville roof. He estimated the Villaistas as nine thousand “but my two thousand men in trenches are equal to twenty thousand of Villa's men.”

On the balcony outside his office he showed me the colors they had captured in Saturday's engagement. Some were shot into ribbons; some were stiff with blood. My sense of adventure vanished. Those were the very colors I had seen on the white ponies at Reynosa. Here by the Rio Grande and over there in Europe war is all the same piteous game.

When we were packing to move to Washington at the beginning of Wilson's first administration, Mrs. Livingston said to Ethel, “What a shame for your mother to make you live in Washington! Such a dreadful place! There are nothing but niggers and Senators there. Does anybody wear a dress suit?”

I knew better than that. I knew that Washington was going to be nice, but I never knew until we settled in the New Hampshire Avenue house how very fresh and entertaining Washington could be. The slight misgiving I had had that perhaps Bordie would regret New York and the whirl, vanished within a week. He too liked the new things and was satisfied with the simpler round.

We came in at an exciting time. The new administration was raising lots of dust. Democrats from all over the country flocked to Washington with a very open party pleasure in having a turn at the wheel. The Republicans were funny, so frankly astonished at being outsted, and all sitting around waiting for the heavens to fall.

I came to see, after I had lived in Washington some time, how very provincial, in spite of their worldly-wiseness, New Yorkers are. In Washington, one lives an American life. Oklahoma, Idaho, Alabama, and 215187Maine brush by you every day. Far from forgetting the vast hinterland that lies west of the Hudson, you begin to think of New York as a narrow strip east of the river. I was constantly meeting new people and finding out things about the country that I had not dreamed before. I remember an interesting luncheon that we gave. Colonel House wanted very much to meet informally Senator La Follette. I boldly went up to the Senator and asked him, but only after much difficulty persuaded him to come. He is a wary Senator, carefully preserves him Wisconsin flavor, and seldom goes out socially. He hesitated, thinking perhaps I was rigging a game a deep-dyed political significance. I wasn't. It was just that Colonel House wanted to meet him and complete his list of figures of national importance.

I mean no disrespect when I say that the Senator from Wisconsin gives me the same awed feeling as a whirling dervish. I have heard him speak for hours with the utmost vehemence and terrific personal emotion, his voice echoing and reëchoing through the Senate chamber when there was only a handful of listeners. Some men talk to empty benches knowing that the pages of the Congressional Record seldom make mention of audience, and that the folks back home will never know that the Press Gallery and all the Senators didn't sit with tongues out while the plea for a local post-office went on. La Follette's speeches seem to me not directed at listeners nor yet at a constituency of readers, but to the passionate expression of a man declaring the truth to his god.

Anne Morgan and I once went to see La Follette in 216188his office and had a long conference with him about some work, we wanted to do in the Civic Federation. That afternoon at a White House garden party, two members of Mr. Taft's cabinet told us that we couldn't have known what a wrong we were doing, tainting ourselves by associating with such a dangerous member of society.

The fluctuations of popularity which public men enjoy with their electorates are amusing to watch. Men loom, now big, now little—now little, now big. It must be terribly hard on the wife of a public man to bear all the condemnation and misrepresentation her husband is apt to receive. Some women can't stand the gaff, of course, and are hysterical about the way things go. La Follette has always been extraordinarily fortunate. His wife has as much sophistication about politics as he, and sharing as she does his stalwart political faiths, is always willing to suffer with him.

It was interesting to watch the Wilson policies take shape; see him as it were, make improvements in the national house. The Republicans held their breath waiting for the country to go to the dogs. And because they were particularly satisfied with themselves on foreign policy, they felt that the consular and diplomatic service would be going to blacker and more especially blood-thirsty dogs than anything else.

On the contrary. Willard Straight, a man who was one of those always big and broad enough to put country before party, drew up a memorandum about the personnel of the consular service and submitted it to the President, who has direct control of that service. Woodrow Wilson understood the importance of leaving 217189the service intact, and so retained all consular officers. He left the service at the close of his administration exactly as he had found it and he retained in office the whole secretarial staff of the diplomatic service. (The diplomatic service itself comes under the Secretary of State.)

In President Roosevelt's administration an effort was made to put the diplomatic service on a permanent basis, and this plan was carried out by Mr. Taft, but it remained for Mr. Wilson to prove it was not necessary to throw out all appointees of a previous administration when another party came in.

He retained in office the following Republican heads of missions: Edwin V. Morgan, Ambassador to Brazil; John W. Garrett, Minister to the Argentine; William Heimke, Minister to Salvador.

Maurice Francis Egan, Minister to Denmark; Myron T. Herrick, Ambassador to France; Charles W. Russell, Minister to Persia; Nicolay A. Grevstad, Minister to Uruguay,—all stayed a year or more.

Henry Fletcher, though a devout Republican, the President retained as Minister to Chile. When the Ministry was raised to an Ambassadorship, he was still kept there, and, even though he was a Republican, was appointed Ambassador to Mexico, when both loyalty to Wilson and to the Secretary of State were absolutely necessary if the Mexican policy of the Democratic party was to be carried out.

There were, however, a number of service men, who had reached the rank of Chief of Mission, who through Mr. Bryan's influence were automatically dropped by 218190the incoming administration, together with all the political appointees of the previous regime.

William Phillips, whom President Wilson first appointed as Third Secretary of State, then First Secretary, and then Minister to the Netherlands, and who is now Under-Secretary in the present administration, has proved by loyalty and tact that the service can be made non-partisan and therefore all the more efficient.

An Act approved February 5, 1915, under President Wilson, for the improvement of the Foreign Service placed the various diplomatic and consular officers in classes just as military and naval officers are placed in grades.

On, December 12, 1913, President Elliot said as president of the National Civil Service Reform League: No advent of a national administration which involved the transfer of power from one party to another had ever occurred in which the principles of civil service reform have been so generally observed as by the new administration.

Again: All Cabinet officers, except Mr. Bryan, were ready to conform to the promises made in the Democratic platform.

It is quite true that Mr. Bryan did not seem to grasp the importance of the civil service idea versus the political. Once I came to him urging the appointment to the head of a mission, of a Republican friend of mine who had been for a long time an able member of the diplomatic service. The Secretary swung around in 219191his chair and said: “I know five or six loyal Democrats who would fill the position as well, if not better than he. What are his special qualifications?” Among other things I mentioned that he spoke Spanish fluently. The post was in South America. “Oh!” said Mr. Bryan, “why should that be necessary? I went all around the world, spoke nothing but English and got on perfectly well.” The daily grind of an Ambassador working to promote friendly relations between his own country and that to which he is accredited, never presented itself to him as more difficult through an interpreter. He, Bryan, a distinguished visitor, had been successful in getting himself understood and he couldn't visualize the other's position.

When Mr. Bryan thought the exchange of notes threatened to involve the United States in war with Germany, he resigned, not being able to hold office conscientiously in a government at war. When the day came for him to leave the State Department, he sent for all the clerks and other employes, several hundreds, to come to the diplomatic reception room. One man read a little farewell address and Mr. Bryan replied in a three-minute speech. These people didn't really like him and feared him because of his political versus civil service ideas, and yet such was the magnetism and power of the man, that when he was through speaking, they filed past him, many of them weeping. They couldn't but realize his thorough goodness and honesty of purpose. Bryan may have been very much the Nebraska man when it came to formal etiquette at diplomatic dinners, as I said before in describing a 220192dinner he gave for Sir Robert Borden, but he is nevertheless a great American. He instinctively reads the thoughts of the common people, and has consistently for years fought to bring the Government nearer to them. He is a prophet and evangelist, a blazer of trails, and lover of the heights. But he was never meant for the drudgery of office.

It was after Bryan's going and the appointment of Mr. Lansing that one warm spring evening several members of the Administration were dining together on a cool veranda, and the question of a Councillor for the State Department came up, Mr. John Bassett Moore having just resigned. There was discussion of a number of names, but “No, he wouldn't do”—“I've thought of him, but—” One man said, “I know exactly the person, but I am not going to tell you because I am sure none of you happen to know him and I don't want him to leave his present job.” “Oh! yes, do tell us, who is it?” “The Corporation Counsel of New York, Frank Polk, but Mitchel could never spare him.” “Tell us what you know about him.” “Well, first he is a lifelong Democrat, then, he is a very good lawyer, extraordinarily conscientious, has common sense that amounts to genius, and a personality that wins everyone. He has more friends than any man I know.” “Good, we must look into this.”

The next day, having been told of what took place at the dinner the night before, the Secretary of State was much impressed and sent an Assistant Secretary to the office of Mr. Polk's friend for more particulars. Just so there came into the Government service one of the best assets the Wilson administration had. T. says 221193many appointments have as casual a beginning as that, while I say, but not all result so satisfactorily.

I remember how I rejoiced for Washington, but grieved for New York, when riding into camp in the Yosemite one night during the next September, I found a note from Colonel House saying, “How glad and surprised you will be to hear that Frank Polk has been appointed Councillor of the State Department.”

The Mexican question became very acute in the winter of 1913 and 1914, and through many dinner-parties I listened to hot discussions from cocktails to coffee. I remember particularly one night at Sallie McCawley's, when the President's policy was rancorously condemned, Senator Lodge entranced me by the way he rolled Juarez over his tongue, and told of the villainies of Villa, who had carloads of cotton standing at the border ready to be smuggled across.

In his message to Congress the President served notice, “No dictatorship will ever be recognized,” and he awaited Huerta's fall. We Democrats trusted him. So I like to recall his 1916 speeches in which he said: There are some things that are not debatable. Of course, we have got to defend our Border. That goes without saying. Of course, we must make good our own sovereignty, but we must respect the sovereignty of Mexico. I am one of those—I have sometimes suspected that there were not many of them—who believe absolutely in the Virginia Bill of Rights, which says that a people has the right to do anything they please with their own country and their own Government.

And again: 222194 Do you think the glory of America would be enhanced by a war of conquest with Mexico? Do you think that any act of violence by a powerful nation like this against a weak and distracted neighbor would reflect distinction upon the annals of the United States? Do you think that it is our duty to carry self-defense to the point of dictation in the affairs of another people? The ideals of America are written plain upon every page of American history.

And again: I have constantly to remind myself that I am not the servant of those who wish to enhance the value of their Mexican investments, but that I am servant of the rank and file of the people of the United States.

I wished in 1916 that I could place these words in the hands of all who had railed when the friction began.

One of my earliest official friends in the Wilson Administration was the Secretary of War, Garrison. The Industrial Relations Commissions brought me into direct contact with him. The Taylor System of Scientific Management had been introduced into the arsenals and the labor unions so resented it that we were asked to make an investigation. I went to Philadelphia with Professor Commons to see the plants where Mr. Taylor had installed it. Later, we visited arsenals. To my amateur eye, the system seemed a great saving of effort. However, a hearing was staged at which the Secretary of War promised to be present. The hour arrived, everyone interested appeared, but no Secretary. “Can't possibly come, too busy,” came over the 223195telephone. The Commissioners felt that the whole occasion would be unsatisfactory without the boss of the Army; so they asked me to go to the Department and try to soften his hard heart.

After some argument I finally compromised by bringing the Mountain to Mahomet. Commissions, secretaries, stenographers, witnesses. The whole kit and boodle crossed Lafayette Square and set up shop in the Army Recreation room. The business was quickly despatched and the Secretary released for other affairs more militant. It was about then that he brought out his plea for a reserve army. We commissioners were delighted with his coöperation, and I wasn't the only one who was sorry when, differing as to policy with the President, he resigned his portfolio.

Garrison's successor I had always admired as a most hopeful young progressive Democrat ever since hearing him speak in the 1912 Convention. So it was interesting to watch him climb from “a pacifist and abominable Secretary of War” in Republican eyes to “a great Secretary.” I like him still, which is pious of me, because he once did me a very bad turn. When the Mexican trouble became acute in the spring of 1916, Army friends on the Border wrote me about the hospital I had seen at Brownsville, Texas, asking for help to enlarge its building and saying that it was the only place where our soldiers could be cared for in case of conflict. I acted quickly. Some of us formed a strong committee and, taking the Army officer's letter as a basis, wrote to the New York Times proposing subscriptions. The Allied Relief Organization offered to 224196send out appeals for us at its own expense. To be sure, the appeal was a little florid and the stenographer hurried it off before we had time to consider thoroughly. However, at the slightest hint that the Army had not forehandedly supplied itself with a hospital sufficient for any strain, the Secretary of War publicly reprimanded me for my impulsive campaigning. The officers on the Border who had set our hearts beating about the situation there, clicked heels and reported, “No, sir. No, indeed, sir. No hospital needed.” But I am still pleased to think that we managed to raise several thousand dollars and pay for many improvements in the Brownsville Hospital before Mr. Baker called us off.

“Mummy, dear, don't, don't be partisan in your book,” was my daughter's parting suspicious injunction when she sailed off for Europe this spring with her babies and left her mother alone with her bottle of ink. I understand how Eth feels. She lives in an atmosphere that is one hundred per cent Republican. There are parties and parties, but only one Party.

“I won't,” I called out dutifully as I saw the charming young Republican go up the gangplank. I dislike extreme partisanship myself. But when I recall the good work done by Democratic administrations, I find it thrilling to bear witness to the fact that it was the Democrats who did it.

President Wilson was quoting Lamb, I believe, when he used to reply to the query, “How can you hate that man when you don't know him?” with, “How could I hate him if I did know him?” I don't hate anything Republican (except the tariff), but I cannot feel that 225197the times of their ruling over us have brought about the fundamental betterment of conditions that I saw achieved when the Democratic party was in office.

Since the Wilson administration went out, and we Democrats have had time to review our record, we've had time to take pride in a good many things. A few think the driving out of the lobby was our greatest achievement.

For twenty years it had been generally known that an insidious Lobby was maintained in Washington to influence legislative and executive action on behalf of vested interests. During the preparation of the Underwood Tariff Bill it came to the attention of President Wilson that certain of these interests were using powerful lobbies to influence the action of Congress on that bill. Thereupon he went to the people with a public statement. A general demand through the country for an investigation resulted in congressional action which revealed the names of a number of men and interests engaged in lobbying. Men employed as the “wool lobby” and “sugar lobby,” for example, lived luxuriously in Washington and pulled wires around dinner tables and in their offices, that cost the American people millions of dollars in high prices. The President's exposure of the lobby and the corrupt part it played in legislation, was unique in the history of the country. He managed it in a characteristically Wilsonian and democratic manner.

The lobby was a creature of darkness. It worked behind closed doors and whispered in corners. This ancient industry was one form of invisible government. As soon as the light of publicity fell upon it, it slunk 226198away, and the horde of cooties, big and little, were smoked out.

I personally agree with those who think that the Federal Reserve Act was the greatest reform of Wilson's first administration. How could we have weathered the war without a financial crisis if it had not been enacted? In speech after speech in the 1912 campaign, Wilson stressed the necessity for American Banking reform. All through the summer of 1913, every member of the cabinet, and especially Mr. McAdoo, seemed to feel that the pending banking and currency bill was an answer to the country's needs. They believed that regional banks would be a far fairer and more workable plan than the central bank proposed by the Aldrich-Vreeland bill. So, when I received an invitation to attend a dinner on October 15, 1913, under the auspices of the Academy of Political Science, in New York, I went with great interest to hear what the other side had to say.

There were six hundred people present and many of them old friends of mine. Several told me that after I had heard Senator Aldrich and others I would no longer espouse the cause of the Owen-Glass measure. “Too terribly dangerous,” one man kept saying. I didn't understand partisanship then as well as I do today, and as the evening wore on and I heard men whose opinions I had always supposed sound, get up and say that if the Owen-Glass bill became a law it would “soon cause a panic, and the collapse of our banking system,” I felt muddle-headed.

Dr. John Finley was toastmaster, and each speaker he introduced went a little further than the last in decrying 227199the iniquity of what my Democrats felt was going to be one of the Administration's most laudable achievements.

Mr. Frank Vanderlip was rather mild. He only argued for one bank instead of the twelve regional ones. Senator Aldrich said, “If the bill should be enacted into law, Mr. Bryan will have achieved the purpose for which he has been contending for a decade. This is an endeavor to secure by partisan legislation the triumph of the doctrines and principles which have received the repeated condemnation of the American people at the polls.”

A Professor Johnson made me laugh a great deal by implying that Democrats were clodhoppers who couldn't understand finance. “Blacksmiths cannot produce a Swiss watch,” he growled and by then I suspected partisanship in the growl.

In all that croaking and prophesying of disaster, I only talked to one calm and unpartisan man. Mr. Seth Low, Ex-Mayor of New York, said that for twenty years the Republican party had not succeeded in getting currency reform, so that even if this bill had a few flaws, he certainly hoped that it would go through. I remember going back to Washington very much perturbed and greatly amusing Secretary McAdoo by my fears that perhaps after all we were not doing just the right thing.

My doubts dried up like the foggy dew, and directly the debates on the bill began, I used to steal away from the office of the Industrial Commission to sit in the Gallery. Senator Root made me uneasy again when he spoke so masterfully against the Owen-Glass bill, 228200in the middle of December, 1913. He said he saw peril in it. “The measure has basic defects of Bryan doctrine. Prices will rise, and gold vanish and stocks fall. Those held abroad will be forced home. It is pawning the nation's credit.” He pleaded that the amount of gold reserve against notes be changed from 33 1-3 per cent to 50 per cent. It was finally changed by the Committee from 33 1-3 to 40 per cent.

The New York Times said next day the Democrats were determined to force the bill to enactment. But they couldn't believe the Democrats would succeed after Senator Root's luminous and masterly exposition of its defects and its perils.

A woman friend of Senator Root's taunted me later with: “Of course, the bill is good, because Mr. Root forced them to make changes that saved it.” I wondered then if the bill was “good” owing to Senator Root. Whey then did only six Republicans, including Weeks, Norris and Sterling, vote for it, and only one Progressive, Senator Poindexter? Root himself voted a very loud “No.”

It is significant to remember now that Weeks came but with, “From the first I have said this bill should be taken up as a business measure, devoid of any partisan flavor.”

In the light of what is taking place in regard to the farmers of the country today, it is interesting to recall that in the 1913 message the President said: I present to you in addition to a bill for the reform of our banking and currency, the urgent necessity that special provision be made for facilitating credits needed by the farmers of the country. The pending currency 229201bill does the farmers a great service. It puts them upon an equal footing with other business men and masters of enterprise, as it should.

It has singularly enough come to pass that we have allowed the industry of our farms to lag behind the other activities of the country and its development. I need not stop to tell you how fundamental to the life of the nation is its food.

That was a great Presidential message. I was only bothered because there was no mention of woman suffrage. But I was sure that in due course of time the southerner who was President and keenly aware of the reluctance in the southern states to face the Suffrage issue, would some day be our best collaborator; so I was only mildly disappointed. I could write a book on the part the suffragists of both factions played in the history of the Wilson Administration. Like the poor, the President had us always with him, one brand of us or another. In the end he could not doubt that the time was ripe for democratic government by all the people, women as well as men.

Two suffrage incidents stand out in my mind. First, an unforgettable delegation which went down from New York to Washington, led by Vera Whitehouse. I think an anti-suffrage engineer drove the rain that night, for he successfully out-bumped and out-jerked even the usual Pennsylvania engine driver, and I thought we were going to present a sorry, hollow-eyed sight to the President when he received us in the East Room of the White House next day. I am feminine enough to treasure a picture of Vera's frock, black velvet with a graceful box plait in the back, as she stepped 230202forward in all her beauty and dignity to make her speech. She was so persuasive and so able to represent any group of people that I do not wonder the President chose her to represent her country in Switzerland, the better to make known American aims at one of the critical periods in the war.

Another unforgettable moment of my suffrage life was a sizzling afternoon in August, 1917. I was in uniform, driving my own car up Pennsylvania Avenue, when suddenly a banner was raised in front of the White House, inscribed “Kaiser Wilson.” I stopped, was out of the car and across the Avenue in a jiffy. I never knew what was in my mind to do, but I know that I saw red. Just a second before I reached the woman who held the banner two naval men had wrenched it from her hands and trampled it under foot. Someone told me afterwards that that particular banner was devised by an over-zealous warrior. Miss Paul herself was ill. She is too adroit a militant to expose herself unnecessarily. I am not a militant. I always regretted the picketing and I still believe that the older women would have achieved the passage of the amendment if the youthful flamboyants had not started a campaign of their own. However, now that it is over, I would give a lot to know as much as Miss Paul and her suffrage bloc must know about the workings of committees in Congress.

On election day at the end of the 1916 campaign, Ethel and I watched all day at the polls in a corner store on Third Avenue, National Suffrage headquarters having sent us there. In the evening we dined at 231

The Last Suffrage Paradise in New York—1917

Mitchel and I were, I think, the only Democrats in the room. At every other table I sighted Republicans important in the New York party councils and enthusiastic contributors to the Republican party funds. As the figures were thrown on the screen there was a tremendous hilarity and when Illinois went Republican, Gifford Pinchot rushed across to me, saying, “Well, well, it's all over. You can't win now.” Mitchel said lots of counties hadn't been heard from and I said hope never died so early in the evening. A table full of Wall Street brokers, the brokers also full, kept drinking their candidate's health and making great game of me. About eleven we went over to the Times office with Mr. McAneny. “Well, what do you think of Wilson now?” shouted John Sanford as I passed him in the palm room on my way out.

“As much as ever,” I shouted back. “He's going to win.”

“I bet you ten top-hats to one he won't.”

“A go,” said I.

“You're perfectly safe,” laughed McAneny to me. “They haven't heard from California yet.”

At the Times office a sort of pall seemed to have settled over everybody, except McAneny, who grew gayer and more hopeful as the evening wore on. Mr. Ochs was doleful. He said that Wilson's defeat would mean revolution. As the returns came in, I called Colonel House and though I knew he was getting them some other way as well, told him about whatever came in to the Times office. At 12:30 o'clock, the World 233204and Times conceded Hughes' election and the whole staff gave up. Not McAneny. The figures as they came off the ticker made not the slightest impression on him because, as he said, Wilson had won! I rang up the Colonel to tell him that the newspapers had conceded the election to Hughes.

“Tell Mr. Ochs,” said Colonel House with vehemence, “that his paper and the World by conceding the election this early are bringing about the defeat. I'm not going to give in now.”

The next morning I stopped at the Colonel's on my way to a Governor's meeting at the Colony Club. Vance McCormick and others of the faithful were there. “We've won,” they greeted me with. Then they told me how all night Democratic headquarters had kept California on the long-distance telephone, shouting to them across the continent not to stop counting. “Don't stop counting until every last county's heard from.” They told me how the returns were being brought in from the high Sierras by men on snow shoes. I began to love the State of California with the passion of a native daughter.

“Don't you believe what you read in the papers.”

When I got to the board meeting table at the Colony Club, every face was wreathed in smiles. Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer and I were the only Democrats there. “What do you think of your President now?” “Why, that he's been elected,” I replied. And they laughed at Daisy's joke.

It is a pity that I did not always keep journal entries describing my interviews as one of various delegations to the President. When I came home from Europe in 234205September, 1914, in an endeavor to be neutral a number of people, including Norman Hapgood and Frank Crowninshield, formed the Committee of Mercy, which was to act as a clearing house for war-relief agencies administering to both sides. Mr. Elihu Root took the honorary presidency and lent just the weight needed to launch the Committee successfully, since there a few so distinguished figures in America. Out of this first effort grew eventually the Allied Relief Committee which did such excellent work.

During September, we had meetings with representatives of all the combatants, among them Dernberg and Von Bernstorff. Norman Hapgood and I journeyed to Washington to get the President's endorsement of the plan which he gave us in writing. After the business of our errand was concluded he took us into the Cabinet room and showed us a large map on which the War Department marked every day the progress of the fighting. The President pointed out and explained the first battle of the Marne. He turned away with a sigh and repeated twice, “The Kaiser will have a great deal to explain.”

I felt then—although he never gave any other intimation—and have never since changed my mind that at heart he was always pro-Ally, but until the country was ready he almost feel over backwards trying to be neutral.

Some day Wilson's handling of the American situation in 1914 and 1915 will be considered among his greatest achievements. In May, 1917, I met on the train a very prominent conservative Republican Senator, a man high in the party councils of the present 235206Administration. He reminded me of a discussion we had had almost a year before as to the relative qualities of Hughes and Wilson. “I want you to know now,” he said, “that I thank God every day that Wilson was elected and not Hughes. If Hughes had been elected and the same conditions had arisen we could never have gotten the country into the war without a revolution. The West would have said, ‘Hughes was put there to make,’ and that it was Wall Street's war, whereas the fact that Wilson did everything to keep us out made the people know when he said, ‘Go, in,’ there was nothing else to do. They backed him as one man—think of it—conscription put through in forty-eight hours.”

When the Page letters came out recently, I read and reread them, caught by their charm and glad to fill in the historical record. But the thought came to me that if he had lived and if he had written the book himself that it might have been a little fairer. There are letters I know which were not included and no mention is made of the state of mind of America as a whole when the controversy over the British blockade was at its height. The book that Mr. Hendrick has made is, consciously or unconsciously, so “censored” by the omissions that the reader would gather that (before our entry into the war) public opinion was always running ahead of the President and the State Department, whereas it was just the reverse. I admired Mr. Page tremendously, and from what I knew of him I think he would have been too just to have pictured Wilson laggard. After all, had not Wilson had the foresight to appoint Walter Page in the first place? 236207And did he not keep Page at the London post, although all through 1915 and 1916 his office was under fire from many members of Congress who thought our Ambassador at St. James's was more pro-British than American? Mr. Page himself was always talking of the “three-thousand-mile disease” which caused so many misunderstandings. Might he not finally have said that British sympathizers were too far away to appreciate the temper of Congress and the country which, in 1916, had refused to condemn the President for his attempt to preserve the neutrality of the United States? Personally, I would have been just as affected as Page by what I saw and heard in the shadow of Downing Street, and the Foreign Office, for like almost all people in the big eastern cities, I was passionately pro-Ally, but I know the West was not.

I have never forgotten how on the night of April 2, 1917, after the President's message to Congress asking for a state of war with the Imperial German Government, three leading Senators went down to the Willard Hotel and cursed out the New York newspaper men. They accused the New York papers of having maliciously fanned public opinion to the war-point because Wall Street wanted a rupture. The Senators proclaimed over and over again what they knew to be true—that the West was still averse to “going in.” Two of those Senators were held in line only through the tremendous efforts of the President, direct and indirect. I could cite incident after incident to show how many of the Western states were in a dangerous condition of mind, from the Allies' point of view.

Why have people forgotten that on March 8, 1916, 237208McLemore's resolution was brought up in the House requesting the President to warn all citizens of the United States against traveling on armed merchant vessels? Whether people like it or not, it is certainly true that McLemore's was no freak voice talking to himself in the wilderness, but a people's Representative using what was then the only radio, the Congressional Record and the press, to report the following sentiments.

It was with consternation that I listened to this speech. McLemore said: I believe this measure accurately embodies the wishes of an overwhelming majority of the American people, for in an hour like this the soul of a nation has ways of making itself manifest....

It has been contended by some very distinguished gentlemen that the Government should take and declare a positive stand in opposition to the German and Austro-Hungarian intention to sink armed ships on sight. ... Only a few days ago the President, in a letter to Senator Stone, denied the right of Congress, according to my interpretation of his letter, to make him even a simple request regarding American citizens who wish to travel on the armed boats of the belligerent nations. I am told the President regards my resolution as an attempt to interfere with his application of the Administration's foreign policy.

I would remind those who favor upholding the English contention in this crisis that England once enunciated the doctrine of the “closed sea” which meant that wherever armed English ships chose a flaunt the English flag and claim dominion over the waters, those waters were English as well as any stone of the British Isles themselves, and no ship dared sail those waters without English permission. Does anyone wish to uphold 238209that British contention at this time? And, yet, all that ever invalidated that law was the change of conditions. Conditions have changed and international law changes with them; but at this point when conditions have changed in a way radically unfavorable to British pretensions, England would arrest the course of nature and refuse to let the law change. And she would do this not by her own might, but, with her great fleet locked by steel nets in a safe and secluded harbor, she would have us rush into the gap of danger and cry “Halt!” to the forces opposing her and all to protect her English interests.

There is not a single American right or a single American interest threatened by the intended German-Austrian submarine campaign against armed ships. Armed ships! Why there are no American armed ships except our warships. There are no American “armed merchant vessels.” There are no American merchant ships sporting “defensive guns.” I reiterate, I emphasize, I invite the most earnest attention of this House and every American to that remarkable fact, that no a single American ship is affected or threatened by the action which Germany and Austria-Hungary propose.

Why then are we called up to protect English ships, or french or Italian. ... Yes,—that is the only meaning of it—we are called upon to protect the ships of one faction in the present war against the ships of the other....

As a Member of Congress, I feel it a proud duty to uphold the hands of our President when he is in the right, but I must know that he is right. With my country it is different. I would prefer that my country be always right, but, right or wrong, my country forever. ... I wish to submit this proposition, that if we are to maintain an open sea for American travellers and tourists, let us maintain an open sea for the cotton, grain, and other products of our American farmers.

When Mr. Flood, or Virginia, moved, that the McLemore resolution be laid on the table, among those who voted “Nay,” that is, voted for the resolution, were Kent, of California; Mondell, of Wyoming; Lenroot, of Wisconsin; and Longworth, of Ohio, and many other prominent men. It was the Administration Congressmen, through the personal efforts of President Wilson himself, who voted “Yea” and so tabled the resolution.

People say the President could have led the nation to war sooner had he wanted to. Well, that is something that can never be proved either way. I know that in the beginning his thought was that if one great nation could maintain its equilibrium it could do more to save a civilization that was tottering in the European conflagration than it could by sending over man power. Of course, in three year as conditions altered. Representatives of the Allies came here and said that they must have help or in six weeks they would be down. Yet a number of English, including Lord ——, British Ambassador to ——, have told me since the war that the Allies would have won in six months anyhow without the United States.

A woman came up to me at the Colony club last spring and said, “I worship Mr. Page. He kept us out of war with England. Now what do you think of your President?” She never asked herself, I suppose, how Mr. Page's efforts would have availed if Woodrow wilson had not fought to keep down the anti-British feeling over here and to secure support for the Allies.

Woodrow Wilson needs no defense from anyone, 240211although sometimes his friends have wished he would answer some of the unfair attacks made on him.

Only true greatness of soul makes it possible to accept resolutely in calm and dignified silence the final issue, and leave it to history to explain, if any explanations be merited.

As Commander-in-Chief of this nation in the war, he did what a great soldier like General Lee did after the war between the states—he never by word or act attempted any defense of himself. He made his decisions and stoically accepted responsibility for the results. He never tried to slight the responsibility or divide it. There are few such instances in history.

All during March Washington was in a state of suppressed excitement. On the morning of the 2nd of April I went down to the American Federation of Labor Building, for Mr. Gompers had called a meeting to launch a committee which he, as a member of the Advisory Board of the Council of National Defense, had appointed. I have told before how the made me chairman of the Women in Industry Committee. J. H. Thomas, the English railway labor leader and M. P., was there, and Mr. Clynes, both of whom had come from London to give the A. F. of L. and the government all possible information on how the English had mobilized the workers. Thomas made a stirring speech.

It was an all-day meeting. About 12 o'clock I was called on the telephone by the White House and told that the President would go to Congress at 8:30 that evening. I went back to the conference room and whispered the news to Mr. Gompers. He repeated it to the company. The announcement was not unexpected; yet when it actually came it took us by surprise. The atmosphere was charged with emotion.

That night at the Capitol everything seemed unreal, yet irrevocably vivid, the white Capitol with the young moon over it and the playing searchlights. A guard 242213of cavalry surrounded the building. The guards and the odd expectant crowds milling through the corridors and galleries, were pictorial things, something out of opera. A clatter of horses' hoofs, and we knew that the President and his escort were arriving.

The straight dignified figure mounted the rostrum. His voice was singularly calm, his face set. His emotion crept into his tone only at the end, when he concluded his address with: It is distressing and oppressive duty, Gentleman of the Congress, which I have to perform in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great and peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

I met Colonel House walking away from the Executive Gallery. “Not a word should have been added nor one left out,” he said to me.

One of the President's daughters told me how one of 243214the family had found him at his desk on the morning of the 2nd of April, his hand pressed to his head, and for the first time she could remember, sunken under the responsibilities of the moment. He looked up and said, “I was not intended to lead the country in a war. Mine should have been a constructive, not a destructive administration.”

No one in all the years since has seen, Woodrow Wilson falter or wince at the labors that lay before him. Once he had said “we must” he went in with all his heart and all the great resources at his command. He was leader of this nation at its grandest moment, and he was articulate of the highest aspirations of any nation. No ruler ever expressed so marvelously the loftiest ideals of mankind. The President's war speech was written while he sat on the south portico of the White House at half-past four in the morning. While it was still night his message began to come to him, and he crept downstairs into the fresh air of the breaking day. Mrs. Wilson, a little later, finding him not in his room, went down to look for him. She brought him an overcoat and placed some milk and biscuits by his side. When this story got out a newspaper man printed it and for weeks after the White House was deluged with letters from grocers and biscuit manufacturers, asking what brand of biscuits Mrs. Wilson had put on his table that historic morning, and saying that if it were their please might they advertise to that effect. Not many people know that in 1918 when work was more and more pressing, the President rose often at 4:30 and began his day. Mrs. Wilson not wishing to disturb the servants at that hour, had an 244215electric stove placed in one of the dressing-rooms, and there she used to cook his breakfast herself. Often in those days he didn't go to bed until long after midnight, and as he is a man who requires a great deal of sleep, his friends attribute his breakdown not a little to those arduous months.

As a forerunner of the foreign invasion which commenced as soon as we had declared war in 1917, there came to my house, early on a cold winter's morning, Melchur Polignac, bringing Professor Bergson, the great philosopher at whose feet I had sat when he gave a series of lectures in New York at Columbia some years previously.

“I have come to Washington,” he said timidly, “in the hope that I might meet some of the government officials to talk with them about this terrible war which is now engrossing my mind to the exclusion of everything else.” He pulled from his pocket a grimy, crumpled little slip of paper on which were written in pencil in a tiny hand the names of cabinet officials. He read them to me, and then, in a hesitating way, said he had wondered if he could perhaps even get to the President himself for two or three minutes.

Of course, conferences were easily arranged for him with all the government officials. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and others were good enough to ask me to sit in on the interviews when I had driven the Professor down to introduce him. I have seldom heard anything more analytical and appealing than his presentation of the military situation on the western front, and his picture of the hardships suffered by the people of the warring nations.

With the President he had more than one interview, and when the more pressing subjects had been covered, they dropped very naturally into philosophy.

About the middle of April I began to keep a diary again: Sunday, April 15th, 1917. Went to church this morning. Spoke this afternoon at National Suffrage Headquarters on Rhode Island Avenue to a gathering of collegiate alumni. Very simple speech but tried to get across that there are eight million working-women in the United States, half of them in factories, and that these have simply got to have the ballot to express their demands. Dined at the McLeans' at their town house. The British Ambassador and Lady Spring-Rice were there, the Longworths, the Lars Andersons, Mrs. H. Beale, Bill Phillips, Lady Maud Cavendish, Blondel. Spring-Rice looks worn. It must be a terrific relief to him to have us in at last. The whole evening was delightful. Moving pictures and music after dinner. It was the first three-course dinner I have had. A Republican congressman told me he had a resolution ready to introduce in the House asking that men in whom the country had confidence, be put at the head of the Navy and War Departments. His line of talk is that it will be helpful to the President, and protect him from scandal “sure to ensue if Baker and Daniels remain.” Rubbish! I won't say the Republicans aren't good sports; I daresay they believe that the worst is about to happen. But, the fact is if the country they are always talking about had had any special confidence in Republicans, this administration wouldn't be still in. 246217 The man is a thorough-going patriot and consciously is quite honest in his conviction that he will be helping the President by the move; but subconsciously he's a hundred per cent Republican, and terribly afraid that Democrats can't run wars. It's constitutional with northern Republicans to look on Democrats as a lesser breed, just as I suppose it's constitutional with southern Democrats to scorn Republicans as not quite nice.

Helen Hastings, talking to me about just this thing one time, on how northern Republicans feel about the party of Jefferson, said to me: “Do you know I was a Democrat when they hunted them with dogs in New York.”

I suppose the Republicans can't help feeling that the White House is theirs by divine right. Mr. Charles R. Crane says delightfully, “A Republican ex-President now gets up every morning saying, ‘D——that man for sleeping in my bed last night’,”

April 16th, 1917. I. L. is ill, and as one of her friends, I took an hour waiting on customers in her little shop this morning. From there to take a mechanic's lesson. Ethel and I are learning to make all minor repairs to a motor, change tires, etc. Leila Pinchot is taking lessons with us. She is such a corker.

At noon to a motor corps meeting. Went on to Mrs. Oscar Underwood's; found her in bed taking a rest cure.

Tuesday, April 17th, 1917. Dined at “Uncle Henry's.” * How I love those evenings there. Aileen Tone sits down at the piano after dinner and says, “Do, Uncle Henry, tell Daisy Harriman how 247218this little 12th century ballad happened to bee written, and then I will sing it to her.” So under lowered lights, looking like a lovely 18th century French picture, Aileen with her sweet voice, goes from one ballad to another. In between times, Uncle Henry pretending not to know there is a war and not having any use for Democrats, whispers, “Well, tell me, what are they up to?” I often wish that it had been possible for the President to know this household. So much the most cultured and delightful atmosphere in Washington.

Thursday, April 19th. Mrs. Catt called a meeting of the Congressional committee of the N. A. W. S. A. at headquarters this afternoon to discuss suffrage war policy. Mrs. Catt thinks the work of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment should continue in the States, but most of the committee disagree with her. I suppose she feels that women lost a great deal by putting aside their own interests during the Civil War. Most of the women want to do nothing but war work. Alice Paul, of course, and the younger group of suffragists, are so bent on the Suffrage Amendment that I don't suppose even war will divert them to any other subject. The National Association's policy, however, goes over for discussion by the whole board.

Saturday, April 21st. Lillie Harriman came to stop over Sunday. I went to ride this afternoon with Laura Curtis in Rock Creek Park. Lieut. Pechkoff, Gorki's son, and others came to dinner.

Sunday, April 22nd. Church, Never lovelier weather. Lunched outdoors at Friendship and sat between Mr. Perry Belmont and Bill Phillips. Such hospitable people, the McLeans. They add 248219much to the life here. I like and admire Mrs. McLean more every time I see her. Dinner at home. Lady Maud Cavendish, Captain Berkeley Johnson, A. D. C., Arnold Robertson and Gladys Ingalls, Lillie H. and Henry Russell, Senator Hale, Blondel, Roland and Gladys a Harriman, Jim Harriman (his birthday). In the afternoon the British High Commission arrived and drove through the streets escorted by the troop of the 2nd Cavalry. They had a gloriously enthusiastic reception. Lillie and I saw them twice, first at the station and then outside the MacVeagh house where they are stopping. Mr. Balfour in the first motor with Mr. Lansing looked radiant. In the second motor were the British Ambassador and Frank Polk and in the third motor General Bridges, General Wood and so on. I went to the Phillips' for tea and there found the French Ambassador and Madame Jusserand, the new Belgian minister, Baron de Cartier, and Major Spender-Clay, aide to General Bridges, and husband of Pauline Astor. I knew him before in England.

Monday, April 23rd. Rode this afternoon by myself on the speedway. Very warm and all the blossoms in their fullest splendor. First I met Mr. Lansing, then Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, and then the President and Mrs. Wilson, then Mr. Balfour looking very weary. Then I kept meeting them all over and over again. All official Washington has blossomed forth in top hats and cutaway coasts to do honor to the British! It's like the old days in New York, the way we bend to their fashions.

Tuesday, April 24th. Mr. Wells came to dinner to talk about Joe Wheelwright's plan for the Red Cross. Then Ethel and he and I went on to a small 249220reception at the British Embassy to meet the commissioners. Mr. Balfour was very gracious and had a word for everyone. General Bridges is a giant, a real “he man,” Colonel Roosevelt would call him. Admiral de Chair tells me that he has known me before, but I can't place him. The Hon. Ian Malcolm, whom we knew in London, is here, an aide to Mr. Balfour, and so is Sir Eric Drummond. The British are, of course, always in uniform as their country is at war. I wish that we would pass some such regulation.

Wednesday, April 25th. The French Commissioners arrived this morning amidst the wildest excitement. M. Viviani in the motor with Mr. Lansing and Warren Robbins to translate for them, as Viviani speaks no English and Lansing, no French. Le Maréchal Joffre, of course, created more enthusiasm than anyone as he drove by with M. Jusserand and General Scott. He is ever so much better-looking than his pictures. The leathery General in bright blue regalia dissolves with a smile and he becomes “Grandpapa Joffre,”—a kindly French visitor, who is most humanly pleased at the way we adore him and frankly adores back. Lunched with “Uncle Henry” and met there Mr. Nelson Fell, who is anxious to go to Russia with the Commission as he once lived there for nine years and speaks Russian fluently. I arranged a meeting for him first with Mr. Coffin and then Mr. Willard.

Thursday, April 26th. A rehearsal of the National Volunteer Aid for the parade in the afternoon. It went well.

Friday, April 27th. Met Colonel House today motoring and had two minutes' talk with him. I 250221managed to pour out in no time how I had just been to see Frank Polk at the State Department about Willard Straight's going into the Department to help out during the war. The Colonel said he would talk to F. P. tonight and Bill Phillips. They are all engaged to dine at the Wallacesapos;, to meet Mr. Balfour. The Colonel is most anxious for the sake of the Administration, that Willard be drawn into that work instead of getting a commission in the army as he threatens to do. The Colonel was as dear as ever. He goes to the White House tomorrow.

We went to the French Embassy tonight, and were introduced to all the French Commissioners. Joffre is enchanting and so picturesque in his red trousers. Dr. Finley was there and I asked him for a copy of his poem about the “lover of the heights,” etc., and he promised to send it to me.

I had two short conversations with Mr. Balfour who came late with Sir Eric Drummond. He said that “your President of course, has a great mentality.” “House has been a great friend of mine for a long time and has an exceptional amount of common sense. I imagine of what great value he must often have been to the Administration. Saved many a situation, I am sure.” Mr. Balfour seems more than delighted to see Professor Bergson again and said, “we must manage to lunch together and talk philosophy.”

Willard brought me home. Am terribly tired.

Saturday, April 28th. Went to the office for two hours this morning. Motored Aileen Tone out to the Phillips' for luncheon. The day was damp and raw so they couldn't lunch outdoors as planned, but it went off exceedingly well just the same. Caroline 251222had Viviani to her right and Joffre on her left. Edith Eustis sat on Viviani's right, then came Secretary Lane, then Alice Longworth, then on Joffre's left, handsome Mrs. Newlands. I sat between Harry White and Franklin Roosevelt. It was not a very large luncheon; so I think they were sweet to ask me. The Phillips are always lovely to me. Grace Bigelow came on all the way from New York. Quite fitting that the daughter of John Bigelow should have been there. After lunch Joffre was telling Alice Longworth and me out on the lawn what he wanted this country to do in a military way. “You should send 25,000 troops at once, and then again 25,000 and again and again, just as fast as possible.” Just then a young State Department official rushed out calling to us all—“Conscription has passed the Senate.” “The beginning of the end,” Joffre said, smiling. At five we went to a large reception at the French Embassy, where we all shook hands once more with the members of the Commission.

Monday, April 30th. Attended an A. F. of L. meeting and them lunched with the McAdoos.

Even before war was declared and ever since, people have been swarming to Washington with all sorts of propositions. Being New York business men, most of them, they are terribly impatient of the delay. They will have to learn how slowly the wheels of government grind. People seem to think that because you live in Washington you can go out and pick commissions and appointments off trees. Like everyone else, I am having the most unique requests. I have worn out my boot leather running between here and the War Department. Dick Peters 252223came early and did all his own running. He has been too wonderful. He wants to be a liaison officer and the war officials acted as if it were something improper—“never heard of one.” After much digging they found there had been three such animals in the whole history of the U. S. Army. Nothing happened, though, for him; so he finally went off to New York, telegraphed me, to get him letters to the Ambassador at Paris from Secretaries McAdoo and Baker. The next thing was a postal of him in uniform saying, “Good-by, bless you, here I go.” He is sixty-seven years old. Too splendid!

Buzzie Smith having been turned down for the Army owing to a recently broken arm or leg, wanted to get into the Remount. He telephoned asking me to see the officer in charge of that department. Then it turned out that they were about to commission the father of my friend instead of his junior. There was the most awful amount of red tape, and then one fine morning I was called and told the shift had been made, but that if S. did not appear at the Department the next morning he would forfeit the job. It was his wedding day, but I informed him by long distance and he and his bride came down that night and left the next day, radiant, with his commission in his pocket. The army officers are kind and try hard to do everything they can, but naturally it is a chaotic time.

Wednesday, May 2nd. Dined with Edith Vanderbilt. Mr. Balfour was there, also Secretary and Mrs. Lane, B. Phillips, Alice Longworth, Lady Lister Kaye. Afterwards the Williams Eustis' had a reception for the French Commission at which Joffre 253224failed to put in an appearance. It was like Hamlet without a Hamlet.

Thursday, May 3rd. Went to tea with Mrs. Stephen Bonsal. Major Spender-Clay, Lady Lister Kaye, Longworths, etc., dined with me.

Sunday. A very prominent old Progressive Party leader came to tea to ask me to protest to Mr. Root himself in case the President couldn't be made to see what a blunder Root's heading the mission to Petrograd will be. He says the Russians won't care a hang about what kind of a good name Root has with the legal profession in America. What they will know, and it will make them wary and suspicious, is that Root framed the New York constitution that the masses would have none of.

This friend has a pet idea that sending Roosevelt to Russia would be killing two birds with one stone. It would pacify the Colonel and give him the sense of active service abroad; and the Russians, he believes, would dote on the honor of having our foremost citizen representing America amongst them.

G. remained very late, begging me to do everything I could to avert the calamity of Root's going. I'm not convinced it would be a calamity, but I promised to consult Colonel House. In any event my seeing Mr. Root would do no good.

Monday. Lunched with Mrs. McCawley to meet that nice Mrs. Withrop Gray.

Dined with the Dick Cranes to meet Lord Eustace Percy. I sat next to C. R. B., and he was very “inty.”

Tuesday, May 8th. Dined at the McLeans' to meet the McAdoos. Alice Longworth was introduced to McAdoo, and they sat together at the moving 254225pictures in the big ballroom. I wonder if she took her courage in her hands and asked him outright to help get her father to France, as our host said she was going to do.

The passionate devotion of Roosevelt's children to their father is very touching and almost draws one on to think as they do, that whatever he wants must be “good policy.”

Wednesday. Mr. Thomas, M.P., came to dinner with Pauline Goldmark, and we had a delightful and illuminating evening. Mr. Thomas told us that he was the only man who had ever been known to turn down a cabinet portfolio.

Tuesday, May 15th. Went with the Labor Committee of the Council of National Defense to the White House. The President made a nice little speech to the assembled semi-circle in the East Room.

Thursday, May 7th. Spoke in Alexandria in motor uniform for the Red Cross. B. came to dine and drove me over. He is certainly a sincere speaker but dry, dry, dry.

Friday, May 18th. I lunched at the Phillips' to meet Mr. Balfour and sat between the Hon. Ian Malcolm and Mr. Breckenridge-Long, Mr. Balfour, after luncheon, talked to me for ten minutes principally about John Purroy Mitchel, saying the most complimentary things about him and remarking that it seemed very unfair to expect him to run again for mayor unless the Government intended to make provisions for his future, as he would find difficulty in going into business at the age of forty, which he will be if he is elected to the mayoralty for another four years. He also spoke most feelingly about the death of Mr. Choate. 255226 Friday, May 25th. Dined with Mrs. Hope Slater, sitting between Mr. Denman and Mr. Baruch. (General Pershing was to have been there for dinner, but did not come in until later, having dined with the Secretary of State.) Mr. Denman talked a great deal about hi row with Sir Richard Crawford. I knew too little to take sides.

Tuesday, May 29th, 1917. Helen Astor wants me to let Ethel go to France to do Y. M. C. A. work with her. It is a great opportunity, but it is hard to reconcile myself to parting with her. I wish that I could go myself, but now that I have accepted Mr. Gompers' appointment. I couldn't very well do that.

I hardly remember at all what I did in the summer of 1917. I missed Ethel dreadfully, and since she wasn't at home, took on the ambulance work on Sundays. The week I divided very evenly between the Committee on Women in Industry and the Red Cross Motor Corps. The Sunday runs of the ambulance were hard work, but never without an incident. Usually we went to Humphries and brought patients back from there to Walter Reed Hospital, a round trip of about fifty-five miles.

One evening I was driving with my girl orderly beside me. We had three very sick soldiers, one unconscious and one delirious. The road from the camp to Washington was only just under construction and a thunder-storm on the way out had so mucked a part of the road just before the main highway that we were mire. The girl orderly loped off down the road until she found two kind young men and ran them back to pry us out. In the middle of our trouble our third 256227patient made a sign that he felt seasick. Our new ambulance was our pride and our joy. My orderly almost automatically snatched what proved to be a brannew hat from the head of our kindly rescuer, thrust it under the soldier's chin with a pleading, “Goodness sakes, don't spoil the ambulance! Use this.”

It may have been just a case of man standing by man. The seasick man, out of respect for his brother's hat, settled back and didn't use it.

The rule was that no man, unless in uniform, could accompany us on Motor Corps work and it was very rare that an officer had time to volunteer to come along. And my fleet-footed orderly couldn't always find husky arms to conscript on the lonely country road. The girls used to change tires themselves with extraordinary speed when we had a critical case inside. They used to get up at 4 A. M. They followed behind green troops on country hikes and carried the canteen workers back and forth.

The work was organized in March, 1917, at Miss Boardman's request, and a few days after war was declared, the organization was complete. Ethel designed the Corps uniform, long gray coat and breeches, high boots, leather belt and a service cap. What stormy meetings we used to have and all about the uniform. Some thought breeches wouldn't become them. Some said their husbands wouldd never, never let them wear such things. Some, who knew beforehand how beautifully they could wear the uniform, turned out quite incapable of driving a car. Once we got the coats and breeches made, they became so popular that the national motor service of the Red Cross followed the 257228example of our Washington Corps and the breeches dispute became a lost cause.

The members qualified themselves for their service by taking courses in first aid and motor repair work, and they received stretcher drills from officers of the 6th Engineers and became very skilful in lifting the injured, placing them on litters, loading and unloading ambulances, and carrying the stretchers into hospitals and houses. When I went to Europe in the autumn of 1917, Mrs. Floyd Waggaman became Commanding Officer pro tem., and I resumed command on my return the following spring. In September, 1918, when I went across again, I resigned and Mrs. David Fairchild took my place, followed later by Mrs. Carter. The best work was done while I was overseas during the influenza epidemic. Then the Motor Corps members went in and out of houses, carrying the stretchers themselves. In all they carried as many as two thousand patients to the hospitals. They did a yeoman's service. Members of the Corps were on duty for twenty-four hours at a time, sleeping on cots in the garage between calls.

New York, November 12th, 1917. My sister Elise, going over for the Red Cross, Dorothy Kane, Dorothy McCombs, and Lydia Taber, going with the Duryea Relief Committee in Paris, are all sailing on the St. Louis with me tomorrow. I am going to London first to make the report Mr. Gompers wants on welfare work for women in munition factories, particularly in high explosive factories. Then on to France to see munition works and then to tour the hospitals at the front so that I can speak and write for Red Cross publicity work when I get back.

“St. Louis,” at sea, November 15th. It was a typical Indian summer afternoon two days ago when we dropped down to Sandy Hook and anchored there. At 10 p. m. we slipped out to sea. Everything has been peaceful, the sky beautiful, the water calm. Twenty years ago I sailed on this same steamer, then the latest cry in ocean liners; now her marvelous camouflage makes her look less like a ship and more like a Ziegfeld Follies show girl. Louis Raemakers, Belgian cartoonist, on whose head the Germans have put a price, was brought down the bay the first night by a destroyer. He has no passport, just a piece of paper with some word written 259230on it and travels under an assumed name. I said good-by to him in Washington last week, and was very much suprised to find him here. He says this ship's camouflage is a masterpiece, but he doubts if such elaborate comouflaging will go on, as the St. Louis' fancy dress costs twelve hundred dollars a trip. At a distance all our rainbow hues merge into the colors of the ocean, and we are practically invisible. Raemarkers spends hours every day hanging over the railing amused at the job the Navy has done. The peacefulness of our journey is just an illusion. The St. Louis has six big guns constantly reminding us whither we are bound, and from my deck chair I watch every day a most diverting Irish marine in charge of some young naval fliers. He is full of amusing stories and songs, but his uniform is a constant reminder.

November 20th. We have hit what father used to call the roaring forties, and the illusion that we were taking a little sail on Long Island Sound in July, has gone. The twisting winds and dank sea slop have ushered in a definite change in our mental atmosphere as well. The Captain has ordered us to wear heavy underclothes, and to keep our life-preservers where we can get them quickly. Before I was awake this morning, a motherly stewardess, who oddly enough was my stewardess twenty years ago, came to tell me that American destroyers were on either side of the ship. We ought to be about forty-eight hours from Ireland, but this is a pure guess; we may be anywhere from the Azores to Halifax. Our convoy gives us a mixed sense of security and disquiet. Once in so often one of the destroyers steams hard and encircles our ship to make sure there 260231is no submarine just ahead or tagging at our heels. Raemakers is enormously pleased with the ingenious camouflage of one of the destroyers. It is painted white, and on the white background is the portrait of a smaller black boat, its bow turning towards the stern of the real destroyer.

Tuesday night at sea. While we were zigzagging through the Irish Sea after luncheon today, an explosion shook the ship. We were ordered to get our sea-suits and come to the main saloon. Several people were thrown out of their berths. The ship was stopped and every precaution was taken. They even flooded the hold with water in case there might be a bomb hidden somewhere there. It seems, however, to have been a deep sea bomb. Raemakers made ludicrous portraits of us in our sea-suits.

Claridge Hotel, London, November 25th. We reached Liverpool during the night and landed at 11 o'clock the morning of the 22nd. The water front, as always, was dull, drab and unpicturesque. After we passed the customs, we drove in a cab up through the slums to the Adelphi Hotel. I found it hard to believe that this was Liverpool, ‘twas at once so gay and so sad. Everywhere we met Tommies in brilliant blue convalescent uniforms, wearing vivid scarlet neckties. There were legless ones, armless ones, one-eyed men, but in bright blue and scarlet. They seem only part of some uncanny pageant that is being staged in England. I have noticed a number of our own American men in khaki and I can't tell whether I have seen thousands of Highlanders in their kilts, or only paid special attention to every single one I did see. I wish I could remember more of Masefield's poem: 261232 “To die, uncouthly most in foreign lands For some idea but dimly understood, Of an English city never built by hands Which love of England prompted and made good.”

The newspapers say that the English have buried 600,000 men in France.

My diary breaks off for several days. The night I arrived Field Marshal Lord French came to see me, some one having sent him a note about my arrival. I remember he impressed me very much as Liverpool had done, superficially so gay in his impressive uniform. He invited me to dine with him the following day.

Nest morning I went to see Ambassador Page to show him Mr. Gompers' letter. He understood to communicate with the Minister of Munitions, Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Churchill was just going off to France, but left orders that I should have every facility for visiting the factories. A motor and secretary were put at my disposal, and it was arranged that a member of the Welfare Department of the Ministry should accompany me on every trip. The English can't bear to have us break our hearts by wasting time on mistakes or false motions as they did at first, and of course they want us to count as soon as possible on the Western Front.

London, November 27th, 1917. Everyone I meet is amazingly cheerful, and yet there is not a household which has not had its loss. They use new words to express what is happening to them. If a 262233soldier dies on the battlefield or from wounds, they say he has “gone West.” Soldiers come back wounded or on furlough to “Blighty.” “Blighty” is a Hindoo word for home.

The concealment of their grief and depression is magnificent. They chatter about everyday matters and about their work; everybody has a war job. The deep feeling is there. I walked home with Lady Harcourt from her hospital last night. Mr. Page says that she is the most wonderful human being in London. She had been working at the hospital all day, and it was she who lifted the dark curtain just a little bit for me when she said: “All my generation of men are dead, and now their sons are going too.”

People have to keep cheerful. They go to the theaters, they entertain someone who is home on leave for a few days; the restaurants are open, music and dancing goes, on as always; women seem to dress rather more than less, though any sort of costume does. It is all part of the game to keep up the morale.

I was talking to Mrs. M. last night about the universal lack of mourning. “My eldest brother,” she said, “the head of our family, was killed five days ago. In ordinary times we would have gone into black for several years, but now that is entirely out of the question. Here is Ronnie,” she said, nodding toward her husband, “just back from the front on leave. How would it be possible for me to spoil his few days at home by showing my grief?”

So many little things I notice. When we arrived at Euston Station four days ago, it was about eight o'clock. We had been advised to bring very little luggage and to carry our own flashlights. It was good advice. I could find no porter, the station was 263234almost black, and we were in great luck to get a taxi, for the streets were very dark. The muffled smothered effect of no lights though, produces a strange excitement in a newcomer. Coming back from registering with the police—all foreigners have to do it now within twenty-four hours—I saw my first girl bus-conductor. Inside the bus were two Tommies with only two legs between them. They began to talk to me at once. “Good evening, Ma'am,” they said. One recounted how he had caught four Boches on the end of his bayonet, but the last one had succeeded in wriggling off. There were shouts of laughter from the people in the bus. I laughed too, but with a queer, sick feeling.

The morning after our arrival the papers broke the news of the Cambrai push. The joybells rang all over London. Tonight I went with one of the Red Cross inspectors to see the hospital trains come in. They tell me that London seems nearer the war than any other place except the actual front, for wounded are everywhere. Every night they come in to the three great stations. Last night we went to Charing Cross. It was dimly lighted and along the station platform were drawn up ten or twelve motor ambulances in line. Night after night these cars are there, waiting for the wounded to come back. They are all Rolls-Royce cars, which have been gladly give over by their owners for this service. Before the hospital train arrives, everybody except doctors, nurses and those officially authorized to be there, are cleared away. The trains in their appointment, the automobile ambulance service, and the hospitals for the care of the wounded, constitute a typical 264235example of the marvelous organization of England. Everything goes like clockwork.

At last the train glided into the station, and the doctors, nurses and stretcher bearers went quietly forward to meet it. Out of the train first came wounded officers who were able to walk, limping, or on crutches, some with their arms in slings, and others with their heads bandaged. Then came the officer stretcher cases. Next came the Tommies in the same order. Four stretchers were put into each ambulance and the blessed, inevitable Sister climbed in to comfort and attend, and the motors slowly left the station to carry their precious freight to their destinations. Last came the wounded German prisoners. On the train they had occupied as comfortable quarters as Britain's own soldiers. Only one difference marked their reception. Instead of a Sister, a soldier went with each ambulance which carried them away.

The wards in most London hospitals are painted white, the floors are covered with strips of blue carpet, and the windows are cheerily curtained with the same shade of blue as the convalescent's uniform. They are made to look as unlike hospitals as possible. Even the bed quilts are bright and pretty. This wouldn't be a bad idea for civilian hospitals.

London, November 30th. An air raid in the West End is pretty bad, but how dreadful last night must have been in the East End. The day we registered we were told to keep our fur coats and underclothes near the bed at night. Last night about one, the warning sirens came. I took my time and dressed. The scene in the lobby was too ludicrous. Women in fur coats and boudoir caps, half a dozen men in 265236pyjamas under gorgeous dressing gowns. A doddering old man got out of the lift with a bird cage in each hand and a parrot perched on his shoulder. Two women with lap dogs under their arms were right in his line of march. Such a scramble; and in the midst of the dogs, parrot and general irritation, a Polish princes capped the turmoil by having a crise, screaming and tearing her hair because her husband hadn't waked up at the alarm, and was no doubt, she wept, dead in his bed. The bombardment of the anti-aircraft guns kept up for four hours. It was daylight before the “all clear” signal came. The Manager sent round word that all the hotel guests were invited to hot breakfast.

December 1st . Women seem to have stepped up every where to take the places of the 1,415,000 men. They say down in the country, women are the chief harvesters of the autumn crop. They are acting as shepherds and dairymen. Someone just back from Glasgow tells me that it is a fine sight to see the Glasgow workwomen cleaning the ships that lie in dock and that great numbers of fisher girls from the east coast of Scotland who suffered from unemployment in the fishing slump have gone to work in the jute mills at Dundee. Today I saw a woman billposter trotting along with bucket and pastebrush, and a woman in butcher's apron in front of a shop struggling to hang up quarters of lamb.

Seeing President Wilson's picture hung with Lloyd George and Field Marshal Haig in all the little coffee shops and in the railway stations, makes the Alliance seem very real, and if that weren't a constant reminder, the way people shower courtesies on us, is. Mrs. Tennant, the adviser on women's 266237work to the Minister of Munitions, constantly thinks of new things to do to help me make my report cover everything. An amusing incident at the Ministry today. Mr. Page would call it another example of the “Three thousand mile disease,” which breaks out every now and then in a rash of misunderstanding and misrepresentation at both ends. Both try so hard—at least pretty hard—and yet are so ignorant of each other. In the Ministry file was a folder labeled “Council of National Defense, Washington, D. C.,” and under which was typed “Is this a responsible organization? Can we safely answer the enclosed questions? It had been through five departments of the Ministry before being rescued by someone who happened to know the standings and functions of the Council. To those of us who belong to a subsidiary branch and who stand in awe of this august body, it was to laugh!

I found a very clever woman in the Extramural Subsection of the Welfare Section of the Ministry of Munitions, who had had much experience in billeting munitions workers, which is something we may come to yet at home.

Billeting bridges over the gap until houses can be built and is much better than temporary “hutments.” She told me how at the beginning of the war large numbers of people were introduced into munitions areas, and that a certain number decamped without paying their landladies. “No more munitions workers,” said the lodging-house keepers. Naturally. When the Extramural Subsection came into being it formed local committees, dealing with the question of lodgings and appointing registrars. The registrars are local women who give their time 267238to canvassing the streets finding out who will take lodgers. There is no rigid rule as to what class the registrar shall come from, but it has been found that the better-class working-woman is most popular with both girls and landladies. In one town where it was said no vacant lodgings could be found, a house-to-house canvass revealed 1,500 lodgings available. The lodgings committees supervise the lodgings after they are found, and keep in close touch with both landladies and girls. The registrars in addition often go to the Labor Exchanges to meet workers arriving. If there is no one to meet them often they lose heart and go straight home again. Some arrive destitute. “Clearing” hostels were described to me as places where girls just arrived are received and kept for the night till allocated to lodgings or permanent hostels. The Executive officer of the Billeting Board hears complaints from both lodger and landlady. (It's not a happy life.) She smooths things over if she can, or refers the troubles to the Billeting Board. Under the Billeting Act it is a punishable crime for either landlady or lodger to be drunk in the lodgings.

The Billeting Board has the power of billeting workers in private houses just as soldiers are billeted, but it doesn't make use of it. Miss Hadow says they don't for these reasons: Soldiers are moved fairly often, but munition workers may be years in the same place. Munition workers often have families whereas soldiers haven't. And, lastly there is a picturesqueness and glamour about a soldier which there isn't about a munition maker, especially a woman.

In any case billeting isn't a solution, because there aren't enough houses. Even before the war Britain hadn't decent homes enough, and with practically no building going on now, housing becomes more difficult every day.

The Billeting Board can refund money to landladies when lodgers decamp. That helps. At first there was much overcrowding and there is still. Where three shifts are working, all three shifts sometimes use the same beds. The Welfare Section has of course, aimed at doing away with this “hot bed” system.

On December 2nd, I wrote from Cliveden where I'd gone to stay with Nancy Astor, to Ethel, who was working in the Y. M. C. A. at Bordeaux.

It is after 1 A. M. and I am sitting by a window through which the moonlight streams giving a “luster of mid-day to all things below.” The Thames winds through the black trees like a silver ribbon and it is as till as only the country on a winter's night can be. How you would have loved this day. In the afternoon I walked along the river bank to Maidenhead on a path cut through a tangle of laurel and holly and many other blessed green things that lend warmth to a winter landscape. Mr. Philip Kerr was with me. He is, you know, Lloyd George's secretary. You can believe the time was only too short for all the things there were to talk about. We had tea with Sylvia Gascoigne, more beautiful than ever, at Maidenhead, and then, not finding any means of conveyance, walked back, arriving just in time for dinner. There was the same stillness as tonight, only the cracking of the dry leaves under foot, the lapping 269240of the water on the banks, and an occasional scurrying rabbit to break it. Did I ever tell you that there is a hospital here and that last time I was here Mr. Kipling was spending the week-end and talking to the wounded on Sunday afternoon? Nancy Astor established this hospital for Canadians as they are so far from their homes or friends, and she visits the wards three times daily, knows all the Tommies by name, and is her cheerful and sprightly self with each one. The matron of all the overseas Canadian nurses is here now and says that except for Nancy's sunny personality, this hospital couldn't have been a success. It is too far from the glamour of London. N. A. is a very wonderful woman.

London, December 3rd. I am tired tonight, having left the hotel at 8:30 A. M. and spent the day walking about an enormous factory at Woolwich, where as many as 25,000 to 30,000 women are employed. We had the Minister's own chauffeur to take us there and back, and, having a license allowing him to drive at any speed, he went so fast that all the telegraph poles looked like a rail fence. In pre-war times he drove a racing machine, and later an armoured car in Egypt. In one day we touched only the fringe of the factory. They say it takes a whole week to visit all the buildings within this huge organization. The Women's Welfare Superintendent, Miss Barker, has a staff of 25 assistant welfare supervisors, each assistant being responsible for 1,000 women.

When the Women's Superintendent came to this factory two years ago there were only 400 women and girls employed. Now there are 25,000. She and her assistants have done all the hiring. I visited a 270241fuse shop, canteen, and hospital in her company and heard her greet most of the workers by name. All grievances the women may have are brought to her in her office, and she talks them over and gives advice. A very remarkable woman, Miss Barker. In the hospital we found a girl suffering from tetryl rash, and another with badly swollen eyelids said to be caused by the powder she has been handling. The girls clip cartridges as if they were shelling peas—it's amusing to watch them. We lunched at the Joan of Arc hostel built by the Y. M. C. A. The hostel is built of boards lined with asbestos.

December 7th, 1917. A year ago I would have said it couldn't be done. Now I spend all day every day visiting His Majesty's explosives factories and half the night getting my notes in order so that I can report to Mr. Gompers just what representatives I have seen each day. I put down first the situation of the factory and its size, then which shifts the girls work in and what their wages are, and then pages and pages of report on the details of welfare work done to keep the women in condition.

Tuesday I visited a filling factory. Wednesday, I remember, we motored out from London and found an aircraft works, in the midst of beautiful country on the edge of a pine wood. The gardens were so charmingly laid out that I felt like a week-end visitor. One room in particular where some girls were doping a balloon, was very full of strong fumes said to be non-poisonous. A pail of free lemonade was kept in the room. Drinking it was supposed to make the fumes more bearable.

That same night, Miss Berry, the secretary given me by the Ministry of Munitions, and I, traveled 271242to Carlisle, our train arriving at four in the morning. A thick fog enveloped the station. On another platform stood a hospital train. The stretcher-bearers in shadowy procession went into one end of the cars and came out at the other with wounded, covered, head and all, by blankets. “Tramp, tramp,” the shadows moved past us. A railway guard looked at us. “This goes on all over England every night and every night.” We slept a few hours at the hotel and then we motored to Gretna, once the mecca of so many runaway couples.

The factory was a drive of several miles from the station through bleak countryside. It is one of the mushroom war factories. The welfare superintendent told me how the first fifty girls arrived last June before either the factor or accommodations were ready. With one assistant she met the girls and took them across fields to the single hostel and bungalow ready for them. Today, just eight months afterwards, the place has 12,000 women employés, most of them living in the seventy hostels and thirty bungalows within the two townships which have grown up around the factory. The factory and townships cover twelve square miles. The girls work on three overlapping shifts. There is no piece work and the wages are pretty low, it seems to me. Girls under 18, of whom there are more than 1,000, earn from 21/6 a week, and the forewoman earns about 40/-, not quite $10. However, board and lodging in the hostels only come to about 13/6.

A large part of the work is the preparation of gun cotton for the manufacture of cordite. The cotton arrives in large bales from the cotton factories; the girls break up the bales and put the cotton into a 272243teasing machine from which the cotton comes out into the nitrating room. Day and night girls with long poles poke the cotton to keep it moving about in large vats of nitrate and sulphuric acids. The air is thick with noxious fumes, though there are many arrangements for drawing off the gas. After long soakings the acid is run off, the cotton is washed and then taken to more vats to be boiled. After the cotton has been boiled the girls climb into the vats and throw the cotton out into huge buckets, which travel on an overhead wire where the cotton is pulped, sieved, pressed and packed into bags.

I lost my last vestige of feeling that this or that is “woman's work.” In the engine rooms I watched girls in their dark blue suits cleaning up the engines, deftly and busily as if they were washing up the pots and pans in their own kitchen. Some work as fitters and electrical repairers, some saw and plane wood, making cases. I found a whole room full of them putting threads on spools and soldering lead. Some strapping girls with thick boots, oilskins and southwesters were doing trucking. I exclaimed at first: “What frightfully heavy work,” but on looking again, not one of them looked as tired as nearly every woman I have seen bent over a washtub. There are a number of girls from Lady Margaret College, Oxford, and other universities making tests in the chemical laboratory. A staff of girl employés is busy in each of the compounds at the different entrances to the factory. In the compounds are the cloak rooms, clothing stores, lavatories, canteens and rest rooms.

For Mr. Gompers' Committee I made the most meticulous reports; just what kind of time-clocks, precisely 273244what sort of time-cards. I used to write pages about cloak rooms, exactly how the counters ran, how the name was stenciled on the bags the girls put their clothing in, how the pegs were arranged on which the bags were hung. I can see myself now with my notebook feeling that I too was winning the war as I jotted down whether shoes went into the bag or were checked separately at Gretna.

There were necessarily a formidable number of women police; as the workers left the cloak rooms in their working-suits to go into the factory, they were subject to search in order that no forbidden article be taken into the factory. Not every girl was searched of course, only one here and there. There was a rule in some factories that girls wearing corsets with steel supports must take them off. Attached to each cloak room was a drying room for the girls who had been sopping around in the wet vats, and there were little mending rooms. Most of the girls wore khaki flannel suits and caps, and the system of issue is rather like the army system. Cloaks with hoods were provided for the girls to wear on wet days, and warm red jerseys are issued in cold weather. Those working with gun cotton wore white rubber overalls without sleeves.

There was an ambulance room in each compound in charge of a nurse on a twelve-hour shift. Five full-time doctors are attached to the factory.

I suppose all these factory details are tedious, and yet the days I spent getting them were some of the most interesting in my life. After thirty years of concern with private houses, and after a careful study of luxurious coöperative living, it was tremendously interesting 274245to see how engineers achieved the large scale emergency living arrangements for thousands of work-people. It kept me wondering whether everybody presently might not be part of some such mechanically planned community. In the large townships there was a huge central kitchen which supplied food delivered by motor-car to all the canteens, and distributed uncooked food to all the hostels. Instead of several privately-owned competing bakeries there was one large central bakery. I made notes of everything, of the tea urns in the kitchen, of how the benches had no backs, of how the table oilcloths wore at the corners, and should have been inlaid. I must have walked miles over each of the two townships going in and out of hostels accommodating from 70 to over 120 girls. I took down what they ate for breakfast, spent hours talking to the various matrons about the ticket system of her boarders, and discussing whether doors or curtains separating cubicles were best. It was interesting to discover that the girls had individual responsibility in keeping their little cubicles clean; that in each hostel one spokesman had been elected to take up all grievances with the matron in charge. I was particularly taken with the public washrooms where the girls could get supplies and do their own washing. The little bungalows or huts, holding about nine girls and a cook-housekeeper, were, of course, more popular than the hostels, showing that however big and fine the more communal places might be, there is satisfaction in smaller living units.

“The Institute” is a club with dues 1/- a month. The men have one floor, the women another. The place 275246was full of reading rooms, writing rooms, games and chess rooms. “Not a place to speak your ‘eart out in, Missis, like we get in the pub, but plenty to do and to set in,” one of the men described it. There were classes in country dancing, a hall to be hired for parties and a large auditorium. It was being got ready when we were there, for performance of “Les Cloches de Corneville” by a cast of the munition workers themselves.

And so on. One shouldn't, I suppose, write at this late date in such detail an odd chapter about the problems of a welfare director in an English wartime factory, but I thought then and I know now that since the factory system is more and more taking possession of all modern industries, making the factories livable must somehow be an accepted factor in overhead. When a woman on the payroll has for her job the taking in hand of each new worker to show her round the factory and make her feel at home, it mustn't be regarded as “waste and nonsense.”

As we were leaving the Gretna factory we saw a long line of women with drawn faces passing through an office. “Those are girls who have been summoned to receive a telegram from the War Office. Someone belonging to them has ‘gone west.’ It is like this every day. They are allowed four days off. Then they come back. It is the rarest exception to hear a word of sorrow or complaint from any of them,” explained our guide.

We motored to Carlisle to catch an evening train to London. Suddenly the secretary and I recalled that I had forgotten to register at the Police Station in the 276247morning before we set out for Gretna. “You register,” said Miss Berry, “while I go to the hotel for the bags.” When the officials discovered that I had been visiting one of H. M. explosive factories quite unregistered, there was a great commotion. I was very contrite; I apologized. I repeated my story over and over as new officials were summoned to question me. I held out my blanket pass from the Minister of Munitions; I gave them my passport. My police pass only kindled the fire of suspicion: it wasn't properly made out. Hubbub! I began to worry. Over in the corner in a very high seat like a pulpit sat an extraordinary elderly man in uniform—one of the handsomest men, I had ever seen. I wanted to ask who and what he was, but didn't dare. He took my passport, loked down at me and looked back at my passport, and said, “And what is Robert Lansing to me?” “Nothing,” I said, “except that he happens to be the American Secretary of State.” It was the “Three thousand mile disease” again.

The Police Station was beside the Railway Station. The London train was rumbling in. I ventured timidly, “Here comes my train. May I go?” “No, you will have to remain all night.” The man in the pulpit said, “How do we know that you didn't pick these passes up somewhere?” I told him to turn over the paper signed by the unknown Robert Lansing; maybe I would look like the photograph on the front page. “Step over here.” I stepped, and a group of officials studied alternately the picture and me. They whispered together. Then, “Very well, you may go, but you must be sure to go to Scotland Yard the first thing in the morning.”

I ran breathlessly to the Station platform into the arms of my secretary, just as the porters were closing the carriage doors.

London, December 9th, 1917. My London visit has come to a close. It has been teeming with interest and inspiration. What a people! There are no words in which to describe their fortitude. I carry away most tender and affectionate recollections of the many friends who have brought bright moments between the investigations which have torn my heart with the pathos of War. Once again I tell Jean Ward “Good-by” with real regret. She is one of the American wives of English husbands, of whom we can be justly proud. She is always the same to her old friends, and ever holds their admiration and affection.

Paris, December 11th, 1917. From London we traveled to Paris by Southampton and Havre at night. As there was no direct train connection to Paris with the boats we had to spend the day in Havre. I was so excited about seeing Ethel again that any delay was a hardship. I went over the tea with Mr. and Mrs. Brand Whitlock. The minister is most cultivated and seems more like an European scholar than an American Major. He was magnificent during the invasion, and is greatly beloved by the Belgians.

Ethel and Helen Astor met us at the Paris station last night, having come up from Bordeaux. Ethel has grown too stout, notwithstanding her hard work with the Y. M. C. A. They have left Brest, where they spent six months, and are now establishing a restaurant and club at Bordeaux. This is Ethel's twentieth birthday.

December 12th. Ethel tells me that she wants to marry Henry Russell. I think that she is too young, and she has so much character that I have always felt she should marry an older man. However, we are going to Saumur to see Henry after Christmas, which we will sped in Bordeaux.

Paris, December 13th, 1917. It's settled. Yesterday I met a prominent member of the French Government. 279250He says the Red Cross have told him that they hope I can see some of the hospitals at the French front. “Of course you can,” he said. “Why not?” “Will you be ready Sunday—Monday?” “Would you like somebody to go with you?” This morning he telephoned early to ask which trip I wanted to take, one to Verdun or to the devastated region around and beyond Noyon. For no particular reason I chose Noyon. He told me to expect a Government motor to be at the hotel door Monday morning at 8:30. Ethel goes along. M. suggests that I wear my Red Cross uniform and Ethel her Y. M. C. A. so that it will be perfectly evident we are not on a joy ride.

Noyon, December 18th. On the trip yesterday, already at Senlis, only one hour from Paris, we saw many ruined houses in a Christmas setting of snow, and trees spotted with mistletoe. German prisoners mending a road, wire entanglements, trenches and graves. We stopped for a half hour at Compiögne and the French G.H.Q. We came on here to Noyon for lunch with General Hombert, of the Third French Army, his staff and several visiting generals. Headquarters is a charming old house set back in a courtyard which was occupied from the beginning of the war until March, 1917, by the Germans. When the French left the town three years ago, the old lady who owned the house placed all her money and jewels behind the books of the top shelf of her library. When she came back this year, before the French Government requisitioned the house, she found them untouched. Not a single book, she says, has ever been displaced. The cellar and walls have all been searched. The story is told with great avidity 280251in order to show that the Germans were after loot and have no interest in literature.

The luncheon was delicious, served on snowy table-linen with fine regimental silver tankard and dishes. Now that we are in the army zone we have white bread, a delicacy these days. The General tells me the chef was in the Waldorf in New York until called to the colors in the fall of 1914. The talk was all about the whys and wherefores of the Cambrai failure. Many complimentary references to General Pershing and most intense interest in General Wood and what his future is to be. It was a great temptation to linger over the coffee and cigarettes. But the delightful officer who was acting as our guide reminded us that winter days are short, and we tore ourselves away. From Noyon on to Chauny every house in ruins. It gave me again the same sick sensation that turned me cold when I first saw Pompeii.

From there we traveled on roads that were camouflaged by screens ten or twelve feet in height, made of chicken wire with green boughs stuck in on either side of them. Every little while we came upon a sign “Point vue par l'enemi.” At these points the chauffeur would go at such high speed that it almost took our breath away. Before leaving Headquarters we were each given a gas mask and shown how to use it.

As twilight fell over the flat snow-covered fields we came to the spot where a dignified stone marks the grave of James McConnell, an American aviator, who was killed in action there March 17, 1917. In the midst of devastation far from home and friends a tiny American flag and bunch of withered flowers on 281252the grave were tokens of someone's thought and appreciation.

Not many miles from there, we drew up at the Hackett-Lowther Unit, a canteen and little theater run by Englishwomen since the very early days of the war. For pulling wounded men out under fire and other acts of bravery, one of these, Miss Hackett, now has the rank of Lieutenant in the French army, and the Croix de Guerre as well. She wears a uniform very similar to that of our own Red Cross Motor Corps, except that it is khaki. It was an experience to walk through the Compiögne streets with her and see the poilus salute her as if she were a cross between a saint and the regimental mascot.

All the afternoon and ever since reaching Noyon we've heard the steady roar of the guns, like an approaching thunderstorm. Every little while the pop-pop of the Avion machine guns battling overhead pokes holes in the monotony of sound. One can distinguish the French and Boche planes by the smoke of the gunpowder, the French almost white, the Boche nearly black.

On a hill commanding a fine view of the surrounding country stands the abandoned tower of Prince Eitel Fritz's hunting lodge during the German occupation. At Cugny we visited an evacuation hospital close behind the lines. The nursing staff and matron were all Americans. The operating, sterilizing, and X-Ray rooms are on wheels as this hospital is attached to the Third French Army and goes with it everywhere the army is ordered. Just now they are all packed up ready to move at any moment as the French are expecting the British to take over this part of the line, and have been expecting it ever since 282253Cambrai. The nurses were only semi-trained until they came here and are now militarized. One of Ethel's friends, Mimi Scott, has acquitted herself so well that she is in charge of a ward. Deep shell holes on either side of the hospital bore evidences of a recent bombardment. It was freezing cold and nearly dark when we went into the ward of the Grands Blessés. The groans and ravings of several desperately wounded and delirious officers were unbelievably dreadful.

Noyon, December 19th. After spending about two hours in the Ambrine Hospital and Compiögne yesterday, seeing burns of every variety and intensity treated, apparently without causing the least suffering to the poilus, we motored to Ribécourt. There 250 German prisoners were being taught to make bricks and with them restore houses in the vicinity. They also make wooden furniture and cook. The French officer in charge had until the outbreak of the war lived in the Argentine, and he combines industry and efficiency with much charm. The prisoners are well fed and comfortably housed, but look sullen and dull. It is funny to constantly meet about twenty Fritzes marching along the highways or in groups, mending the roads, always guarded by just one French soldier, usually quite a small one.

Very cold here and much snow. Yesterday and again today our motor had to be dug out of piling drifts several times. Our officer guide is distressed each time and has been profuse in apologies. He couldn't have said more if he had deliberately and intentionally run us into the drifts himself. These French manners certainly do oil the machinery of life.

Blérencourt, the headquarters of the Morgan-Dike Unit, is a very attractive place and the work well organized. As we lunched to the accompaniment of the cannon, I wondered if they are not a little too dangerously near the front to do any very extensive reconstructing. One would hate to have such fine efforts lost and the much-heralded spring offensive looms only a few months away.

A native of Nesle, whose family were refugees, but returned a few months ago, said to me today, “I want to leave, it isn't safe, the Boche will come back. The trees aren't cut down, just the houses demolished for spite alone; it was so that there would be no cover for a retreating army.” One wonders! But wouldn't it work both ways and handicap the Boche too, eventually? But these peasants are sometimes wise men and see what the rest of us don't. However, officials of both the American and the French Red Cross at Ham, and Nesle and Roye work hard at inducing the people to stay.

Yesterday at Coucy-le-Château, which was once the most perfect example of feudal architecture in France, we were only three-quarters of a mile behind the French line and could distinctly see the German lines.

I am writing in the hotel where we spend our nights and am already in my nightly attire for the front,—the warmest underclothes, breeches, two pairs of stockings, two sweaters and a fur coat. Yet even this doesn't keep out the penetrating dampness that seems to be the habitual atmosphere in French provincial houses in the winter.

The hotel is just restored and we are the first guests. The pretty pale green room that we occupy 284255is the only one yet finished. The proprietor, a Parisian, is considered most enterprising to date rebuild his hotel on the Germans' heels. Loud explosions and raids are still frequent. One alarm came tonight at dinner. Lights went out, and we finished eating by the light of one smelly oil-lamp, while our teeth chattered with the cold.

December, 1917— Paris. Eight of us dined last night with Eleanor and Major Belmont in their own salon. There was a most delightful and original man there, Charles Dawes of Chicago. I'd heard of him but had never met him before. He sat opposite to me but we hadn't been introduced. He drank café au lait and in the middle of dinner pushed his chair back and began smoking a long cigar. Suddenly he demanded of Major Belmont, “I thought you said I would meet Mrs. Harriman here tonight. I wanted to meet her after the way she wouldn't be bullied by Walsh on the Industrial Commission.” Major B., “That is Mrs. Harriman over there.”

“What?” leaning forward, “I met you in the lift yesterday and went to the concierge and asked, ‘When did Mary Garden arrive.’ There is only one back like that in the world.” The diplomatic service lost a treasure when he went into banking, I thought.

Christmas Night — Bordeaux —1917. We have had a very happy Christmas and a very strenuous one too. Such a rush, as the last few days they have been getting the Y. M. C. A. building ready to open today.

Dinner was served in the restaurant, but the Cafeteria is not yet installed. The officers and soldiers who came seemed very satisfied with a few exceptions. It is delightful to find how Ethel has developed 285256with the work and responsibilities here. She has so much decision and poise. Helen and Vincent are lovely to her, and I think her wonderful vitality and spirits give them great pleasure.

December 30th— Paris —1917. We stopped at Saumur, the Artillery School, to see Henry. He is a nice, gentlemanly boy. I told him that we couldn't talk of weddings yet awhile. Saumur is where in President Roosevelt's administration Guy Henry and Fitzhugh Lee were sent to the Riding School. I heard the Colonel at Ted Roosevelt's wedding introduce Guy over and over as “the best horseman in the U.S. Army.”

January 3rd, 1918. McCoy on leave from G. H. Q. is in Paris, and we decided to go on a picnic yesterday to celebrate the new year. We set forth for Barbizon by the 11:28 train to Melun. There was so much to talk about and laugh over that we skipped our station, and escaping at the next found there was no train back for much too long a time; so we set forth on foot through the forest of Fontainbleau. Ethel was right when she used, as a child, to call this a “forêt enchantée.” Through the crisp air over the dry deep snow, we took our enchanted way; every twig and branch was laced in glistening ice. From far away a dozen times we caught the sound of cowbells and once the report of a boar hunter's gun. We made the ten mile walk to the Inn Charmette by four o'clock. Luncheon was never so delicious. Outside through the window we saw the snow, the sunshine and the houses with leaded windows like a corner of a Dorset village.

Just as we seated ourselves a British General walked past the window with a cortöge of gun carriers 286257and dogs, and bringing up the rear were boys bearing in a cloth his “kill,” a huge Russian boar. McCoy and I shouted to each other together, “What a Christmas card.” It turned out to be General Gage. We found him and his wife and boys taking their goˇter when we went to dry our feet. Why I keep hoping to get my feet dry I don't know. They have been wet since I first put foot in Havre. I have learned what a graphic expression “cold feet” is. Back on the tram to Melun, McCoy pointing out to me the landmarks, where the British retired in 1914, and where Lord French had his headquarters, and much, much talk about our own G.H.Q. Then to Paris in time for dinner.

January 10th‐ Abbeville. Eleanor Belmont and I arrived here this noon to go over the British line of communications. We were met by a motor from British G.H.Q. and lunched with Miss McCarthy, matron in chief of the B.E.F. She belongs to Queen Alexandra's Royal Nursing Service. In the afternoon went over an ambulance train and visited No. 2 Stationary Hospital. Dined with Nurse McCarthy, Colonel Gallie and Colonel Thurston, whom I knew at Government House in Bermuda.

Friday, January 11th‐ Rouen. Visited hospitals all morning. No. 9, of course, interested me immensely because it is the Lakeville U.S.A. unit with the celebrated Major Cryle in charge. I couldn't help feeling the contrast in the appearance of that hospital and those run by the British. Major Cryle seemed to sense this because without my saying a word, he remarked that ours were simple and workmanlike and the patients did just as well as where there was more attempt at gay decorations. In all 287258the British the walls are painted a cool sea-green and bright flowered chintzes are hung at the windows and used as quilts. Where quilts are not practical the blankets are red instead of the gloomy black or brown in vogue in our military hospitals. The English surgeons say they have learned by experience that an attractive environment helps speed the wounded to recovery. So they gladly allow the British Red Cross to supply these little touches suggestive of home. I hope our Army Medical Department will decide to let our Red Cross do the same.

Saturday, January 12th. We returned to Abbéville and on our way to Etaples went through Montreuil, the British G.H.Q. At Etaples we saw the motor ambulance convoy run entirely by women, and the first British cemeteries, thousands of little crosses on the slope of the ground on the Channel's edge—all looking towards Blighty. One of the soldiers said, “We open thirty graves a day.”

Sunday, January 13th. Stopped at Le Toquet. The Casino once so giddy is now the Duchess of Westminster's hospital. My note book is crammed with notes. We lunched at the Hotel Louvre, Boulogne. We went over a hospital ship loaded with 300 wounded; one man with no arms or legs still smiled at us. What is there in human beings to make such miracles possible? At General Dublin hospital, where they are doing wonderful face surgery, there are 520 beds. Blanchie Lennox is in charge of the Red Cross stores, but she is now in England on leave. Saw Lady Hadfield, sister of Mr. George Wickersham, at her hospital where she is a splendid executive. 288259Spent night at the Hotel Louvre, Boulogne. Air raid tonight.

Monday, 14th. At No. 13 General, Wimereux, there are two Harvard Units. Colonel Patterson is C. O. and Major Cushing and Major Binny are there. Everywhere we find the W. A. A. C.’s doing all kinds and variety of work. The war has literally swept everybody out of the old ruts and everything now seems natural.

Sunday, January 27th, 1918— Paris—Ritz Hotel. Maitland Kersey is here as king's Messenger. He asked me to lunch with him and with General Pershing, who happened to be in from Chaumont. Afterwards we went up to our sitting room to see Ethel. The General says he doesn't approve of war marriages, but I asked him if he didn't think an officer could do better work if he were safely married than worrying as to whether or not he would eventually get the girl he was in love with. He said, “Well, there is something in that.” He even relented enough to say he would come to the wedding if he were down from Chaumont. He won't, though. He is doing a colossal job, and when working hasn't another thought. History should give him his just due. Called to Washington in May, 1917, and ordered to France with a staff of twelve men, he was told to set up an organization to win the war. No ports, no docks, no adequate transportation. He began at once organizing a general staff. Miles of docks for landing men and supplies have been built since. At Bassens, opposite to Bordeaux, they are building docks so that it will be possible to unload thirty-six ships at one time.

Under his direction camp sites, railways, hospitals, 289260reservoirs, and telegraph and telephone lines, have been planned. No one can possibly appreciate what has been accomplished in seven months, unless he has been here to see. There is a lot of complaining and growling that things are not yet as they should be, but that is inevitable. I suspect disgruntled officers sent home because of incompetency, do a great deal of the talking. An Army engineer at Bordeaux told me that the work which must be done in France in a year requires as many supplies and as much equipment as it took to build the Panama Canal in ten years.

Paris—January , 1918. Whistler should have etched the British Salvage plant at Paris. Old Frenchwomen sit on stools on the floor industriously sorting out the trench coast, waistcoats, breeches, kilts and tunics; those past recovering are sent home to England for rags. The old women snip off buttons and mend underclothes. One lot sit with knives doing nothing but scraping mud and lice eggs off garments. It's not easy when it comes to the kilts, for the pleats of the seven and one-half yards of cloth used in each are veritable cootie country-fairs. There are fourteen different kinds of kilts in use in the British Army, each with a different plaid and its own peculiar form of pleating. The officer who showed us about, however, said: “But nothing is too much trouble for these wonderful Scotchmen. They can have their kilts.” Some overcoats so stiff with blood and mud that they could “stand alone” seemed almost human. The British General who was with us says they send back to England 20,000 tons of unusable clothing a day. There were today 109,000 jackets and 60,000 great coats in the storeroom, all 290261made over and cleaned ready to be sent back to the front when called for.

January 31, 1918. Yesterday my darling child was married to Henry Russell. The wedding in the American Church was small and simple. No bridesmaids, and all the men, of course, in uniform. Her uncle, Kay Vanderbilt, gave Ethel away, and he and her Aunty Anne gave her three beautiful, what she calls. “wriggly” bracelets, one of sapphires, one diamonds, and one rubies.

Dr. Billings, from Groton School, performed the ceremony, assisted by Dr. Beekman, the rector. Ethel's gown was white satin made by Worth. I put on her tulle veil the way she used as a tiny child to tie a handkerchief around her head and play “Beggar girl, Mummy.” After the breakfast in our salon at the Ritz, Cole Porter played the piano and everyone sang, Ethel sitting on the floor, among her friends. And she said, “there were more of my friends here than there would have been if we had married at home.”

Toughy Pine had come from Tours, Billy Taylor from somewhere at the Front. Anne had kindly lent her motor to take the bride and groom out to Fontainebleau where I have engaged them an apartment for a few days at the “France et l'Angleterre.” The chauffeur kept sending up world that it would be too late for him to take them out if they didn't hurry; so Ethel and Henry tore away from the choruses. Helen Astor and Willard Straight have done everything imaginable for them.

In the evening there was a bad raid and Eleanor Belmont and I, after gazing from an upstairs window, went out and stood in front of the hotel. The 291262French machines carried light to distinguish them from the enemy, and it was pretty to see them darting about. “Quite mad,” people today say we were.

February, 1918— Angers. Have been on an inspection tour with Dr. Lambert, Ruth Morgan, and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant who writes for the New Republic. We stopped several days at Tours visiting hospitals and aviation camps. Issoudun is a 6,000 men unit, and there are 500 German prisoners there doing the building.

At the second aviation instruction camp at Tours whom should I see paring potatoes, altogether concentrated on making corkscrews out of dirty peel, but one of Ethel's old beaux. “A. W. O. L., I suppose?” I said. He looked up very sheepishly and then went back to his medicine.

It is February, but it is so mild this morning, the earth is so damp and the buds so sticky and straining to burst that it might have been April at home. As we passed through town after town along the banks of the Loire, we did not see a man all day except a half-dozen gnarled grandfathers working in the fields. The black-gowned women with set expressions seldom looked up from their work as we passed. The children had plenty of time for us, waved hands and threw kisses and made quite an event of our coming. Our route is directly down the American line of communication. Twice we passed convoys of American troops in Ford ambulances, and once we caught up with a bevy of army trucks. Late in the afternoon we stopped at a hospital in a beautiful old building. I told the nurses about the American doughboys I had met at noon who trooped across the street as soon as they caught sight of my American 292

Ethel Harriman Russell

Savenay. This hospital used to be a school house; now it is an American army hospital with ten thousand beds. The water supply is inadequate. The American engineers are now busy about a mile from here building a reservoir which will hold one hundred million gallons of water.

Behind the Administration building they are putting up some wooden barracks to hold 70 to 100 wounded each, and also a nurses' home. The commanding officer here has rented a hundred-acre farm where he is growing vegetables and planning to have poultry. It will be a very decent place to convalesce. There are three operating rooms which will compare favorably with the best in New York. This morning one of the most noted aurists in America has been here performing adenoid operations. After dinner we were asked to the weekly dance for officers and nurses, and we found ourselves in a corner of France-at-war 294264not quite to be believed. American jazz shook every corner of the room and everybody danced with that peculiar delight in a first ball plus the kind of gaiety Thackeray described on the night before Waterloo. The pianist was the leader of last year's Princeton Glee Club. The banjo boy talked to me about his uncle the Senator. Most of the orchestra were college men; the orderlies came chiefly from Princeton and Yale.

When I get back to the U.S., though I came here especially to see Red Cross work, I must give the Y. M. C. A. its due; their rest-rooms and reading-rooms are really homelike places, and movies every night are a godsend.

We found a peasant kitchen just outside the hospital gates where a rosy-cheeked middle-aged widow in a white cap made us welcome at her table. Copper kettles gleamed on the walls; sausages by the hundred, savory and inviting, hung from one corner of the room to the other ready to be cut down when called for. At small side tables gray-haired peasants talked together over their own bottles of vin d'Aufin, which they park on a convenient shelf and take down from visit to visit. One tableful of doughboys sat sniffing the chickens which an old woman was turning on a spit; and another tableful of them were making away with a platter of “Crêpes,” the French version of the flap-jacks “Mother used to make.”

From Savenay we went down to St. Nazaire, the port of debarkation for so many of our troops. At noon a transport of marines was landed, and at sunset we encountered them again at a grade-crossing clustering around the doors of their box cars, singing, 295265“Where do we go from here, boys?” We have just come from a camp near St. Nazaire where the Nth regiment is stationed. The mud around the camp made you think of the third day of creation. Ham F. was the officer of the day. As soon as he heard we had come he got hold of the leader, and had him take his orchestra to the Y. M. C. A. hall and give us a concert. When there was a pause in the jazz Ham would buzz in my ear, “Superb morale this regiment.” The music became louder and gayer. Ham was telling us about the Nth. “You can't beat it anywhere. We have no fights at all. It ought to get a chance to show what it can do at the front.” He was earnestly pouring, pouring, in the hopes that I would soon be spilling, spilling, praise of the Nth on to G.H.Q., when in dashed a corporal almost too breathless to salute. “Beg pardon, sir; serious shootin' in Company D Street.” This was the end of Ham's perfect tale. The band-master was really glad to see me. He had always been fond of Bordie. He talked to me a long time about parties and one thing and another he'd played for in the last ten years. As I walked away somebody else, as chatty as Ham, but with no desire to sell me the regiment, turned up and put it this way. “The Nth is just one damned brawl after another. There won't be a bit of fight in us by the time we get to the front.”

February, 1918— Chaumont. Came up here several days ago to speak at the Y. M. C. A. When I saw the C. in C. in Paris, he told me to let him know when I was coming. So I wired. Colonel Boyd met me at the station and took me to this hotel crowded with officers, where a room had been engaged. Sam Babcock, working with the Red Cross, was the first 296266person I ran across in the dining room. He seemed happy to meet someone fresh from home, and I was enchanted to find him. Today we are going over to Neufchâteau to see the big hospital at Bassoil. The first afternoon Bishop Brent came to fetch me in a G.H.Q. motor to see the Cathedral and then to to the Chaumont hospital where we found Harold Barclay. I liked the sight-seeing, but most of all I appreciated the privilege of having that time to listen to the Bishop.

February 26th, 1918— Chaumont. When I returned to the hotel, I found a note from Colonel Boyd asking me to dine with the C. in C. at the Château, and saying they would send a car for me.

It was a delightful evening. There were a few generals and several colonels ad officers of lesser rank. General P. seemed very busy and went upstairs almost directly after dinner to do some writing. He asked me to stop as long as I could, as he said the officers enjoyed an opportunity of talking to an American woman. He told me to come to his office at ten the next day to talk business. After he had left the drawing-room there was general conversation, the officers seeming much more free in the absence of their superior, to express themselves about the air service. There is a vast amount of discontent among the fliers who feel the West Pointers don't understand either them or their service, Everywhere I go, I hear the complaints of the fliers. Colonel Bolling and Major Green, since General Foulois' appointment, seem to be in an anomalous position in Paris. As ever, there are two sides, but if the war continues any length of time, the air service should be divorced from both the army and navy, and have 297267a Secretary of its own sitting in the cabinet; that is my snap judgment. On the way back to my hotel Colonel Boyd acknowledged that there were hitches between the army and the air force, but he thinks coöperation will come in time. It is a delight to meet anyone so devoted to his chief. General Harbord was at dinner, but Logan, McCoy and de Chambrun are all away. Bishop Brent took me around to see the French annex to “1718.” (1718 H Street, Washington has for years been the most delightful bachelor quarters in the world. Henry Fletcher, Willard Straight and others have at various times lived there.) All the 1718ers can't help building little annexes, with something of the spirit of the beloved good address, in whatever corners of the world they find themselves.

At ten in the morning I went to the Commander-in-Chief's office. There is nobody like him; he is one of the few men who can tactfully say no without giving you any of the depressing “turned down” feeling. He listened to everything I had to say, and I said out every complaint about army administration that I had heard in France. What he thought I don't know, but he wasn't in the least resentful. I feel very keenly that the world is full of misunderstandings because of people don't know how to hear complaints calmly and because so few people are willing to speak out and “not to lose face,” as the Chinese say, if no notice is taken of their suggestions.

Sam Babcock and I lunched together; then Colonel Collins took me to Langres, a beautiful hill town with a view from the city wall, that on clear days includes Mont Blanc itself. It was disappointing to miss Willard Straight; he is at the Staff College here.

Bishop Brent is devoting much of his life at present to creating better relations between the British and American troops. He was terribly shocked when he first came to find the amount of ignorant, quite irrational rub between them. I took his lead and my speech at the Y.M.C.A. tonight was about better understanding with the British. The doughboys crowded round after the meeting, as they always do, and asked the most touching question. “Say, Ma'am, did yer ever known my Aunt Mary keeps the store at Duxbury, Massachusetts?” “Say, Ma'am, can yer tell me nuthin' about the Texas onion crop?” My third and last day was a rush. After a hurried once-over inspection of the officers' club at Neufchâteau, I lunched at the mess with Colonel Winship and General Mitchell, who is the smartest looking American officer that I have ever seen; made notes on the big American hospital at Bassoil; and in spite of several blow-outs on the way, got back to Chaumont. The Paris train was dark and dreary, but Ogden Mills found me on it, and we talked all the way, not about politics this time, but about the queer way life twists, how unexpected everything is, how relationships, like people themselves, live and die, and how one must go on, on, on whatever happens.

March 8th, 1918. Tomorrow morning at 8, I start for Havre. I must, in order to make my boat from England for America. Ethel leaves at the same hour for Bordeaux. It's a tug to leave her behind, to have the ocean between us, an ocean with submarines in it, at that.

I quote a letter to Ethel, written from London, March 19, 1918.

With the good fortune that has followed me all through this trip, I found a calm channel at Havre yesterday. In the streets were the same flower vendors as in Paris, with spring piled high on their stalls, golden brown from the Riviera, scarlets and blues from the Midi, and the little fresias that we love. I wanted to send you some for farewell.

As I stood on the quay at eight in the evening, I saw quite a large hospital ship, one of the “Castle” line, go out. We followed her in just two hours, and although the night was most tempting on deck, I was so tired that I went almost at once to my room, and lay down on the bed, fully dressed. It seemed only a few minutes when there came a knock at my door and a voice said: “Please get up and put on your life preserver; something is wrong.” It was I A. M. and we must have been in mid-channel. With my life preserver hung round my neck, I stepped into the passageway where hunched against the partition were British, Canadian and American officers, and a few women. Everyone seemed calm enough in spite of the noise of running and shouts overhead. A strong smell of something burning made me ask a British officer opposite me if we were on fire. He nodded. I slipped on deck through a door forward which I had discovered earlier in the evening. It was pitch dark except for the stars. The flashlights carried by the officers went on and off like giant fireflies. As soon as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I made out two destroyers on our starboard side from one of which, across a narrow plank that swayed gently to and fro, a procession of men passed carrying burdens on their backs. How they maNaged to avoid slipping off the plank and what they could 300270be bringing aboard, I could not see. Another very large destroyer was slowly circling around and around our ship, and presently it hove alongside, and a voice called sharply through a megaphone, “It is not safe for you to wait longer. Go full speed ahead. The rest we will take to Southampton ourselves.” The two destroyers dropped astern. We were under way again. Below I found the ladies' cabin, halls and all the staterooms filled with British wounded, men from the Italian front and men from Flanders, men in all stages of convalescence. These were the burdens I had seen on the backs of the sailors crossing that narrow plank in mid-channel. Another hospital ship had been sunk. Ghastly. Two hundred of these twice-brave men with us.

In one stateroom alone, there was a man with appendicitis, a man so ill with pneumonia that he had to sit up all night because he couldn't breathe lying down, and a man with no legs.

The passengers collected all their cigarettes and chocolates and went about distributing them. Never a word of complaint, only smiles. What patience and pluck. You would have laughed at the sleepy passengers, as they sat on the floor the rest of the night, their heads nodding as they pillowed themselves on life preservers which still hung about their necks by the Captain's orders.

Several hours late we docked at Southampton. Ambulances were on the dock. Everyone took it as a matter of course. There wasn't a single hysterical passenger. People stand by through all sorts of nightmares and carry on calmly. It is wonderful.

About a week after I had arrived home an appointment was made for me to call on the President and deliver messages, and tell him what I had seen. My head fairly buzzed with all the tales poured in my ear by those who hoped I would pass them along at just such an hour. Complaints had been lodged with me, compliments carefully whispered to me meant to sweeten the President's ear. I myself had seen so much; and here were only fifty minutes to give the chief a picture of it all. I grew quite shaky and spent the whole preceding afternoon making notes. First, I would decide to leave out certain subjects. Then I decided to talk fast and breathlessly and get everything said. I knew how terrifically busy he was, and how each interview was just an added burden. And I have no sympathy with the vast tribe of people who are always feeling it necessary to the welfare of the country that they should see the President personally, and go away to their little puddles big-frog-croaking, “I told the President—I advised him so and so.”

In the end, with two pages of typewritten headings, and a three-page memorandum, I set off for the White House. For a moment it seemed to me, as he rose from a chair to greet me, that he had aged, but he had not. I never saw him more vigorous, as the vaguely disquieting 302272momentary expression of sadness in his eyes vanished. I was thanking him for writing in my book the message which I had given to all the men I talked to over seas—“When the world is mad everyone who keeps his head has contributed to keep mankind from irretrievable disaster.” I described hastily some of the encampments I had visited in France, and told him truthfully enough that I had seen no drinking, though I had seen plenty of boys peeling potatoes after an “A. W. O. L.”

Everyone had urged, “Tell him that there has simply got to be an improvement in the mails.” I have the notes I carried that day, and with a big red crayon I had underlined the word mails. The men's parcels were being broken into, and thousands of packages of little home comforts made from Maine to California never arrived at all. What with lost letters, and the way the small tradespeople in France fleeced the boys, plenty of them had the blues. “The little shopkeepers round the cantonments at home fleece the boys badly, too,” the President broke in. “On the whole,” I reported, “the morale of our army is splendid.” He smiled at that.

Underline in red crayon in my notes I had written, “Inadequate to put victory before our citizen soldiers as ultimate aim of war,” a quotation from my talks with Bishop Brent. I threw in that many hoped Bishop Brent would be made Chaplain-General, an idea that never came to anything, of course.

I tried to get across to the President the attitude of mind I had found in England. There was Margaret Bonfield, who had kept repeating to me, “All we ask 303273of our government is that it follow Woodrow Wilson.” Then Thomas, the railway labor man, wanted me to ask whether a joint statement of the Allies could not be brought about, emphasizing the League of Nations standpoint. Thomas wished the President to know how much of the “pacifism” in England was “war-weariness,” and to remind the President that the U.S. was where the Allies had been in 1914. I remembered the little railway stations, the huts and pubs in remote English villages I had motored through, and told the President how his own picture was always with Lloyd George's and how people asked questions about him and prayed for him, and depended on him for leadership. Then Bergson had said to me, “Tell the President that he is our Pope. Where we used to look to Rome for spiritual leading, now we look to Washington.” I did. Tears came into Wilson's eyes. “All we can do is to try our best, but we all make many mistakes.” I was seeing it all over again, and he was seeing it with me. Thousands of human beings waiting for him to lead: to them his word was the only hope and the only law in a crashing world.

As I hurried with my talking, my speech, my notes, dissolved into broken phrases. “The want of food in Europe is dreadful. Even I was hungry the last days in London.” Couldn't the President's next speech, I asked, make the war-weary people know that America comprehended things like the hunger, the tiredness, the grief. They badly wanted some lift from somewhere so that they wouldn't stop in their efforts. I dropped bits of talk about British labor's umbrage at our labor leaders on account of their “holier and more 304274patriotic than thou” attitude towards the British labor party. I ended as so many people ended their interviews with the President, with the censorship. The system had utterly failed in Europe, and it couldn't do anything else here. Then I came away, leaving with him my three-page memorandum about the muddle in the medical reserves.

Back at Leila Pinchot's, where I was stopping, I tried to imagine what life must be like for the man in the White House, sitting there listening, listening, obliged to see with the eyes of hundreds of travelers what was happening in France.

My interview off my mind, I fell in with Leila's suffrage program. We made ourselves very busy trying to line up Senators to vote for the suffrage amendment. One morning we motored to Baltimore in an effort to capture Senator James. The poor man was too ill even to see us. His illness was real enough, alas, but I know that a good many diplomatic migraines overtook others of our lawmakers that spring. Major illnesses and death we respected, but after half a century of lobbying, even the gentlest suffragist hated to be put off. When we weren't gunning for senators, the anti-suffragists were. They used to administer black looks when they came across our suffrage groups in the Capitol elevator, and bristled when they passed us in the corridors and I often wanted to call out to them “King's X, Time out. I'm not lobbying today,” when I went to the Capitol for purely social lunches and ran into their barbed-wire manners.

Staying in Leila's delightful household was, as always, a dramatic and exciting experience. I never saw 305275half enough of my host and hostess, for they were such inveterate travelers. I've said good-night to Leila at ten o'clock at night expecting to finish a discussion with her in the morning after breakfast, and been told with my morning toast that I could only reach her by long distance telephone to New York. T. says that the Pinchots are the only human beings he admires as he does fire-department horses. “They're magnificent,” he says, “always mobilized.” Leila's returns, like her departures, are unexpected and precipitate. To me she presages a new race of creatures who will really master the machine age. The rest of us are dodos. Because cities used to be a week's journey by stage-coach apart, we still think of them as distant one from another. We live in one city or we live in another. Leila Pinchot is modern. She lives in the eastern half of the United States and moves about that area as the rest of us do from up-town to down-town. While I was staying with her I used to speculate a good deal about how long it would be before some wise President chose her husband as Secretary of the Interior. He seemed destined for it.

Presently I found myself a house, at 1228 Seventeenth Street, belonging to the George Drapers; and so left the gracious Pinchots. It was much smaller than my own H Street house which I had leased to others until August, but I moved in and began a busy summer. By day and sometimes by night there was the Motor Corps job which was always hot. The weather was sweltering and our uniforms were not of dimity. There were committees, good committees and bad committees. Washington fairly swarmed with 306276them. Nobody seemed to be able to do anything in the old way: first one had to have a committee. Then committees begat conferences. And while two heads are better than one, ten tongues talking—it sometimes seemed to me—achieved less wisdom and action than was needed. However, we did our best and around the corner from too much work, we played to keep ourselves fit. I began a meager diary again, mostly of the playing.

Sunday, May 12th, 1918. Dined with Monsieur Tardieu, head of the French Mission. De Billy was there, able and wise, but not quite so affable as his chief, who is an amazing man. Sat between Lord Reading and Professor Keppel, who is here as Assistant Secretary to Baker. Our host, Ambassador Jusserand, and Lord Reading, carried on a French discussion that shot back and forth across the table about how this war compares with the Napoleonic Wars. Lord Reading's French speeded up so that it tumbled and roared even as fast as Monsieur Jusserand's. They went so fast that I can't put down whether this war is or isn't more of an upheaval than what we had a hundred years ago. After some people's misgivings about Lord Reading, he has turned out to be the perfect Ambassador. I have never heard, and never seen anybody more universally and instantaneously liked. His cultivation and brilliancy are a real gain for Washington. His profile makes me think of Dante's.

Tuesday, May 14th. I took Lady Muriel Paget today to see the President about Russia. She has just come from her marvelous work in the Russian hospitals. With that record behind her, it was 307277natural the President should listen to what she had to say about the Russian situation. She thinks the Bolsheviks should be turned out at once, and spent her fifteen minutes giving the President reasons for the intervention. She didn't mention the Allies, but I presume some of them don't want to go in alone and that is why she is here and so persuasive. The President was very attentive, but gave no assurances of any kind. He is a great listener.

Wednesday, May 15th. Dined at the Shoreham with Mrs. Nat Thayer, who is here for a while to look after some business in the national headquarters for the Massachusetts State Council of National Defense. Tay Pay O'Connor there too. He always makes me feel that there really isn't any ocean between England and America. There is only Ireland, which could quite as easily be a bridge between us as a wall. Mrs. Kellogg Fairbank, a guest too; I think she considers herself the original McAdoo man!

Thursday, May 16th. Spoke today for the OverSeas Hospital in Radnor, Pa. Mrs. Hoover made an excellent speech. Women are seldom eloquent and she is rather diffident, but she says what she has to say just as though she were talking to friends in her own drawing-room. That is a way and a talent that a great many eloquent people haven't got. Spent the night at Mary Munn's.

Saturday, May 18th. The whole motor corps marched in the Red Cross procession today. Parts of the parade were very beautiful; women in starched uniforms in military file. We are trying to raise I don't know how many million dollars. Until now no one would have dreamed that such a thing were 308278possible. Somebody has invented a slogan, “Give till it hurts,” but the war has done something strange to people; parting with money seems a perfectly painless process now. We're quite anæsthetized.

Sunday, May 19th. Still hot. Spoke for the Red Cross in Baltimore. Speeches and meetings—meetings and speeches. The drive is being put on with a tremendous amount of machinery, and we do our various parts with such mechanical precision that it surprises me when so much spontaneous individual enthusiasm is the result.

Wednesday, May 29th. I know what vaudeville actors complain of in one night stands. Today I spoke in Wilmington for the Red Cross. Just think of it, a hundred thousand speeches being made this week, most of them indeed pretty much the same speech. I wonder if it will ever be possible to make people concentrate and give as they give now for any enterprise in peace time. If peace ever comes——

Thursday, June 13th. Mrs. Pankhurst is in town. She wanted to meet some of the men on the Hill; so I took her up to the Senate to lunch with Senators Hale and Chamberlain. I find it hard to believe that this is the same woman who defied the British Government such a short time age. She has hardened into an implacable conservative and she thinks there should be intervention in Russia. Such, a rush of visitors thinking that! Both the Senators were interested in her and liked her.

Friday, June 21st. Dined with the Adolph Millers. Bergson was there, Sir Richard and Lady Muriel Paget, Justice Brandeis, and Colonel Maitland Edwards, who is just back from Russia. Sometimes the conversation drifted away from the Eastern 309279Front, but Bergson and Lady Muriel brought it back to Russia every time. Bergson feels that the situation can only be saved if the Allies send enough troops to the Eastern Front, so that Germany will have to transfer some of her divisions to Poland. He says he has been studying this matter for three months, and that though he is not here officially, he has come with the encouragement of his government to convey a very important message to the President.

Sunday, June 23rd. Lady Muriel Paget, Professor Bergson, General Brancker, Mrs. Slater, Professor Jerry Landfield, on from California to advise the State Department on the Russian situation, Walter Lippman and Felix Frankfurter lunched with me. Afterwards Colonel Batchkarova, with her interpreter, came in. She is the woman who led the Battalion of Death. I can't understand her Russian of course, but I hung on her words just the same, drawn by her magnetism and the vociferousness of her gestures. Everyone thinks she rings true. Dined at the British Mission, General Bridge's house. Professor Maseryk, tall, thin and a little nervous, was there. They say that if the war brings the dismemberment of Austria, he will be the first President of Bohemia. He looks as though he would rather write history than make it.

Monday, June 24th. Batchkarova, her interpreter, and the Mohrenschildts, lunched with me, Nona looking like a sweetpea. Took Batchkarova to see the surgeon-general before lunch. She was in great pain from a wound in her side. We has her X-rayed and found out that the piece of shrapnel had moved, but was not in a dangerous position. No operation is necessary, and she was much relieved. After lunch 310280I took her back with me to the motor corps, who arranged a special drill for her. Her stocky figure in her Russian army uniform was not at all a feminine sight. Imagine my surprise when she burst out, “I don't approve of women's wearing breeches. I don't approve of women's being soldiers. They aren't physically intended for such a hard life.” Dined tonight with Miss Boardman. There isn't a man in Washington who is a better sport than she, and I hope the men who ousted her from her position of headship in the Red Cross appreciate it. They never for one moment expected, I'm sure, that she would agree with them about the need to have R. C. work done by big business executives, and would so gracefully carry on. It was she who had the Red Cross idea when all of them were engrossed in business; she is really generous and cares for the cause, not for herself.

Tuesday, June 25th. Took Batchkarova to the White House to see Tumulty and Admiral Grayson. We made an engagement to put her through to see the President two weeks from now, July 10th, at 4 p.m.

For some reason or other I made no entry in my diary on July 10th. The Batchkarova interview was intensely dramatic. Beside her own interpreter, there was another one from the State Department to check up. Batchkarova started off her story in a fairly matter-of-fact way; then suddenly she began to tell the tale of the sufferings of her people and her tongue went like a runaway horse. She would hardly wait for her interpreter to put what she was saying into English. Her face worked. Suddenly she threw herself on the 311281floor and clasped her arms about the President's knees begging him for help, for food, for troops to intervene against the Bolsheviki. The President sat with tears streaming down his cheeks, and assured her of his sympathy. The little party finally got away from the White House, all very much shaken.

Wednesday, June 26th. Dined with the Belgian Ambassador at the Montgomery County Club. Sat between General Bridges and Mr. Hoover. I wonder if Hoover is going to enter politics. Mrs. ——from Democratic headquarters says nothing will augment the party like Hoover. It makes her uneasy to have him untagged. I'm not so sure. He doesn't seem to me to have “the flare.” He's like a cat with water; gingerly impatient with our political talk. He doesn't like the amusing indirectness of getting things done in a political way, and that means that he wouldn't like Congress! I feel his standoffishness from politics refreshing. He is a great figure, compelling the confidence of the majority of Americans.

Thursday, June 27th. Lunched on H. M. S. Warrior with Lady Grant, whose husband is Admiral in command here. Lord Reading and Captain Molyneux both there. What stories there will be at the New York Yacht Club if the war is ever over and all the boats come back to tell their skippers what they did at the Great War! They have been given, lent, sold, and confiscated all over the seven seas. Their whiteness painted dun and camouflaged like the rainbow.

Dined tonight with General Bridges at the British Mission. Sir William Wiseman came over and 312282sat down beside me after dinner. He has a commission from the British Cabinet and also from Mr. Balfour. He keeps on the best of terms with the heads of missions over here and has been right-hand man both to Sir Cecil Spring-Rice and to Lord Reading. He is sort of superhead of the British Secret Service here. Is enormously valuable as a liaison between this country and England, and everybody says that he understand the American point of view better than any of them. There isn't the slightest trace of British insularity in his reaction toward us.

Friday, June 28th. Margaret Wilson and Alice Longworth came in after lunch to see Batchkarova. Never were three people more unlike in one animated discussion.

Saturday, New York. I have come up to New York to turn over Uplands to Mrs. Burden. I did not know when we fixed the sale last month that the actual wrench would hurt so. I feel as if I had lost an arm or a leg. However, nothing matters in war-time. Everything could be worse.

Mt. Kisco, July 6th. Today the terrible news of Mitchel's death in an aeroplane accident. I don't know whose fault it is, but I can't get out of my mind the picture of that rare brave valuable spirit wandering about the streets and offices of Washington last December, when I was in France, begging for an opportunity to serve his country. It breaks my heart. He should have had some big staff position. At his age, he should never have been forced into joining the air service. Whoever is responsible for the sabotage must have a heavy heart today.

Tuesday, July 16th. Colonel Batchkarova came 313283in to see me and greeted me with kisses, one on each cheek and a dab at the chin, and the news that she was leaving at once. The British Ambassador thought that she should go. I think the Embassy has heard the story which is going the rounds, that they themselves brought her here and paid her expenses as part of the propaganda to induce the President to send troops to Russia. One of the Secretaries says that the State Department has heard that gossip. I can hardly credit it as the poor woman is pathetically hard up. I raised a small purse for her to which Mary Rumsey, Grace Vanderbilt, and a few others generously contributed.

I was a little disconcerted, however, today, when she said, “I believe you to be such a good woman that I am leaving you two legacies—my book to have translated and published, and my little fifteen-year-old sister Naja, to keep until Russia is safe for her. I cannot let her learn free love and all the other horrible things that the Bolshevists teach.” The book is a small problem, but what in the world can I do with Naja?

Saturday, July 20th. The worst has happened. Naja has arrived. I have arranged for her to go temporarily to a charming Miss Engle's boarding house on N Street. Naja has a musical voice and most winning personality, though not pretty. Anything she wants to do, she begs for in the most irresistible way. She puts her hand up to her face and says, “Please, please, please, lady, let me go to camp and be a soldier like my sister.”

July 25th. As Naja is still anxious to go to a camp, I am arranging for her to go to a girls' camp out on the Conduit Road where they wear khaki 314284uniforms. I have had a most amusing time with her. She seems afraid of water, and the girl who roomed with her refused to do so any longer unless she would take a bath. No persuasions on my part or Miss Engle's had any effect. So this afternoon I found myself standing on one side of her while a charming secretary from the Russian Embassy stood on the other beside a bathtub, and the secretary translated what I said in forcible language as to what would happen if she wouldn't promise to later undress and get in. I have had a telephone call that she has kept her promise and will now take a tub every other night.

The bath episode had an unexpected sequel. At the camp Naja became so addicted to bathing that she was with difficulty restrained from spending most of her time under a shower or in the Potomac. Before she left to go to school in the autumn, she had to be forbidden spending all her money on manicures and powder and cold creams.

Some Russians gave part towards Naja's expenses, and I supplied the rest. She spent a little over a year here, but was so homesick and unhappy that we finally decided to send her home with a Red Cross agent who chanced to going. For weeks she would be quite reconciled to America, and then a letter would come from her mother telling of all the fine things the Soviet had brought to the peasants. “We can go to the movies every night for nothing, etc., etc.,” and then Naja would cry for days. I never had but one message from her after her arrival, but I often wish I knew what has become of her. She was very lovable, 315285especially after she learned to be soignée. The other legacy—the book—B. found a translator and publisher for, herself. She was a wonderful woman and I was glad to do anything for her. Poor thing, she was, I believe, killed somehow soon after her return to Russia, and so ended a fitful and eventful short career. She was under thirty.

July ——. Stopped at the White House office today. Was shown into Mr. Tumulty's office. He was telling the Secretary of State on the telephone how upset he had been by an interview about Russia he had had with Lady Muriel Paget and “two British generals each with one glass in his eye.” And he concluded the conversation after a long pause during which I suppose the Secretary was explaining, with, “That's right, Mr. Secretary, you know what I mean; it's time we set the stage for Russia.” I was at the White House trying to get forty-five minutes for M. Bergson with the President, instead of the usual diplomatic fifteen. It was granted. Mr. Tumulty is very kind these days about everything I ask. I wonder if her remembers how he went up in the air the first year I was in Washington. Someone had come to him with a story that a Democratic woman was unfriendly to him and trying to oust him from his job. And he had been made to believe that it was, I, and said there wasn't room in Washington for both of us, and Washington such a spacious town too! I found out later who it really was. I wonder if her ever has.

August ——. Last night Professor Masaryk went out with me to Cabin John to dine and to see a Japanese play. He wore the thinnest of Palm Beach 316286suits and before the second act was over the thermometer had dropped twenty degrees. He grew very blue about the mouth. No one had a coat to spare; so we borrowed a rug to wrap him in for the drive home. I was quite frightened wondering what the Czechs would do to me if I were even the innocent cause of the death of this great man and their “best bet.”

Whatever else we did, the committees and the Motor Corps work went on day in and day out. For several days one week in July the thermometer reached 114 in the shade. I drove an ambulance down Pennsylvania Avenue at 2 o'clock one afternoon when the heat rising from the pavement was so great that involuntarily I kept putting my hand to my face to see if anything was on fire. When we had deposited our patient at the Providence Hospital, we stepped to get a cool drink. The thermometer in the drug-store vestibule registered 126. I would not believe it now if I hadn't written it down at the time.

Several times a week I managed a ride late in the afternoon, and often think now of galloping on the shore of the Potomac into the sunset, and the most beautiful of all monuments in the distance.

One afternoon in August, Mr. Henry P. Davison stopped at my H Street house, and almost without any preliminaries, told me that he wanted me to go to France to take charge of five hundred women Motor Corps drivers that the Paris office had cabled were needed. He gave me two weeks to get ready and with my mouth I said, “Of course I will go.” I think I 317287even said that one week would be plenty, while all the time I kept thinking to myself about the new house at 2017 F Street, which I had just bought, and wondered if I could furnish and decorate it all in a fortnight, and leave my affairs in order.

Sure enough, in a few weeks I was at sea, and writing back from the Espagne, “The ship is crowded with Red Crossers, Y. M. C. A. people, and troops. When I remember how the American-line people were so cautious, the French seem to take wartime transportation for too casually. Mr. Vernon Kellogg today examined the life boats. He thinks the ropes look rotten and won't believe that the boats have ever been lowered since they were hauled up. One woman says she was assigned to a boat which doesn't exist, but that may only mean that she can't find it. We've had but one boat drill since we left New York. Clarie Dolan is aboard, as amusing as ever.

Secretary of the Treasury Glass was talking to me on deck one morning and asked me who I thought would be our next President. I said ‘Pershing.’ ‘You are right,’ he exclaimed. And just then a gust of wind took my only hat far out to sea. A pleasant Frenchwoman has provided me with a simple fur substitute of hers. Shipboard is no longer a lotus land where one may escape shore trouble. Various relief societies have meetings, and committees meet every day. Mrs. Pankhurst makes addresses. Fortunately a boat is still too small to need a Motor Corps. I find myself part of a group that go regularly to the steerage 319289deck to give French lessons to the soldiers and try out chorus singing with them. Their favorite song is ‘A long, long, trail,’ with Elsie Janis' words: ‘There's a long, long trail a-winding Into No Man's land in France, Where shell and shrapnel's flying, And the order is “Advance.”

But we're going to show the Kaiser What the Yankee boys can do.’

Two alluring doughboys, Jimmy, a chauffeur, and Bright Eyes, a vaudeville artist, amuse themselves with horseplay day in and day out—themselves and the rest of us too. Aileen Tone is lovely in her uniform. It seemed strange to hear her sing her twelfth-century ballads in the saloon one night, and not have ‘Uncle Henry’ Adams' stories to explain them.”

From Paris, I wrote to T., describing how influenza broke out on the ship. Only one man died at sea, but many were carried from the ship to a hospital when we landed. I have never known land to seem so good as the night the Espagne docked. There was a beautiful sunset, and when a thin new moon rose as we made our way up the river, the troops hung over the sides cheering and singing, hailing everyone they saw on the low banks of France. This was the earth on which they were going to battle. There were many of them never going back, but they were quite overjoyed at the sight of any dry land. Darling Ethel was on the dock, and so I had one good day with her in Bordeaux before I came on to report and take charge. To me 320290the landing was really coming home, for being on the same side of the ocean with her seemed a miracle.

When I arrived in Paris, I found that my title was to be Assistant Director of Transportation under Major Osborne, who was the Director. We fell to at once and discussed the work. It was necessary to find and operate our own garage and to establish a hotel where the women in our unit could live. By the first of November, after motoring hundreds of miles around Paris, trying to ferret out some garage not already taken over by the military, we succeeded in having a place at Neuilly requisitioned and turned over to us. We had there accommodations for about sixty motors. All the personnel of the garage except the mechanics and night watchmen were women,—the garage manager, her assistant, the floor manager and the car despatcher, the checker-in and the equipment clerk. Presently we even had a girl as head mechanic who promised to beat the men mechanics at their own game.

Life was strenuous in the Neuilly garage. The rules we ran it by were rigid. One had to report at 7:15. Many of the women used to get up by starlight and even moonlight at half-past five on winter mornings in order to get there. I shan't forget the times I saw the sun rise over the Place de la Concorde as I hastened forth to be present at roll call. How hard the cars were to crank after twelve hours in the freezing garage! Wartime motors had no self starters and more than one girl got a broken arm from a kicking Ford. There was a vast amount of time spent in checking equipments and in making out the elaborate 321291time-cards we kept, describing the coming and goings of the men to whom our motors were assigned.

Paris, it seemed to me in those days, was all uniforms. I sympathized a lot with General Charlie McCawley, whom I met one morning in the Place Vendome. He was standing stock-still eyeing the passersby. “My, I thought, it was something to be a General at Home! Here I find one on every corner. They are as common as policemen.”

Anne Vanderbilt, I found as hard at work, if not harder, than when I had left Paris last spring. She was in charge of all Red Cross Canteens, which meant the welfare of hundreds and hundreds of girls as well. She has splendid vitality and energy, combined with the well-known Harriman charm.

One particular day that October, is still marked down for me as thoroughly disagreeable. As I was goind into the Ritz dining-room for luncheon, a Frenchman rushed up to me. “Isn't it too bad about Pershing?” he exclaimed.

“What's too bad?” I asked, all anxiety because I knew that General had been threatened with pneumonia a short time before.

“I saw Clemenceau this morning,” he said. “He's just back from the Argonne where he was caught in an eight-hour jam. The old man was furious, and has sent a complaint to Washington, and the General is certainly going to be recalled.”

“Oh,” I replied, not believing what he told me, but my breath knocked out just the same. I sat down to lunch and almost at once General Bridges began telling all his guests about the dreadful mistakes that were 322292being made and how if only Pershing had followed British advice, everything could have been averted.

That night at dinner I was the only American dining with a party at the British General Spier's house. The talk ran almost at once on the Argonne and General Pershing. A very high British official stated that he had inside information that out commander-in-chief would be replaced in a few days, that he was down and out. I grew hot all over and leaning across the table heard myself saying as any loyal American would:

“I beg your pardon, Lord——, for contradicting you, but General Pershing will not be recalled, and furthermore—” I snatched at anything to make it more emphatic—“he will be our next President.”

“I bet you eight hundred that both your statements are incorrect.”

“All right,” I said with more bravado than I could afford, for I found out later that he meant pounds, not dollars. I thank my luck that the thing broke even.

After dinner he came and stood by me in front of the fireplace and apologized for having made the original charge, saying that he had forgotten completely that there was an American present. Then he went on to enlarge on the situation, and tried to prove that what he said was true. It was such a critical moment that I hated to have someone try to discredit the commander-in-chief of an Allied force.

That night I wrote in my diary: If one woman can run into so much malice against Pershing in one day, what a terrific amount of propaganda the French and British must be making 323293against him, and all because he very properly refused to continue to brigade our troops with theirs. To be tolerant of wartime hysteria or not to be——

Three months later, one night I was standing in a doorway talking to General Pershing when Lord——came down the room to speak to him. Suddenly, a most extraordinary expression came over the English-man's face, and he turned on his heel and walked rapidly away. Undoubtedly, he thought, “Good Lord, that wretched woman is telling Pershing what I said.” He was wrong, I hadn't told a word of it!

Friday morning, November 1, 1918, was the day when the American First Army began its final and decisive attack. Colonel T. Bentley Mott, Mrs. House and I, set out for Compiögne. We were to visit Rheims, Soissons, Fismes. We left Paris at nine in the morning, and went to Meaux and to Château-Thierry. The cathedral at Meaux was quite undamaged and very beautiful. Château-Thierry was still scarred. Here our own Second Division had thrown itself into the battle before Paris at the end of May. We wanted to stop and hear the story of how our troops had thrown the Germans back from the tower. We passed down the road in sight of Belleau Wood. For weeks during June, the Second and the Twenty-sixth divisions from New England, fought there under terrible difficulties. As we left Château-Thierry and the Marne, we drove straight across, and along where the French and the American divisions had clashed with the Germans. We saw the march toward the Vesle, where late in July and early in August, the Third, Fourth and Twenty-eighth 324294divisions, and afterwards the Thirty-second, were engaged in long and arduous fighting. A little after noon we came to Rheims and stopped in front of its glorious cathedral. Down one street of ruined buildings we found a patched-up dwelling where the young American officers of the Motor Transport Corps had their mess. We opened our baskets and picnicked with them.

We left Rheims and followed the Vesle all the way to where it goes into the Aisne. On either side this little stream lay the opposing forces during August, after the German retreat from the Marne. All the fields were plowed with shells. We came to Fismes, where the Thirty-second fought. It was a pile of stones. Through wrecked Soissons we went along the road to Compiögne, turning to the left to pay the visit we had come to make to the ambulance St. Paul, where a number of negro patients from the 370th Regiment were still in the hospital. And they had also several American patients from divisions serving in French armies. We passed through Compiögne as night was falling, and went on to Senlis, Marshal Foch's headquarters. At the American mission we found Willard Straight and Colonel Poillon. This was the journey's end. We delivered our messages, and went directly back to Paris.

On the morning of November 9th I went over to see Colonel House in the Rue de l'Université. While I sat there he was called on the telephone from Foch's headquarters at Compiögne. “The Germans have arrived and the Marshal had just joined them on the train,” he was told. “We will keep you informed.” 325

Colonel House

Two mornings later we war workers were all in our offices when suddenly the guns were heard and all Paris burst into the streets. My one idea was the statute of Strassburg. I threw myself outdoors with the rest and was carried along with the stream of humanity flowing toward the Place de la Concorde. I came in time to see the creêpe pulled down and the laurel wreath placed on the head of the beloved city. Six or seven people climbed on the railings. They started to sing the “Marseillaise,” but people could not sing. Their faces were bathed in tears, voices would not come, the old men sobbed aloud. I began to watch a poilu who stood quite still, apathetic. The look in his eyes said, “We've suffered too much. We've touched depths. We cannot feel great emotion any more.” And all through that day of processions and dancing and singing and crying I saw other poilus standing quite unmoved, not more interested or alive than the millions of their comrades they had left forever at the front.

The rest of us had suddenly become the most good-natured crowd in the world. People linked arms with one another, waved flags and ran about singing “Madelon.” The French street gamins gave a very creditable performance of “Hail, hail, the gang's all here.” As the day wore on the crowd became more venturesome. They took the cannons from the Place de la Concorde 327296and ran them about the city with midinettes astride. And one of my Red Cross motor girls, who had started on her errands before the hour of the Armistice, had her camionette lifted and carried a block by the crowd while she still sat on the box to the accompaniment of “Vive l'Amérique.” It was wonderful to be an American. As the crowd wove back and forth an American uniform was not safe from suddenly becoming the center of attention and the kisses of the populace.

The sky was very blue in the afternoon. Laboriously pressing down toward the Madeleine, wedged in that seething mass of happily released humanity, I looked up suddenly and saw white against the blue sky, standing on the pediment of the Madeleine, the carved figure of the Christ. “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men,” I seemed to hear Him say. All day without aim, I came and went with the crowds, with the tide that flowed from the Rue de Rivoli up around the Arc de Triomphe and back again to the Place de l'Opéra, to Red Cross Headquarters. If I had walked a hundred miles I would not have been tired. But I did not walk: something seemed to carry us along. In the evening we were still and at café after café, we listened rapturously over and over again to the girls who stood on tables and sang the national anthems. The war was over, and it seemed as if everything in the world were possible, and everything was new, and that peace was going to be what we had dreamed about. We were mad, that 11th of November.

Several days after the real armistice, I discovered what had cause the fake armistice report. Ray Howard, head of the United Press, it seems, went to Brest, 328297where he called at Admiral Wilson's office just as the Admiral had received a telegram from the naval attaché at the Embassy in Paris, saying that he understood that the Armistice had been signed. Howard asked if he might cable his papers and the Admiral said “Yes.” At the same time the military attaché in Paris cabled the War Department at Washington to the same effect, but they got a denial of it from the State Department which was in continual communication with Colonel House.

It is interesting to me that Willard Straight was the very first person to give out the news of the real Armistice. He was at Marshal Foch's headquarters at Senlis, and at 5:15 A. M. he called Colonel House's residence in the Rue de l'Université, saying that the Armistice had been signed at 5 A. M., on practically the terms which the Allies had agreed upon. Ten minutes later the President received the news at the White House by cable. The Chef de Cabinet of Clemenceau came at 7:30 A. M. to Colonel House's and said the Premier wished the Colonel to have the news of the signing before anyone else. Well, he had it!

On the second of December, I wrote in my diary an account of the loss of Willard Straight: Sunday, November 17th, Willard and Colonel House and Gordon Auchincloss motored down to Rheims and Soissons. The next day Williard was taken ill at the Hotel Crillon. ... His friends have done everything they can think of, but nothing availed and yesterday, just a few minutes before 1 A. M., that luminous spirit passed on. Every minute during these last two weeks he has been thinking 329298of others. Ill as he was, his mind has been engrossed and busy with the work before him at the Peace Conference. When he could not longer write, he used to ask me to sit by him, make notes of things he wanted to bring to the attention of Colonel House or some of the other Americans. He kept thinking he was at the front.

“Rest now, Daisy,” he would say, “you've got a long trip back to Paris.”

Thanksgiving day he was still semi-conscious.

“Did you say this was Thanksgiving?” he asked. “Look in my dressing table,” he said; “take all the money you want to get turkeys, and give everybody a good time. I love people to be happy.”

It has been agony not to be able to save him for Dorothy. And he seemed to all of us to have a great future and the makings of a statesman. Every friend he had, felt that no sacrifice would be too great if it could spare him. Dorothy's cable on hearing that all was over was like them both. Not a word of herself, but thanks and thoughts for “doctors and nurses and all the friends who have done so much.”

Dorothy wanted Willard buried “among the soldiers he loved so well.”

There were no gun carriages to be had. The flag-covered coffin was taken on a motor chassis. All Willard's friends were there, and they were legion who had loved him deeply; the men who walked behind his coffin up the Champs Elysées that snowy day were of all ranks. At the church they sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” We were all thinking of Dorothy. From the church we went to Suresnes, the United States Military Cemetery 330299looking down on Paris from the slope of Mount St. Valérien. What Bishop Brent said as he stood in his uniform at the grave on a little mound of snow will never be forgotten: In the Army, when a comrade is taken, it is the common custom to speak of him in terms of farewell before his body is laid in its last resting-place.

In speaking of Willard Straight. I speak of one who lived a long life in a few years. His native gifts and varied experience equipped him to render distinguished service to the cause and country for which he spent his powers without stint. His organizing genius was exactly what the moment needed. But it had been ordered otherwise; and he has been carried into a sphere beyond this world. His personality will operate there in building up the permanent order for which this world is the training school.

It would be a lack of faith to think of him in terms of loss only. We shall surely miss the courtly presence of our comrade. But his disappearance from our midst does not mean that a superior force has conquered him. Death is powerless to defeat so knightly a man as he was. It has set him free to operate in wider fields, and the vitality which flowed from his well-directed efforts among men will forever course through the veins of his country. He has done the greatest thing that God or man can do—he has laid down his life for his friends, than which there is no greater act of love or service.

He strove in all he did to teach excellence and far more than most men be achieved his aim. Those who knew him intimately felt the force of his leadership. We had thought and planned to work by his side when we doffed the uniform and returned to the homeland. This may not be, nor shall we disguise our sense of effort. On the contrary, we will by added purpose and 331300activity endeavor to make up what has been lost to us by his going and, like him, we will make excellence our watchword. This is our best tribute to our gifted and gallant comrade.

Even before the Armistice, Paris seemed to be gathering to itself the hosts of Peace. The Ritz seemed to hold more people than ever, though how it managed to let out tucks and cover more people than already swarmed there I do not know. Colonel House's arrival to represent the President on the Supreme War Council was the advance guard of the secretaries, specialists and newspaper men who flowed in on us like a tidal wave. Rumors flew around that the President himself was coming to Paris. Colonel House, I know, advised him to come. Lansing's judgment was otherwise. Whether the President's coming was good policy or not I did not question. I only knew that to the Parisian populace it was the greatest of good news. My manicure at the Ritz chattered for days about his arrival, and the red, white and blue ribbon she had bought to tie on her children's hair. “Saviour of Europe” she kept repeating, and thanked God she was living to see his blessed face.

We had news of his arrival in Brest and his reception there. I did not mean to miss a minute of the popular demonstration that we knew would be given him in Paris. I expected much the same sort of pageant that had greeted royal visitors before. Not the wildest imaginings could have foretold what really happened. Joe Grew kindly asked me to come to one of the windows of the Peace Commission office at the corner of the Rue Royale looking out on the Peace de 332301la Concorde. Fully an hour before the time set for the President's arrival, Ethel and I set out. Oh, to have been wedge-shaped as we worked our way through the tightly packed square. To the branches of every tree far up the Champs Elysées boys and men clung like hiving bees. Many had spent the night there in order to have front seats in the morning. I never saw so many people in all my life.

Presently we heard the guns at the station and we knew that the President was in Paris. As the guns stopped a new sound rose like distant rumblings of thunder, vox populi, the roar of the populace, coming nearer and nearer—“Wil-son—Wil-son.” The crowd in the Place de la Concorde seemed to be one great single mass as it swayed back and forth. Emotion moved it as the wind moves water. Around the columns at the foot of the Champs Elysées coming directly toward our windows the procession appeared. Where the kings had sat in the state victoria beside President Poincaré sat Woodrow Wilson. He held his hat in his hand and, as he looked at the cheering thousands, smiled the smile that took all Paris by storm.

There is a story, apocryphal perhaps, that Clemenceau said to him, “No one has ever had such a welcome in the world before,” and when the day was over the President said to one of his intimates: “And in six weeks they may be dragging me in the dirt.”

Hindsight is always so much better than foresight. It is so easy to look back now and see how things might have been different at Paris. Sometimes it seems to me, seeing how the nations sat down together, tired and war-scarred, all except the United States intent on territory or indemnities, the marvel is that any order came out of it at all. Four days before the Armistice, every nation would have denied itself anything to bring Peace. Peace was enough. But end of arms, however, was not the end of the hate and fear. There were the secret treaties, old bargains, often shameful, made in the days before the Fourteen Points shone like stars promising Peace on Earth. It is the custom to vilify the peace-makers who gathered around the table and drew the Treaty of Versailles. But their problem was one of the most difficult in history.

Every nation in Europe wanted to recoup for the outrageous sacrifices made in the years of madness. Only President Wilson held to his original scheme for lasting peace.

As political situations altered in every European country, internationalism gave place to nationalism, and the national spokesmen echoed in Paris the changes at home. I have not even hindsight. It would be easy to say that Colonel House was wrong in advising the 334303President to come to Paris. Who can tell whether if he had remained the Absent Figure, the Great Myth, things would have moved otherwise than they have? None of us can live the winter of 1919 over.

I should like to. I should like to feel the old hope of a new world again; and relive some of the gay hours of that crowded scene.

The day after the newspaper men discovered that the sessions of the Conference were not to be open, I was in the midst of an angry camp. On the one side, the newspaper men mocked “open covenants, openly arrived at.” That is, most of them did. There was a few of them with private pipe lines to Personages in the Conference. As one of these men said, “If you've got an official in the know for a news source, you're about as well off outside the tent as in. He's not likely to stuff you more than half the time. Even a good tool has to have his reputation as a newspaper man nourished with straight tips.”

My sympathies were with the more democratic news-gatherers and I was inclined to believe that perhaps this exclusion was the First Mistake. Whether it would have worked practically or not I do not know. The Washington Conference of 1921 held open sessions, but still that was only for presentation of the cut and dried reports. All the negotiating and wrangling was done behind closed doors.

Mr. Grasty, correspondent of the New York Times, was one of the most Olympian of the pressmen. I always felt when I talked to him that an eagle had come down out of the sky and shared his eagle's range view of things with me. Herbert Swope—“the Swope,” 335304the other newspaper men called him—made me feel that some journalists have a sixth sense. When I could see nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, touch nothing, I would suddenly realize that something nevertheless was happening. I exaggerate, of course, but an electric tremor would pass over Swope at the luncheon table and I would know he had sensed news. Lord Northcliffe had something of the same quality. I wrote down in my diary once that Northcliffe reminded me of a tremendous jug which poured inexhaustible comment on the scene around him. The last time I saw him we were lunching together at the Ritz. He had come into Paris from Fontainebleau, very nervous and ill. He pointed to a girl coming down the room. “That girl should be in the Cabinet. She's going to run for Parliament and I am going to help get her in.” It was Christabel Pankhurst. As she passed our table he sprang up and they had a great palaver about elections and bye-elections and her certain good fortune.

It seemed to me that we lost a good deal after the closing of the Cree! Bureau by not having an official press section to push the American point of view. The British Press Bureau under Sir William Tyrrell, with Eric MacLagan, his assistant, who had been learning the rope and setting up machinery for a year before the Armistice, was certainly successful in the dissemination of the British slant on everything that came up.

I say in my diary that everybody was at the Ritz the winter of 1918 and 1919. And not the least noticeable of the everybody was Elinor Glyn. She had been holding her classes all during the last part of the 336305war, I believe instructing people how to hold thoughts about their relatives at the front so as to protect them from being wounded or killed. I never attended a class and so never mastered the details of the process, but I was intrigued by rumors that part of the process was to surround them with the thought of orange rays. Whatever theory she had about preserving her youth and beauty, that was the theory I was after. For the skin was like a child's, not a line or a wrinkle.

One noon we were lunching, E. G., Herbert Swope, another man and myself.

E. G.: “Of course, every one at this table has passed the age of being interested in lovers, but if not I could tell them how to hold one! The loved one could never, never get away. And would never know why.”

Our aged table paid attention.

E. G., earnestly, “When you wake in the morning you must imagine your lover standing at the foot of your bed, opalescent, so that you can see through him, hold each of his wrists firmly between your fingers, and then surround and permeate him with waves of orange light. He will then never, never elude you. My dears, always think of those you love in orange.”

“Well, anyway,” I said to myself, “Elinor Glyn isn't one of those stuffy novelists who sit beside you glum at meals, saving their stuff for their next novel.”

Very early in the winter I dined one night with Sir William Tyrrell at the Majestic and met there one of the most picturesque characters at the Conference. He was a young Oxford archæologist, deeply interested in the Arab people. He had felt that their future depended upon their getting into the war on the side of 337306the Allies. And it was he who persuaded Feisul to raise a hundred thousand men and offer them to Great Britain. Everybody knows his story. The winter after the war, he came to Paris as representative of “his people” to get territory and recognition for the Arabs.

Paris was full of friendly liberals who took an interest in the small nations that had risked and suffered so much in the war. Some of us enlisted to get Colonel Lawrence interviews he wanted with American members of the Peace Conference so that he could bring up the question of an Arab hearing before the body. One of my stepping stones, or so I thought, might be my friend who was busy with the Reparations question and hadn't so far as I know made a fad of a single submerged nation. I asked Sir William Tyrrell, Colonel Lawrence, and my friend M. to come to lunch with me at the Ritz, which seemed more and more like Shepherd's Hotel in the good old Cairo days when all the strange people of the earth broke bread at the mouth of the Nile. We began to eat lunch. Then the cue was given to commence and with his white earnest face looking ahead of him with the fixed expression of a Moslem prophet, Colonel Lawrence recited the aspirations and achievements of the Arabs. I looked hopefully at M. He was a hundred miles away, or more accurately, there he stuck right in the Ritz dinning-room bowing and smiling right and left as his army of friends came into the room, quite blind and deaf to the palms and date trees of Syria and our song of an ancient and once-free people.

Now M. is one of the kindest men in the world but he is quite typical of western civilization, a comfortable 338307and successful business man with not an ounce of comprehension to spare for a man steeped in the mysticism of the East who “yearns beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down.” Some other way Lawrence got his people their hearing and appeared with the Arab delegation, not in his usual British officer's uniform, but looking as much an Arab as any of them in his desert costume.

The Secretary of State and Mrs. Lansing gave a dinner at the Crillon for the President and Mrs. Wilson on January 22d. Mrs. Lansing is the ideal wife for a high official. I always think of her as I saw her the day she addressed the wives of the delegates to the Pan-American Conference at Washington in Spanish. “Isn't she pretty?” How wonderful for an American to speak Spanish so fluently!” “I never heard a woman make a better speech!” We North Americans were proud of her gifts, and her distinction.

Dear Madame Waddington, who in “The Diary of a Diplomat's Wife” introduced an easy chatty style of autobiography that proved one can be entertaining without revealing too many secrets, lent an air of the Empire to the party. I sat next to General Harts. He had been Aide at the White House, and had done splendid work in extending and enlarging the playgrounds for the people in the Washington public parks. His job in Command of the City of Paris seemed an unenviable one. I went to see him several times about imprisoned officers whose families at home had been worried about their fate. The General was courteous and kind always, notwithstanding the fact that I was entirely outside my province in interfering in army affairs. He 339308knew that in abnormal times, we all did things we wouldn't otherwise have dreamt of. I passed on requests from officers to get them sent home on courier service, because “my wife is ill,” or “mother dying.” Some of these requests it was a great pleasure to try to have granted.

Dick Peters was one officers we wanted most badly to get home. That wonderful man! After receiving the Croix de Guerre three times, and being promoted to a Captaincy, he came to Paris after the Armistice as active as a man twenty years his junior. Soon, however, the reaction set in and that dear nearly seventy-year-old man was three months in the hospitals. He and David Gray, with a broken leg, and Hal Borrowe, full of wit and rheumatism, were all in the same room at Dr. Blake's. The Three Musqueteers they certainly were and when I wanted a good laugh, after a trying day at the garage, I always dropped in to see them. What a gift to have a spirit like Captain Dick's. He was one of the outstanding figures in the war. He wanted to be a liaison officer, and he became a liaison officer, surmounting every obstacle placed in his way.

There are dinners and dinners, and in my life I have been to many banner ones, but never have I been more intrigued than when I dined with Monsieur and Madame Coromillas of the Greek Commission in Paris. It was a warm evening and we sat in the Ritz garden for coffee and then it was that from the center of the group I heard our hostess address herself in four different languages to her guests. It was done without the slightest effort and in the most natural way possible. “Will you, Mr. Balfour, take sugar in your 340309coffee?” Then, “And how will you have yours?” in Greek to Mr. Venizelos. The guest of honor, Signor T., was then drawn into a lengthy conversation in Italian, until Monsieur B. joined them and all three slipped naturally into French.

Venizelos I met first through one of the most charming of the everybodies who spent that winter at the Ritz, Mr. Berenson, the art critic. Several times a week during breakfast at Laurent's he drew about him the progressive liberal figures of the Conference. The day I met Venizelos, who had been heralded as the first statesman of the world, the modern Cavour, I find an entry: “He has snow white hair and beard, laughing eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, and a luminous expression.” At subsequent meetings in the following spring and summer, some of the light went out of his face as Thrace ravaged his heart and mind. All the Allied diplomats in Paris rated him as a great man, and I grew to have a personal devotion for his cause, so that I was really hurt when a young friend who spoils my tea with her dissent used to snap at me, “I wish you'd stop listening to all this blah about the destiny of the Hellenic peoples. Papa Venizelos is buying gold bricks with his people's blood and a rather nasty amount of English money.” She used to make me shiver. I like to go on thinking my heroes are as big as their highest and best moments, not as small as their least fine ones.

A charming Commander Heaton Ellis of His Majesty's Navy, sat next to me at dinner one night and told me that Lady Hood, widow of Admiral Hood who was lost in the naval battle at Jutland, had come to 341310Paris. She was a celebrated English hostess, born American, and all her friends, official and unofficial, were insistent that she should fill a great want by coming to Paris and entertaining so that all sorts and conditions of peace-makers might foregather one evening a week and know each other socially. She had taken a large house near the Prime Minister's, and would I not take part in making a success of this British salon in the French capital? Commander Ellis asked me if I wouldn't try to get the American peace-makers to go. I fell in with his suggestion and before each of Lady Hood's “at homes” I gave a dinner and asked all the members of our delegation in turn to come. But with no luck. They came to the dinner sometimes but were always “too tired” or a wife was “too ill” and they couldn't “go on.”

Some very attractive men, not the real lions but specialists on various committees, were delighted to accept. I used to joke with my lesser lights and tell them they must write “lion” across their chests and make a great deal of noise going upstairs so that I would appear to have fulfilled my contract. The truth is our men have not acquired the taste that the British and French have for evening receptions where there is nothing but conversation and a light supper. Under the skin our diplomats an our tired business men are the same, and want to be amused by sprightlier follies. But in this case they really were all tired and often ill. And so it was that I lost out in the good graces of the distinguished Commander who thought I sat down on my job. The “at homes” were a great success if crowds 342

Woodrow Wilson at the Peace Conference As painted by Sir William Orpen

Mr. Balfour was always there and Lord Robert Cecil was a bright and constant star—I wrote in my notebook about Lord Robert at the time: Lord Robert shows valiant allegiance to the League of Nations: he is a true citizen of the world. How happy must a man be who has an ideal—and such an ideal—a practical plan for peace, and can devote his energies and life to its fulfilment.

He told me once afterward in Paris that without President Wilson the League would never have been possible, because he and he alone brought the conference back, every time they drifted afield, to the subject of the League. His persistence alone was bringing it about. He insisted that it must be bound up with the Treaty; otherwise after peace was made people would go about their business and it would be difficult to get them all together again for any purpose. So soon the horrors of war are forgotten.

To show how some of us felt about the League then, I find in my journal written in Paris the end of March, 1919, after I had seen a great Division reviewed by General Pershing: Oh, that splendid body of men who came overseas, backed so uncomplainingly by the women of America, those 60,000 crosses which Bishop Brent calls “the proudest of all decorations,” make us feel that we must all stand true to te end to make their sacrifices worth while—see it through. The world is 344312hungry for a League of Nations. It must have a League of Nations.

It seems to me that God has given the world a new Pentecost to make a new Crusade. The old crusade was made to save an old tomb, the new is to bring the benison of God on every baby's cradle. A better chance for education, for housing; and for the female child an opportunity such as has never been dreamt of before—equal opportunity with the men.

Surely a new spirit of God is moving in the trees. We must not be blinded by the little things, the small criticism, but let us be grateful every day that we have been given the chance to take part in this great world movement towards brotherhood and peace.

Sentimentalism, words ... that depends on one's point of view. I only wish that I could feel the joy again that I felt in those days when I did not dream that anything created to make practical an eternal idea, could become a political football. There was no doubt in my mind but what we would become a member of the League of Nations. A group of women representing all the Allies,—Miss Katherine Davis, Mrs. Rublee, and I from, America, held meetings and visited all the members of the Peace Conference asking that women have representation on the Committees of the League. We asked for the insertion of an article dealing with the traffic in opium and in women. We wanted to stamp out these evils.

Our receptions were always cordial. Our hopes rose. We expected all women to back us, and I was quite heartbroken in the 1920 campaign when I found the 345313Republican women holding up the failure of our little handful of women to do more than put the League on record against these evils, as a sign that the League was a trip.

Sometimes when I went to the Red Cross office in the morning instead of to the Neuilly garage I would meet General Dawes. Encountering him was always a pleasure, because as we walked along he pointed out all the statues and buildings which he particularly liked. He combines the fresh enthusiasm of a young girl seeing everything for the first time, with the hearty earnestness of a professional guide selling you the city.

One evening I came back to the hotel late and found a note saying that General Dawes and his party were impatiently waiting for me in the dining room. My boots were muddy and every muscle ached from driving the car all day. I thought I simply couldn't rush in to dinner without changing my uniform, and I was upset to have so completely forgotten an engagement. “You forget things that way when you are in your dotage,” I said to myself. Just then the ‘phone rang and General Dawes was saying very peremptorily, “Well, well, well, we're waiting. Please come right down as you are.”

Dinner brought me to, and General Harbord was so interesting that I ceased to speculate on my lost memory. Some mornings later I met General Dawes again on the way to the office.

“I don't know what ails me,” I started to tell him. “Even yet I can't remember the circumstances of your invitation.”

“Of course you can't, he chuckled. “I never did 346314ask you. Someone backed out at the last minute and spoiled my table. I knew the only way to get you at the eleventh hour was to bluff you into thinking you were booked before.”

General Dawes is one of the few persons who can do such things and find himself only liked the more. Bordie was like that.

One day I had a luncheon engagement at Henri's. As it turned out my friend was ill, and as she had no telephone in her apartment, she couldn't let me know that she couldn't come. While I sat waiting, in came the Prince of Wales, arrived in Paris the night before. He sat down directly next to me on the red sofa, and his aide sat at the end of the table. Shortly, a lovely lady, a guest at the British Embassy, came and the aide gave her his seat. The unapproachable and unreal quality that surrounded royalty in my “Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, where have you been? I've been to London to visit the Queen” days crept over me and I wanted to pinch this alluring figure to see if he was really flesh and blood. Soon, however, every other sensation was lost in the realization that I could hear every word he and his companions said. I edged over toward the seat reserved for my friend, but was still within earshot. I called a waiter and in my embarrassment ordered such a sumptuous repast that it cost 50 francs—then ten dollars. I began hastily to eat. The ripple of conversation went on.

There I sat, cooped on the long settee at the very same table, and though I wished mightily that someone had invented buttons and buttonholes for one's ears so that I could turn down the flap and button them up 347315tight, there was nothing for it but to eavesdrop. The young man from Windsor went on in a cheerful, charming way saying the nicest things about my personal friends. The harder I tried not to listen, the more acute my hearing became.

To flee from my unwelcome rôle I must have crowded out in front of the happy Prince. How I wished for my friend X. who salts and peppers all her talk with quotations from Queen Mary, “The King said to me,” and “I said to the Prince.” She could have told me just what was proper etiquette for wedging past the heir to the British throne. Should I ask him to rise and let me out? And so I ate and ate and went on eavesdropping, all out of respect for royalty. And my neighbors chattered on quite unaware that a white-haired woman in her working uniform knew most the friends they chattered of, or if they knew, they didn't guess that I stuck to my post out of sheer ignorance. On a latter date I told the Prince of my quandary and we had a good laugh. Etiquette is not my long suit. I take it so seriously, too. I'm always having vague moments. My husband used to say that there were days when I stopped little boys in the street and asked them what time my own dinner should be!

One day in Paris I met the daughter of Lord Derby, the British Ambassador, and had occasion the next day to send her a note. Pen in hand (I was dreadfully tired after weeks of rising at five in the morning), great uncertainty as to how to write her title came over me. I left the salutation blank, wrote my note, and set out for the local Mr. Price Post, night watchman of the Ritz bureau.

“Don't know,” he said. “What about Miss Derby?” said I. “Sounds likely,” said he. Thus seconded, I wrote in, “My dear Miss Derby.”

Such a cold voice from the Embassy telephoned me next day saying very slowly, very distinctly, very chidingly, it seemed to me, “Lady—Victoria—Primrose is very sorry, etc.”

Next time I wrote, my addressing was perfect and apropos of my Miss Derbying, I said that that's what it was to be an American and worse than that, a Democrat with a big D.

The Embassy secretaries that winter, when short of dinner conversation, used to tell a story, marvelously embossed, of the dear good American, no name given, a woman, supposed to have savior faire too, yet who wrote such funny notes. I used to laugh louder than the rest, sometimes because I did find the story amusing and sometimes because I thought it was just as well everybody didn't guess that I was the American bumpkin.

Thursday, March 20, 1919. General Lincoln Andrews, Lieutenant Shiverith and I left Ritz Hotel at 9 A. M., picked up Dorothy Kane at Hotel St. James and started for Chaumont. We lunched at Nogent-Sur-Seine, Hotel Bour Vonneux. Arrived at Chaumont 4:30.

At headquarters, Captain Hewes told us that the Commander-in-Chief wanted us to take tea at his château to meet the King and Queen of Belgium. After smoothing our hair and washing our hands at the hotel in Chaumont, we went to the château. There were many generals and lesser lights. Their 349317Majesties were very gracious and decorated a number of the Chaumont Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross workers.

The King is an imposing and handsome man. I should like to see him on the tennis courts. The Queen is the Queen in spite of being a very unassuming German Princess, graceful in her royal station, but too direct and simple a person, apparently, to be much impressed by her own rank.

Friday, March 21, 1919. Lunched at Toul and arrived at Luxembourg. We passed through the St. Mihiel salient, and through Briey where there are so many iron mines.

Saturday, March 22, 1919. A telephone from G. H. Q. that the C. in C. wanted us to come to Chaumont tomorrow so as to sec the Divisional review on Monday. Dorothy has gone on the Coblenz with a woman friend, and the General and I came here to Nancy, where I am putting up in the Red Cross hotel. It is a moonlight night and this beautiful city is a dream.

Sunday, March 23, 1919. Arrived at Val des Escoliers, Chaumont, from Nancy in time for luncheon, and found there Mr. and Mrs. Grew. This afternoon I went for a ride on horseback along the Marne.

Monday, March 24, 1919 . Colonel Quekemeyer and General Pershing traveling in one car, and Consul-General Thakera, Colonel Bowditch and I in a second, we proceeded to a friend where the General inspected M.P.’s and German prisoners, interrogating many of them about quarters, rations, etc.

At our next stop, Montigun, there were two squadrons 350318of the 3d Cavalry, my old friends of the border, as well as engineers and medicos.

The General was sharp about the men's boots, which he felt should have been clean, despite the mud that does seem to outmud other muds. After inspecting each company, the General asked to have the men gathered about him. He talked to them in a simple, true soldierly fashion, telling them how much the A. E. F. had to be pound of and what it would mean to the people at home to have the Army go back clean. Very fatherly.

We lunched some kilometers further on at Bour-bonnes-les-Bains, the Headquarters of the 29th Division, where we were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Grew, and Captain Hewes. General Morton, in command of the 29th Division, and his aides, were very hospitable.

After luncheon we went just outside the town, where we walked a few yards to a small stand erected for the occasion. Under a blue sky, so rare at this season in France, on a green plain, encircled by sapphire hills, there stretched in every direction, a cloudy mass of olive-drab surrounded by purple,—thousands of our soldiers in the helmets they wore at the front. From around the corner of a group of red-roofed houses, the Commander-in-Chief advanced on horseback, followed by the Divisional General and their aides while the band played “Over There.” Drawn a little way out in front, to the left hand, were fifty officers and men to be decorated with the D. S. C.

Dismounting, the C. in C., with the officers of the Division and his aides, proceeded to make a personal inspection of the individual men, who, standing in

companies, with front and rear ranks facing each other, made one marvel once more at their glorious height and physique. Their faces, like rosy apples, gave evidence of their fine condition.

“Where did you get your wound?” “In the Argonne, Sir.” “When?” “October 6th, Sir.” “How did you get it?” “Going over the top, Sir.” “How long after you went over the top were you wounded?” “Half an hour, Sir.” “I suppose that you know we all share your pride in having been able to render such service to your country and are proud of you too.”

This was the conversation carried on between the C. in C. and the first man he came across wearing a wound chevron. Striding on in the mud ankle-deep, casting a critical, but human glance along the lines on either side, he seldom passed a man who had bled for his country, without an interested word or two. On one occasion, directly the information: “A machine gun bullet in the leg, Sir,” had been elicited, the Captain of the Company stepped forward and added, “And he continued to fight with us for twenty-four hours before I could force him to go back to the dressing station.” The C. in C. asked if he had been recommended for D. S. C. “Yes, Sir, but so far we've heard nothing of it.” “Make a note of that,” said the General, turning to his stenographer. “Get all the circumstances; he must be decorated.” And so it went for about six kilometers, through lanes of American boys drawn up on the plains of France, not very distant from where the Maid of Orleans was born and had her vision. Sometimes a pause was made to ask if the billets were properly heated, and when the reply came, “No, Sir, not enough wood to 353320keep the billets warm, only enough for cooking,” the adjutant of the regiment was commanded, “Double the allowance at once.”

At the end of each battalion, the officers were gathered in groups, and asked what the percentage of disease was in their command. In one instance it was 2 per cent, and the C. in C. remarked severely: “Much too high. Why, do you know that the percentage for the whole A. E. F. is only 1-5 of 1 per cent? Get after it at once. Cut it down. It's up to you officers. You are responsible. Inspire your men with an ambition to be clean. Think what it will mean to the people at home, to have the Army come back clean.”

After the presentation of decorations to the officers and men and the tying of ribbons inscribed with the battles in which these regiments had fought, on the regimental flags, the General mounted a small stand in the field to view them march past.

How many people have ever seen a complete division, or nearly complete one, pass by? Until they have, they have never received every impression of power. Upwards of 30,000 souls, en masse.

When the last line had passed, the order was given to gather around the C. in C. where he stood, and a great sea of young, clean, earnest faces, were turned up toward the leader. I saw them as the men who for some years to come will shape the destinies of the greatest country of the world. And this was only one of 40 divisions, or, in all, 1,200,000, to most of whom the C. in C. has made his personal appeal.

He spoke like a soldier, not like a politician. But he had a chance to get at the hearts of his men no civilian could ever have had. I cannot remember 354321his speech. Only sentences here and there, and his bronzed face turned to that sea of youth.

“Men, you are going home soon,” he told them. “It is not very often that I have an opportunity of saying a personal word to the units of this command, inasmuch as there have been some two million men in the A. E. F. ... Is it not a splendid thing that you fought in that army, the most splendid army of modern time, representing, as you have, the greatest nation in the world today? Therefore, when I say that you men are especially chosen, especially favored, especially privileged, I believe you can see the reason why I say that. It is a proud thing for you to return home with these thoughts in your mind, and you should also allow no belittlement of American effort in your presence. This without boasting, this without excessive pride, but with a spirit that will arouse the entire nation in an humble sort of way, and will give each individual and each citizen of our country something to be proud of....

“I thank you again and again for the splendid service you have rendered and for the fine morale you have displayed, which I am sure will not only continue to the end of your service, but on through the rest of your life.”

There my journal breaks off, and the next entry is, “Russia, what will be the solution?” While Wilson was still in Washington, the newspapermen asked him if the Russian question would be considered and he replied, “The manner in which the problem of Russia is dealt with at the Paris Peace Conference will be a test of the statesmanship of the world. It cannot be 355322ignored without admitting the bankruptcy of political wisdom.”

The Russian question in Paris was as ever-present as it had been in 1918 in Washington. Sometimes it seemed to me there were as many Russians in Paris as there were French. That was because so many of them were émigrés who had fled to Paris as their second home. The Grand Duke Alexander lived at the Ritz and I often lunched and dined with him. I couldn't entirely agree with him politically, in spite of my liking for him. Czarists in general seemed inadequate and mystified by the misfortunes of the Romanoffs. They made you think they were not quite the masterful leaders necessary for the fortunes—or misfortunes—of the Russian people. M. Boris Bakmeteff, who had been sent by the Kerensky Government to Washington, was easily the ablest Russian that I met. He was witty, intelligent, omnipresent whenever the Russian question was to be discussed. People tell me that even Bolsheviks, though they were quite frantic at the thought of his being in control of the considerable sum of money which was left of the American government loan to Russia when Kerensky came in, really rather admired the way he did his job. His business was to keep us from recognizing the Soviets.

Perhaps it would have been better if the proposals to meet the Russians at Prinkipo had gone through. But this is hindsight again. I remember at the time being very amused. Wilson, I believe, wanted the Russians brought to Paris to thrash thing out. The French wouldn't hear of it. A proposal was made for a nicely quarantined tête-à-tête on Prinkipo, a tiny 356323island not far from Constantinople. The Soviets wirelessed an acceptance of this very kind invitation with more eagerness than I ever saw in any social climber with his eye on the Four Hundred. Whether they ever really got a formal invitation, anything more than a whiff of news in the papers, I do not know. Prinkipo was called off, perhaps because of the weather. Bolsheviks at Paris were all the picture lacked.

The four men on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for bringing some semblance of order to a chaotic world were seldom seen. Keynes has given his picture of Wilson, quite unrecognizable to me and unforgivable. Someone told me this year that Keynes himself regrets that portrait and is witness to his own injustice. I, of course, never got into the Conference room. My picture is from quite a different angle.

Late at night, half past ten and eleven o'clock, over and over again, as I hurried from my work at the canteen, I would catch glimpses of the President with his quick step, a dispatch case generally under his arm, leaving the Crillon followed by a secretary with more papers. A look of energetic resolution would melt into a quick smile as he greeted a passerby, stepped into his motor, and was gone. His work continued generally fifteen hours a day.

It was sometimes necessary to go to Colonel House's office to make an appointment for someone, or on my own business, and I always found it full of the great and near great, as exciting as visiting Mme. Tussaud's was works. I remember one morning M. Orlando waited in the ante-room. Colonel House emerged from his inner office with Clemenceau and as I 357324went to the lift, Mr. Lloyd George stepped out of it.

No story of that winter in Paris could possible omit mention of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. Their hospitality adds luster to any diplomatic post, and Mildred's culture and beauty always make me think of a rare first edition bound by Zanesdorf.

Prince Metternich said that every Peace Conference had to have its best story. The best one that came to my ears in Paris, possibly pure fable, was told of Scapa Flow. A German sailor, at the handing over of the German Fleet, is recorded to have said as he slipped on to a British vessel, “This is what I think of your Fleet and your Admiral Beatty,” and he promptly spat into the sea. A British seaman quietly retorted, “It doesn't matter much what you think of our Fleet or of Admiral Beatty, but be careful whose ocean you're spitting into.”

The first week in April I tore myself away and went to Brest en route to the United States to be present at the arrival of my first grandchild. I traveled on the troop ship Rotterdam. Dr. John Finley was another passenger newly arrived from his Red Cross service in the Holy Land, poetizing about Lord Allenby and the entrance into Jerusalem. It was like meeting one of the old Crusaders.

Arrived in New York, we were all drawn into a Salvation Army Drive and ate crullers until we could not stand the sight of them, and screamed ourselves voiceless on street corners.

As soon as my status as grandmother was safely settled, I returned to Paris to close up my work, and was in time to look on from the outskirts at the signing 358

“The Big Four” Premiers Lloyd George, Orlando and Clemenceau, and President Wilson

The delegates came to the windows and in one of them, as the crowds began to disperse, Mrs. Wilson lingered, looking out on the historic scene. She was all in gray with a small toque, a graceful and beautiful figure. Then, as always, she was a “First Lady” to be proud of.

Almost I left this chapter out. Then, as I looked over an old letter that I had written during odd minutes at the 1920 Democratic Convention out in San Francisco, I was surprised to find myself living it all over again. I dare not include the names. Don't ask me who is who, who M. really is and which man I call R. My letter-writing style at San Francisco wasn't calculated to please anybody but the friend to whom the letter went.

Thursday, July 1st. Yesterday was a perfect day, as Conventions go. The nominating speeches were excellent and the demonstrations amounted to pandemonium! When Al Smith had been nominated in a masterly speech by Bourke Cockran, it was such fun singing all the old songs—“Tammany,” “The Sidewalks of New York,” “Maggie Murphy,” “Daisy Belle,” etc., accompanied by an organ and an orchestra—the latter one of the biggest in the world. Al Smith is the greatest governor New York has ever seen, and he was a fish peddler in his youth! Of course, his religion (R. C.) bars him from the Presidency, at least for the present.

When McAdoo was put in nomination I really believe there was more spontaneous enthusiasm for him than for any one. The S. F. papers are poisonous 361327about him, and I suppose most of the N. Y. ones are too, but that only proves that the Republicans are afraid of him. I am working hard for him and even with the “Crown Prince” taint believe him our best candidate, as Davis hasn't enough strength.

Today I am assigned New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut to do lobbying on the floor, when the balloting commences.

Last night I went to a delightful café for a fish dinner with Sir Arthur Willert and General Bethel and then to a McAdoo caucus at the Palace Hotel. There is much about S. F. like Marseilles or other French seaport towns. It is really one of the most delightful cities in the world—such people, so hospitable! There is nothing they don't do for us.

I have cheered and waved my arms so long for McAdoo that I am quite stiff and voiceless.

Thursday, July 1, 11:10 A. M. Jim Ham Lewis has just come onto the platform stroking his fading pink whiskers; the band is playing the “Sidewalks of New York”—a warmed-over inspiration from yesterday's Al Smith demonstration. It has now changed to “Dixie” and amidst the roars of the delegates an old man from Kansas is dancing a jig in the center aisle.

11:15 A. M. Mrs. Antoinette Funk, principal feminine McAdoo backer, climbs to the platform and whispers mysteriously to other McAdoo boosters. Organ playing “Dear Old Pal.”

11:30. Now to soft organ-music a man is reciting verses of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A beautiful soprano voice floats from the far-distant corner of the top gallery singing the air of the chorus. 362328Then the whole twelve thousand people (there is not an empty seat) join in singing the chorus. It is grand and impressive and gives one chills up and down one's spine.

12:00. They resume calling the roll of states for nominations. Oregon and Utah unanimously second the nomination of McAdoo. Virginia nominates Glass. He is the third man so far given sole credit for the Currency Bill!!!

The delegates seem mussy-tempered this A. M. There have been three fights—or near fights—already, and we have been in session only fifty minutes.

Just been sent to lobby with a woman from Porto Rico who can't make up her mind whom she is for! Think I won her for McAdoo.

12:15. West Virginia nominates John Davis. Would that he were better known. The McAdoo boom has lost strength a little today.

12:30. Mrs. Brown, of West Virginia, seconds Davis' nomination. She is very good looking, and has a charming voice. She tells a funny story of the creation which brings the delegates roaring to their feet. The band plays “You Great Big Beautiful Doll.” The most finished and perfect speech I have ever heard a woman make.

12:50. Irvin Cobb is now standing up in the press seats and minutely estimating the claims to his notice of the individual cherubims in our organ loft. His profile is uniquely conspicuous.

1:00. One poor woman from the Philippines is now putting Burton Harrison in nomination. Thank goodness her voice is such that one can't hear her. 363329 1:05. The secretary has just reported that Senator Glass says that the Resolutions Committee won't be ready to report until 8 P. M.

Adjourned until eight tonight.

Evening Session. 8:00. Large crowd. All seats in balcony taken; so I am perched on organist's bench. The organist is playing “Song of Songs.” Rumors are flying madly about “there will be no session”—“there will be,” etc. Jim Ham Lewis and Senator Robinson are embracing. Franklin Roosevelt is shaking hands on the platform to “Rose of Washington Square” played by the band.

8:05. Word has just come up that the Resolutions Committee won't be ready to report until 9 P. M., and then the session will last until 5 A. M. I wish I had taken a nap this afternoon instead of talking so long to Mr. Heney and doing some work among the doubtful delegates for McAdoo.

8:35. Band and organ play “On the Banks of the Wabash,” and Indiana delegates jump to their feet and cheer.

8:40. Chairman calls to order.

Singing of “Star Spangled Banner.”

8:45. Resolutions Committee not ready to report.

Sergeant-at-Arms Martin has appeared tonight in a full Colonel's U. S. A. uniform! Dear old soul, he looks so proud.

George Creel is laying down the law to a chosen few back of the chairman's seat. He is working hard for an Irish plank. The sub-committee of the Committee on Platform and Resolutions that has been sitting twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four for two days, are Senator Glass, Chairman, Secretary 364330Colby, Senator Walsh, of Montana, Vance McCormick, etc. They are all powerful.

9:15. Band plays “How Dry I Am,” and the New York State delegates go wild! Governor Al Smith has just appeared in the aisle amidst local applause from New York.

Mrs. Castleman, silver-haired National Committeewoman from Kentucky, 78 years old, is standing up and singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” with a rapt and inspired expression. Dear thing, she is for McAdoo. Oh! I wouldn't have missed this convention for anything! It is wonderful.

9:23. The wife of Dr. Jenkins, the editor of the Kansas City Post, has just asked me what paper I write for, and says that she wants to put me in touch with her husband, as she is sure my notes would be valuable to their paper. I make my most professional bow and say, “I will be glad to consult with him.”

A National Committeewoman from Washington, on Mrs. J.’s right, leans across and asks me if I will tour the Northwest, speech-making for the Democratic candidate. I give an evasive answer.

9:30. Mrs. Bass, Chairman Women's Bureau, introduced to address the convention, tells the story of the triumph of women's suffrage in Congress.

Governor Smith is sitting smilingly beside Miss Mills from “Up State”; her other side is substantially buttressed by Bessie Marbury, who has chewed gum consistently ever since the convention convened on Monday.

9:45. The crowd is yelling for Jim Ham Lewis, and the Chairman has sent for him! Jim Ham refuses 365331to speak. The delegates are tired and restless and want to be amused.

10:20. Howls for Bryan, “We want Bryan” from all over the house. Chairman raps hectically for order; the yells increase.

10:22. Committee on Resolutions not ready to report. Convention adjourns until ten o'clock Friday morning.

Friday, July 2nd. The Commoner in the same old alpaca coat, Carter Glass, Bourke Cockran, and other members of the Resolutions Committee appear on platform; so their labors must be over. Howls of “Bryan.” Prayer; then “The Star Spangled Banner.”

10:50. “We favor the League of Nations.” Enormous applause.

11:05. Ray Baker bechecked and bediamonded as usual, leads his wife draped in sables, triumphantly to the platform.

11:45. Suffrage plank brings on a great demonstration. All states join in procession except Maryland and South Carolina.

12:05. All the planks of the League of Women Voters included in the platform.

12:23. Glass says “nearly through” which brings applause. He is very human and lovable. His voice is nearly gone, and he must be near a collapse after sitting up for three nights.

12:40. Ireland. “I have to read the plank in my own ‘brogue,’ and this is the American ‘brogue’,” Great applause.

12:50. Reading of platform concluded.

Senators Robinson and Glass standing on the Speakers' platform surrounded by heavy ropes like 366332the principals in a prize fight waiting for the referee's, “GO.”

12:55. Bryan steps out to present minority report. Convention in an uproar. Bryan wants dry plank.

1:10. Bourke Cockran comes on platform with another minority report. He wants wines and beer!

1:40. Bryan opens debate on amendments. He speaks with all his old-time vigor except that his voice seems a little husky. He is a great exhorter, and to me what he says has a perfectly sincere ring, although I don't think that the dry and wet question should be touched on in the platform. It is a dead issue. Bryan makes very kind allusions to the President. He is altogether very kindly towards everyone, notwithstanding the belligerent tone of his newspaper articles after he was not included in the sub-committee on Resolutions.

2:10. Hobson, the much kissed, comes on to speak for five minutes. The audience is impatient with him—he hasn't Bryan's magnetism.

2:20. Mrs. Peter Oleson, of Minnesota, makes impassioned appeal for Bryan's plank.

2:30. Bourke Cockran begins his address with the invocation with which Mrs. Oleson left off, “God speed the right.” He “sure is” silver-tongued orator!

Hiram Johnson is sitting in one of the Press seats looking deeply interested in the debate. Bainbridge Colby, Vance McCormick and others of the sub-committee of the Committee on Platform are holding their hands to their heads and look about a foot from a fit!

3:20. Senator Walsh, of Massachusetts, pleading for a plank for Irish freedom. 367333 3:55 . Several minor speakers who can be passed over. Bryan has come on again to speak about a National Government Bulletin. Great and prolonged demonstration for Bryan. Largest personal one these has been.

4:55. Secretary Colby arguing for the platform as presented by the Committee. He makes a most masterly speech full of very subtle sarcasm, but perfectly courteous.

5:05. Ovation for Colby.

5:15 Carter Glass speaking. Alas, my dear Senator is laying into Bryan unnecessarily harshly it seems to me. Colby said everything without giving offense. It seems a pity to alienate the old man completely. We may need his good offices before we are through.

6:20. Voting on amendments. All lost.

Have just been down on the platform. Overheard Bryan say to himself, “I never thought they would beat me so badly.” I felt like crying. At times this afternoon he seemed to me to have the look of a fanatic.

Platform accepted as a whole. The delegates have voted just as they chose, notwithstanding the applause they gave Bryan.

The League of Nations is a terribly difficult plank to determine. I do hope that they will make a compromise possible. They can't get it through just as President Wilson brought it home, even if they have a majority in Congress next year; so why try to deceive the country?

On the surface this isn't at all a characteristic Democratic Convention. The Auditorium is beautiful and there is no confusion or disorder of any 368334kind—and no perspiring delegates in shirtsleeves.

Saturday. Nobody knows anything, and everybody lies every minute! McAdoo had dropped behind. I have been down on the floor trying to induce the three women on the New York delegation who came to San Francisco favorably disposed toward McAdoo and have now flopped to Cox, to reconsider.

Miss M., who was sent by the women of the Tenth District as an antidote to J.’s machine affiliation, has become her shadow, never moves without her, sits next to her in the convention and is obviously voting under instruction. With her mouth full of sandwich and her face screwed up as if afraid of dropping a hint of the truth, or a piece of bread and butter, she has just said to me, “No, I won't be coerced—no one but McAdoo people have tried to influence me since I have been here—I am voting as my conscience dictates, and my conscience says ‘Cox.’” That pretty D. has also succumbed, but I think to the wiles of Foxy Grandpa R. or Bourke Cockran's facile tongue. She says: “I've heard things since I have been here that have weaned me from McAdoo; they are so unfortunate that as you are his friend I can't tell you about them!” “All lies!” I retorted.

Mrs. O'Day also slipped. The men will too. Marbury calls insinuating remarks across to me as I hold a colloquy with Al Smith. “You'd better jump on, you'll be sorry you opposed Cox,” etc. She annoys me so that I call back to her, “All right, Bessie, I bet you one hundred dollars against the field that McAdoo will be nominated.” She takes me up at once and makes a great show of passing two fifty dollar bills to someone telling him he must be stake 369335holder. “My bag is in the organ loft; so I'll put up my hundred dollars later.” I don't add that I am more likely to have a hundred cents in it than a hundred dollars. I tell Al Smith he is so sure of reëelection that he can afford to have any Presidential candidate on the ticket and he will slip through with him. He says, with a knowing smile. “I would like to discuss that with you further.” He is a corker. How in the world did Tammany ever produce him?

In the aisle I meet G. and L. B. waiting for my report. “Hopeless,” I sigh. G. throws a scornful look over the delegation and says, “And to think I am paying that woman's board and expenses! Good-night!” One can't suspect either. He must have meant that he is paying it for some committee.

A little woman in white shirt-waist draws me aside and whispers in a tearful voice, “I hope you will tell Mr. McAdoo, when it is over, that I stood firm through it all, and it's been a nasty business too; such gibes as Mrs. J. has thrown at me—we women are so embarrassed by her. You should hear her talk. At our state delegation meeting the other morning. Bessie Marbury announced she was ‘going to the mat’ with Bryan on the prohibition question before the convention closed. Why, I hear of teas and entertainments the California women are giving all the time and our state is never invited.”

Mrs. Bass calls me on to the platform. Your old friend is there, sinister and jubilant, because McAdoo has lost ground to Cox. He keeps muttering: “What did I tell you,” and “I did it.” “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, etc.” Senator Robinson turns around and says, “It is too soon t crow, he may come back and surprise you.” 370336 Senator Glass says he thinks Chairman Robinson is for Cox. I wonder. Anyhow, Walsh os Montana, Pittman, Henderson, Glass, Gerry, are for McAdoo. —— seems to hate him. Ex-Senator Saulsbury comes up to me and says: “Why are you alienating all your friends by so conspicuously backing McAdoo?” I asked him since when he had changed his mind, as in 1913 at a dinner in Washington, he said to me, “After Wilson, McAdoo should be our next President.” “Yes, but I have learned better since then.” Everyone seems to be personal in his political opinions—what can McAdoo have done to Saulsbury?

3 P. M. Senator Walsh asks me to take a walk and we stroll about outside for an hour. It is a relief to get into the fresh air for a little and not to hear that continual repetition of “Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas,” etc. I shall dream of that roll call for weeks.

6:30. It is a deadlock, no less, with Cox a little ahead. I've just been down to talk to the Texas delegation, which has never varied from the forty votes for McAdoo. Thank goodness! And they want a recess as Cox is forging too much ahead. They asked me to go to Senator Glass and suggest an adjournment. I did so and he says he thinks it a good idea. Vance says that the Palmer people will vote with the McAdoo crowd; so that will carry it.

6:40. Demand for a roll call. Taken. Vote to adjourn carried.

Dined hurriedly at Palace Hotel.

Evening Session. Very little change in lineup. Where, oh, where, are those states that were coming over solid to us? As time goes by, it will be more and more difficult to nominate one of the leaders. 371337Senator —— says, “How can a sensible man like McCormick go on holding delegates for Palmer and so complicate this situation still further? Palmer has no earthly chance of winning. Why doesn't he release them?”

He isn't the only one that could help matters. If Bryan would advise Senator——to let his corporal's guard of votes go it might put McAdoo over.

11 P.M. My head is woozy with listening to roll calls and trying to keep a record of them. So many deluded ones think they are going to be the dark horse.

Midnight. Adjournment until Monday.

Later. Senator Walsh took me up to the Fairmount. When I began asking him about Vice-Presidents, he said, “Let's get McAdoo nominated first.”

Sunday night. Went to Senator Phelan's most beautiful place in the Santa Clara Valley for luncheon. It is five miles from San Francisco. There were eight or nine motors in line like those used at funerals. I went in one with Senators Pittman, Walsh of Montana, Gerry, and a Mrs. Gardner. A luncheon for one hundred people was served at small tables on the terrace. I sat between Senators Jones and Beckham. Others at that table were the host, Mrs. Marshall, and Mrs. Jones.

The Vice-President made a clever, short, and fitting Fourth of July speech. Senator Jones told Mrs. Marshall that if the deadlock continued he wouldn't be at all surprised to see her husband nominated. She replied, “He doesn't want it, but I can tell you that the party hasn't anyone as good a vote-getter as its Vice-President.” There was a lot of Marshall 372338talk today. Mr. Wooley told me after luncheon that McAdoo was a sure thing, as he went over with me the votes that are coming to him eventually.

July 5th. Well, it's all over. Now we must be good sports.

A McAdoo woman on the platform has just handed me this intellectual ditty: I couldn't dream—I couldn't know That I would have to swallow Crow. I have an awful tummy ache. Perhaps the Crow will turn to cake Just now it's like a ton of rocks This swallowing of Jimmy Cox.

All of this seems a great deal of excitement in behalf of the goal we never reached. It was surprising how as soon as Cox was nominated, we accepted him and forgot that we had done our best to keep the Ohio man from getting it. I think that Cox's offish attitude toward Prohibition accounts far more than the politicians will admit for the Democratic failure in 1920. It would have been much safer to choose a candidate to stick drouth out.

Republicans are good propagandists. I confess, being a simple soul, that on March 4, 1921, I got up all prepared to “Look who's here,” and generously admit I saw a fine sight. The Republican Barnums had really made me feel that maybe there would be bigger, better performances upon the Congressional trapeze. I waited to see the “Best Minds” prance. All this titillation was coupled with a rather selfish feeling of gratitude that we Democrats would no longer have to defend the Chief Executive against unfair criticism. Somebody else's turn now.

Mr. Harding's friends told us that he would not bring criticism down on his head as Mr. Wilson had, for he was much more “gregarious, understanding, and human.” “People like him.” All the better for his friends, I thought, as I hadn't then reached the point that Mr. Thomas Nelson Page had, who shortly before his death to me, “It is a tribute to his greatness that they can't leave ex-President Wilson alone. What they say makes no difference; his place in history is made among the greatest. No one can change that.” Mr. Harding's statement that “government is a simple thing after all,” gave me food for thought, as I summoned the picture of the white-haired man who had just left the White House, broken in body, 374340having sacrificed everything on the altar of a great ideal. He knew that government was not “a simple thing,” and I imagine that in two and a half years Mr. Harding learned that, too. The new Republican President started with friendlier critics than we had in 1912. I know Democrats, of course, who think no Republican can do anything that is wise or generous, but it hasn't been my misfortune to hear the abuse heaped upon a Republican President by Democrats that was always thrown on Woodrow Wilson by most Republicans. The Democrats are better sports at losing.

It was Wilson himself who led us in giving the Harding administration the benefit of every doubt. A certain Democratic senator who was calling on our leader spoke sharply of what he thought was Harding's shallying on a national question, when Wilson interrupted and said that he had been President and understood too well how many elements known only to the chief-executive might enter into presidential action, and that he would not speak hastily of another man on whom lay the responsibility for the leadership of the nation. No one, he said, outside the inner circle of administration, could pass judgment really fairly.

As human beings, I see no difference of breed between Republican and Democrat, though the Republicans fancy themselves of somehow a bluer strain. Most of my early friends happen to be Republicans; my political friends are Democrats. Human weakness and capacity for mistakes we all share individually though our fundamental political beliefs attach us to different social programs, one of which must be the “better” 375341program, if it comes nearer having as its goal the welfare of all the people rather than that of any special group or class.

I was asked by more than one old lady when I first came to Washington, “Why should Wilson's wife have driven back with him from the Capitol after his inauguration? and then the ball! So hard on the tradesmen to do away with it.” Trivial matters those, but they caused more than a little feeling. I looked to the “Best Minds” to restore the good old ways. But they didn't. Presently I came to see that Mr. Wilson instead of breaking precedents had really made them! The President's personal appearances before Congress, thus establishing closer relations with the people's representatives, is one of the more important Wilson fashions that have now become a habit.

From my seat on the sidelines I found Washington changed, when normalcy came in. The advocates of respect for property rights no matter what human rights were jeopardized, seemed to me to breathe freely again. Wilson had worried them much more. I felt that the administration was not keeping pace with the liberals of the country. The farmer-labor revolt that has come was the natural consequence, quite to be expected. I wondered if my Republican friends were not concluding as I have now concluded—never again to be intimidated by Republican propaganda—that an administration which stands still gives much more trouble in the end than one that “gets a move on.”

President Roosevelt used to know this. He instituted trust-busting and brought a better morale into business. In his time the farmers and laborers were 376342being killed by the Octopus, the big trusts. He struck at the giant before it brought on a revolution. Now there is a different breed of Octopus,—high tariff, no markets abroad. High wages are no help when the cost of living goes up, up, up. I think of Grandfather Jaffray, and how he used to say, “What tariff ever did anything but make the rich richer, and the poor poorer?”

At a political meeting last autumn Mrs. Douglas Robinson bounded up and said that one reason “people” hadn't like the Wilson administration was because they had had no faith in the men he appointed to the Cabinet. I stood up at once and said that Democrats were “people,” and that Democrats had been quite satisfied with President Wilson's cabinet. Man for man, I thought they stacked up very well with those President Harding had picked out or those who had been picked out for him. Republicans had harped so many years on the subject of Wilson's cabinet that I was quite sick and tired of listening.

When I got home I took out my pencil and my ruler and put down the names of Secretaries past and present. I don't even think it stacked up six to one and half a dozen to the other. In spite of one or two weak places, it was Wilson who chose the better men,—though a cabinet that holds both Hughes and Hoover deserves national and international respect.

Coming to the senate. There again, the “Best Minds” haven't made a better showing.

I am not a senate gallery fan like Alice Longworth, but some of the most interesting hours of my life have been spent there these last years. It is easy for people 377343on the outside to depreciate our lawmakers, to be exasperated by the political seesawings and the long drawn-out debates what seem to be trivial matters. But our legislators are in great measure very fine, conscientious men who try to carry out the wishes of their constituents.

I have been most interested, of course, in the fights on foreign policy. What I have not understood is, why those who didn't like the League haven't suggested some after plan of coöperation. The irreconcilables one more readily comprehends; they are “again” any concert of nations which includes us.

Senators Johnson and Borah have stood consistently for isolation. I have never heard even the most violent pro-Leaguers say that they were not perfectly conscientious in their opposition. On the other hand, men who said they were for the League, but the best way to get it was through voting for Harding, are difficult to comprehend. Republican administrations galore have good for international courts, yet in the third year of the administration that promised, no matter how it failed at home, to fix us up abroad, the American people are still waiting to join the other nations of the earth in a concerted effort to prevent war. Having blasphemed the League of Nations, the Republicans fear to turn to it. Had President Harding been able to do what he wanted to with his program on the World Court, he would certainly have had the backing of all right-thinking Democrats. I do really believe that the Democrats are good sports and, if they could have seen their country enter any thing that savored 378344of the League ideal that Wilson set before them, they would have blessed the spirit and let the credit go.

Nearly all of us were behind the Washington Arms Conference, and greeted it as an historic achievement of the Harding Administration. Some of the old hope I had in Paris when the League was born revived in me. When Mr. H. G. Wells said to me one day that Washington was the only capital in the world where such a gathering could be successfully held, the only place where the atmosphere was sufficiently free from intrigue, he made me hope that what was left undone at Paris would come to pass in Washington when the other nations came to us and idealism had a chance to play its game on the home-town field.

No one will ever forget the memorable opening-day when Secretary Hughes sprang the surprise of the American plan for naval disarmament. From the gallery adjoining that where the Senators and Representatives sat, it was fun to see their reaction to the proposition. They rose to it at once and cheered. In my anxiety to help the administration make a success of the Arms Conference, I enlisted to help convert some Democratic senators who were very slow about deciding how they would vote, for they were inclined to the belief that the Four-Power Treaty was going back to the old balance-of-power principle and would be of no help toward hurrying America's entrance into the League of Nations. There was a member of the English delegation who was an authority on the League and everything pertaining to it; so we planned a dinner at which he would explain the relation of the Treaty to the League, and how, if anything, it would 379345help, not hinder, America's participation of Geneva. The particular Senators I wanted to reach, promptly accepted my invitation to dine. So we all foregathered one evening at eight in my drawing-room. I had said nothing particularly about my party's having any other august purpose than the amenities of dinner. Though I recount the story myself, I must tell you how pleasant the table looked and how satisfied I was with the cook. My distinguished Englishman sat on my right. The conversation arrived almost of its own free will at the Four-Power Treaty. It was the visitor's turn to express his opinion and I smiled as only a hostess can smile all's going well. “Oh, yes,” said Mr. H., thrusting both his hands in his pockets, and assuming, as it were, the chair, “knowing that I was to be interrogated,” he went on, fishing out a pile of notes, “I have come prepared.” When his own pockets had given up memoranda of hardly less volume than the rabbit hosts that come from a magician's hat, he turned to his aide across the table, “Will you give me what you have? And do please fetch me whatever is left in the hall.”

From behind a white hillock of notes and pamphlets, he developed his theories and dilated on his facts. I looked at my Senators aghast. They were back in their shells. They had ceased to relish their dinner. Probably they wouldn't ever vote for the treaty now. I looked at Mr. H. “Wherever,” I said to myself, “did anybody ever get the notion that the British are sly at propaganda, that they can slip it unawares like tasteless poison in the tea? Children of guile, nothing! They are rash as soapboxers, open as babes!”

It taught me a lesson. The next time I want to lobby for anything I'm going to put on my hat and go up to Capitol Hill. Meals are going to be meals in my house and nothing more.

The Disarmament Conference of 1921 brought many interesting and distinguished people to Washington. As in 1917, Lord Balfour made a lasting and deep impression and left many friends remembering him affectionately. This philosopher-poet-statesman is the acme of charm and good breeding, the perfection of a type seldom or never met outside of Great Britain.

Princess Bibesco, the youngest wife in the diplomatic service, is only one of the many people in Washington who keep me always interested. The second night after Elizabeth came to the capital with her husband she dined with me and left all of us dazzled and delighted with her brilliant talk. Both Mr. Thomas Lamont and Mr. Norman Davis exclaimed when she had gone, how extraordinary it was that, though she was only twenty-five, she should have the mind of a cultivated woman of forty. I watch everything that comes from her pen with eagerness and when M. said to me the other day that Elizabeth's short stories gave her indigestion—they were so overfull of epigrams and meaty morsels—I said that was just the thing that made me find her so promising. She has a beginner's desire to tumble everything out at once. She has made friends quickly and before she leaves us, she will know America from top to bottom, for she is constantly going on eager little excursions, leaving behind the delightful old-world dignity of the Embassies in Washington, to 381347study America as it plays baseball or hangs breathless at a boxing-match.

Madame Jusserand, the distinguished wife of the dean of the Diplomatic Service, is one of the happiest ties, not only with Wilson's administration, but with the years before that. The Spanish and the Belgian Ambassadresses keep their little corners of Madrid and Brussels ever hospitable. Sir Auckland and Lady Geddes are the center of an amazing circle of friends.

Mr. Coolidge and his wife used to be like Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt. He was very, very silent, the most silent man I ever met. He hadn't a word of small talk about him and silences used to be very long. I had great sympathy with his type, for it reminded me of my taciturn English uncles. Mrs. Coolidge, au contaire, has vivacity and savoir-faire, and was the administration's greatest success, beloved by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Once when Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge dined with me in my garden—such a hot night it was—the Vice-President was puzzling about Senator “Pat” Harrison and his attacks on the Administration policies. Senator “Pat” knows how to blackguard people and still hold their friendship and respect. It is an art with him, and the Democrats et him make the greater part of their official speeches in the Senate. When he has anything particularly harsh to say about another Senator, he always sends a page to tell him to come in and surely listen. The Senator does and tells you afterwards how much he likes “Pat.”

I would hate to have “Pat's” job. I am supine when 382348it comes to campaigning against anyone. Very weak! They wanted me to go on the stump against Senator Wadsworth in 1920. I hated the way he fought suffrage, but I knew I would keep remembering how up-standing he looks, and how nice he is, and would probably end by telling that to my audience. I forebore to enlist. It is marvelous, though, to be a crusader for a cause like the League of Nations. Then you can let yourself go!

I spoke to two thousand people in an armory at Marion, Indiana, in 1920. Afterwards they asked questions. “Why does England have six votes in the Council?” And other questions about all the things you'd been at pains to tell them were not true. Then I recognized a fat old woman who had been standing up for a long time waiting her turn. She said, “I don't want to ask you no question, darlin', I just want to say to you, you could put backbone into a jellyfish.” She put backbone into me all right, the dear old soul. It lasted even when Katherine Bement Davis and others got up on the same platform with me and said, “I agree with all Mrs. Harriman says bout the League of Nations, but the way to get it is to vote for Warren G. Harding.”

When only yesterday the news came that President Harding was gone, that the gentle, good-natured man who preached normalcy and kindness was no more, I felt not only the common sense of loss which comes when the life of a leader, the symbol of authority in a great nation, is extinguished, but the last bit of partisanship vanished. And, if his policies were not mine, they 383349were, at the time of his election, the policies of many of the American people, as the vote showed. He endeavored to carry them out and was faithful to the trust reposed in him.