"Mais resiste-t-on a' la vertu? Les gens qui n'eurent point de
faiblesses sont terribles," observed Sylvestre Bonnard of the
redoubtable Therese.
This fearsomeness of the good is an old story. Horace remarked it,
when, walking about near Rome, pure of heart and free from sin, he
met a wolf. The beast quailed before his virtue and ran away,--to
bark at the statue of the she wolf giving suck to Romulus, by way
of intelligent protest.
A similar prevalence of virtue and a similar romantic quality,
where it is least to be expected, was disclosed in a recent
encounter between Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, and one
of the irreconcilables, when Mr. Hughes, integer vitae scelerisque
purus had just commissioned Colonel George Harvey to take the seat
once occupied by Woodrow Wilson in the Supreme Council.
When the news of this appointment reached the Capitol, Senator
Brandegee, of Connecticut, hurried down to that structure across
the street from the White House whose architectural style so
markedly resembles the literary style of President Harding, the
State War and Navy Building, official residence of Mr. Hughes.
Harvey being, in a sort, Brandegee's ambassador to the Court of
Saint James, the Senator's object was to tell Mr. Hughes what
Harvey should do in the Supreme Council. Mr. Brandegee has the gift
of direct and forceful speech. In his earnestness, he dispenses
with the elegancies and amenities. The upper ranges of his voice
are not conciliatory.
In this tone, he developed views regarding this country's foreign
relations with which Mr. Hughes could not agree. The Secretary of
State combatted the Senator from Connecticut precisely as he
combats counsel of the other side when a $500,000 fee is at stake.
The discussion was energetic and divergent.
Mr. Brandegee hurried back to the Capitol and summoned other
senators to his office, all those who were especially concerned
about the exposure of Colonel Harvey to European entanglements.
He was excited. His voice was nasal. His language, in that select
gathering, did not have to be parliamentary. He told the senators
that they could expect the Versailles treaty by the next White
House messenger; that "that whiskered,"--but nothing lies like
direct quotes,--that "that whiskered" Secretary of State would soon
get us into the League of Nations, being able for his purposes to
wind President Harding about his little finger!
His excitement in such an emergency naturally communicated itself
to his hearers. What to do? It was unanimously decided that the
only adequate course was for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to resign as
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by way of
protest.
Henry Cabot Lodge running away from his chairmanship would be Henry
Cabot Lodge behaving as romantically as Horace's wolf. The good are
terrible, as Anatole France said in the words with which this
sketch begins. It is not so much that you can not resist them, as
that they lead you to make such fools of yourselves.
Mr. Hughes prevails, however, not merely by his virtue, but by his
intelligence. His is the best mind in Washington; to this everyone
agrees, and it is not excessive praise, for minds are not common in
the Government.
Mr. Harding has not a remarkable one, the people having decided by
seven million majority that it was best not to have one in the
White House, choosing instead, a good heart, excellent intentions,
and reasonable common sense. Mr. Hoover has a fine business
instinct, great but diffused mental energy, but hardly an organized
mind. From this point the Cabinet grades down to the Secretary of
Labor, who, when Samuel Gompers, Jr., his Chief Clerk, addressed
him before visitors as, "Mr. Secretary," said, "Please don't call
me, 'Mr. Secretary,' Sam. Call me, 'Jim.' I'm more used to it."
"Call me Jim" is the mental sea level of the Administration, by
which altitudes are measured, so let us not exalt Mr. Hughes' mind
unduly, but merely indicate what its habits are. Its operations
were described to me by a member of the Cabinet, who said that no
matter what subject was up for discussion at a Cabinet meeting, it
was always the Secretary of State who said the final convincing
word about it, summing it all up, saying what everyone else had
been trying to say but no one else had entirely succeeded in
saying, simplifying it, and all with an air of service, not of
self-assertion.
Mr. Harding, speaking to an intimate friend, said he had "two
strong advisers,--Hughes and Hoover."
It is a satisfaction, even though it is not a delight, to come in
contact with a mind like Mr. Hughes'; it is so definite, so hard
and firm and palpable. You feel sure that it rests somewhere on the
eternal verities. It is never agnostic. It has none of the malaise
of the twentieth century. Mr. Justice Brandeis, when Mr. Hughes was
governor of New York and a reformer and progressive, said of him,
"His is the most enlightened mind of the eighteenth century."
I think the Justice put it a century or two too late, for by the
eighteenth century skepticism had begun to undermine those firm
foundations of belief which Mr. Hughes still possesses. For him a
straight line is the shortest distance between two points,--Einstein
to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Conclusions rest upon the absolute rock of principle, as morality
for his preacher father rested upon the absolute rock of the Ten
Commandments. There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no nuance, no on
the one hand, on the other, no discursiveness, no yielding to the
seductions of fancy, but a stern keeping of the faith of the
syllogism; a thing is so or it is not so. Mr. Hughes never
hesitates. He never says, "I must think about that." He has thought
about it. Or he turns instantly to his Principle and has the
answer.
You speak of Mr. Hughes to ten men in the Capitol, and nine of them
will say to you, "Of course it is easy to understand; his is the
one real mind in Washington."
Everyone is impressed, for, starting with no other initiation into
the mysteries of foreign relations than having had a father born in
Wales and having spent his vacations in England, probably in the
lake region studying the topography of Wordsworth's poetry,--a
certain oft detected resemblance to Wilson must make Wordsworth his
favorite poet, as he was Wilson's,--in ten days was he not a great
Secretary of State; and in three months the greatest Secretary of
State? To be sure, back of him was the strongest nation on the
earth, left so by the war, the one nation with resources, the
creditor of all the others, to which a successful foreign policy
would be naturally easy if it could only decide what that policy
should be.
It was left to Mr. Hughes to say what it should be. His discovery
of the word "interests," amazed Washington; it was so obvious, so
simple that no one else had thought of it. Mr. Hughes' mind works
like that;--hard, cold, unemotional, not to be turned aside, it
simplifies everything, whether it be a treaty fight that has
confused everyone else in the land, or a rambling Cabinet
discussion; whether it be the mess in which the war left Europe, or
the chaos in which watchful waiting left Mexico. His is a mind that
delights in formulae. He has one for Europe. He has one for Mexico.
It is an analytical, not a synthetical mind, a lawyer's mind, not a
creator's, like Wilson's, with, perhaps it may turn out, a fatal
habit of over-simplification. Life is not a simple thing after
all.
But effective simplification is instantly overwhelming; and he made
his brief announcement, a few days after taking office, that the
United States had won certain things as a belligerent, that it had
not got them, that he was going after them, that other countries
could expect nothing from us until they had recognized our rights
and our interests; he had completely routed the Senate, which had
been opposing Wilson's ideals with certain ideals of its own,
pitting Washington's farewell address against "breaking the heart
of the world," in a mussy statement of sentimentality.
Mr. Hughes talked of islands and oil and dollars; and the country
came to its senses. Mr. Wilson had pictured us going into world
affairs as an international benefactor; it was sobby and suggested
a strain on our pocketbooks. The Senate had pictured us staying out
of them because our fathers had warned us to stay out and because
the international confidence men would cheat us; it was
Sunday-school-booky and unflattering. Mr. Hughes said we should go
in to the extent of obtaining what was ours, and that we should stay
out to the extent of keeping the others from obtaining what certainly
was not theirs. It sounded grown-up; as a Nation we belonged not to
the sob-sisterhood, neither were we tied to the apronstring of the
Mothers of the Constitution.
Our national self-respect was restored. Truly, it required a mind
to discover "interests" in the cloud of words that Mr. Wilson and
the Senate had raised. Of course, it is all clear now, when
everybody scorns idealism and talks glibly of interests. "Hobbs
hints blue, straight he turtle eats; Nobbs prints blue, claret
crowns his cup." But it was Hughes who "fished the murex up," who
pulled "interests" out of the deep blue sea of verbal fuddlement.
And thinking of our dollars, thanks to Mr. Hughes, we are made sane
and whole, clearsighted and unafraid, standing erect among the
nations of the earth asking lustily for Yap.
Our foreign relations had been the subject of passion. Mr. Hughes
made them the subject of reason. Mr. Wilson could think of nothing
but his hatred of Lodge, which rendered an agreement with the
Senate impossible, and his hatred of Lloyd George and Marshal Foch,
which rendered cooperation with the Allies and through it
achievements in the foreign field that would have reconciled the
public to his policies, equally impossible.
Mr. Hughes looked at his task objectively. He saw the power of the
United States. He saw how easy it was to exert that power
diplomatically. He saw the simple and immediate concerns of the
United States. Foch says that he won the war, "by smoking his
pipe," meaning by keeping cool and regarding his means and ends
with the same detachment with which he would study an old campaign
of Napoleon. I do not know on what sedative Mr. Hughes wins his
diplomatic victories, as he does not smoke a pipe;--perhaps by
reading the Sunday School Times. But like the French Marshal, he
knows the secret of keeping his head. It is a great quality of mind
not to lose it when you most need it. Mr. Hughes has it. Perhaps
this is why Washington remarks his mind; he always has it with him.
"I am not thinking of myself in my work here," he said once. "I
don't care about immediate acclaim. I am counsel for the people of
this country. If a generation from now they think their interests
have been well represented, that will be enough."
He is coldly objective.
Mr. Hughes comes by his coolness naturally. He was born to it,
which is the surest way to come by anything. Men have hated him for
it, coolness being a disconcerting quality, ever since he emerged
from obscurity in New York during the insurance investigation,
calling it his "coldness" and adding by way of good measure the
further specification, his "selfishness."
If the last characterization is to stand, it should be amended to
read, his "enlightened selfishness." He has a good eye for his own
interests. Roosevelt disliked him for it, because when governor and
again when candidate for president, he refused to gravitate into
the Roosevelt solar system, taking up his orbit like the rest of
them about the Colonel. But think what happened to that system when
the great sun of it went out!
His political associates in New York hated him, accused him of
being "for nothing but Hughes," when he quit them in the fight "to
hand the government back to the people" and went, on the invitation
of President Taft, upon the Supreme Bench. But it was his only way
out. If he had gone on working with them, he would still be
"handing the government back to the people" along with,--but who
were the great figures of 1910? He knows an expiring issue and its
embarrassments by an unerring instinct. He finds a new one, such as
"our national interests," with as sure a sense.
It is worth while casting a glance at him "smoking his pipe," when
other real and false opportunities presented themselves to him; one
finds discrimination. He refuses a Republican nomination for Mayor
of New York City when there is not a chance of electing a
Republican Mayor of New York City. He accepts a Republican
nomination for Governor of New York State, when the putting up of
Hearst as the Democratic candidate makes the election of a
Republican as Governor of New York State morally certain. He
refuses the Republican nomination for President, in 1912, when
another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through
vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the
one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four
years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President,
when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to
win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected
opportunities lie ready to his hand and when the force of world
events requires little more than his intelligent acquiescence to
bring him diplomatic success.
His discovery of "interests" was no accident. It sprang from that
hard unemotional simplifying habit of his mind.
When one writes of Mr. Hughes, men ask, pardonably, "Which Mr.
Hughes? The old Mr. Hughes, or the new Mr. Hughes?" for he has had,
as the literary critics would say, his earlier and his later
manner.
But it is chiefly manner, a smile recently achieved, a different
way of wearing the beard, a little less of the stern moralist, a
little more of the man of the world. A connoisseur of Hughes, who
has studied him for nearly twenty years, after a recent
observation, pronounced judgment: "It's the same Hughes, a trifle
less cold, but just as dry." And the Secretary of State himself,
when one of the weeklies contained an article on "The New Mr.
Hughes," remarked, "People did not understand me then, that is
all."
These two eminent authorities being substantially agreed for the
first time during many divergent years, there must be something in
it. Mr. Hughes must be a gradually emerging personality. You take
that new warmth, recently detected; Mr. Hughes himself knows it was
always there. It is like the light ray of a star which has needed a
million years to reach the earth; it was always there but it
required a long time to get across.
Then the beard:--when Mr. Hughes was "handing the government back
to the people" in New York, it was a preacher's beard; you might
have encountered its like anywhere among the circuit riders. Now it
is a foreign secretary's beard; you might encounter it in any
European capital,--a world statesman's beard. The change of beard
reveals the smile, which was probably always there, and the
splendid large teeth. The nose, standing out in bolder relief, is
handsomer and more distinguished. You see more of Mr. Hughes than
you used to and you gain by the improved vision.
Something has dropped from him, however, beside the ends of the
whiskers. I met him first when he was about to run for President in
1916. An icy veil, like frozen mist, seemed to hang between us. We
talked through it ineffectively. When I saw him again as Secretary
of State, that chill barrier had fallen away; to recur to my
figure, he gradually emerges.
Mr. Hughes of the later manner is, however, I am persuaded after
long familiarity with his career, more truly Hughesian than the
Hughes of the earlier manner; just as the Henry James of the later
manner is more explicitly Jamesian than the James of the earlier
manner, and the Cabot Lodge of the present is much more
irretrievably Cabotian than the Cabot Lodge who years ago stood
with reluctant feet where the twin paths of scholarship and
politics meet,--and part.
I should say that Mr. Hughes was Bryan plus the advantages, which
Mr. Bryan never enjoyed, of a correct Republican upbringing and a
mind. The Republican upbringing and the mind have come of late
years to preponderate. Looking at Mr. Hughes to-day, you could not
tell him from a Republican, except perhaps by his mind, though such
esoteric Republicans as Brandegee, Cabot Lodge, and Knox profess an
ability to distinguish.
But when he was "handing the government back to the people" in New
York, there was too much Bryan about him. The Republicans would
have none of him, except as a choice of evils,--the greater evil
being defeat. They called him ribald names. They referred to him
scornfully as "Wilson with whiskers," when they ran him,
reluctantly, for the Presidency in 1916. His opponent being also of
the Bryan school, and a minister's son at that, Hughes striving for
an issue, failed to make it clear which was which, a doubt that
remained until the last vote from California was finally counted
after the election. This was the Mr. Hughes of the earlier manner.
Latterly, Mr. Hughes has succeeded in establishing the distinction
which he did not succeed in making during that campaign. When he
confronted the task of Secretary of State, he carefully studied the
international career of Woodrow Wilson, as a sort of inverse
Napoleon, a sort of diplomatic bad example.
"This," he said to himself, "was a mistake of Wilson," and he noted
it. "And this," he observed thoughtfully, "was another mistake of
Wilson. I shall avoid it." "This," he again impressed on his
memory, "was where Lloyd George and Clemenceau trapped him. I shall
keep out of that pit."
His head, like a book of etiquette, is full of "Don'ts," diplomatic
"Don'ts," all deduced from the experience of Wilson.
The former President met Europe face to face. Mr. Hughes thanks his
stars for the breadth of the Atlantic. The former President put his
League of Nations first on his program. Mr. Hughes puts his League
of Nations last, to be set up after every other question is
settled.
The former President tried to sell the Country pure idealism. Now
as a people we have the habit of wars in which we seek nothing, but
after which, in spite of ourselves, a little territory, a few
islands, or a region out of which we subsequently carve half a
dozen States, is found adhering to us. Mr. Wilson offered us a war
in which, of course, we sought nothing and found, at the end of it,
not the customary few trifles of territory, but the whole
embarrassing, beggarly world adhering to us. The thumbscrew and the
rack could not wring from Mr. Hughes the admission that we are
after anything more lofty than our interests.
One of the present Secretary's "Don'ts" of similar derivation is
"Don't have a fight with the Senate unless you make sure first that
you have the public with you."
Mr. Hughes does not run away from fights; he likes them. But
believing God to be on the side with the most battalions, and
intending scrupulously to observe this last "Don't," in order to
secure the necessary popular support, he is as Secretary of State,
"handing the government back to the people," just as he did when
governor,--a little less self-consciously, perhaps, a little less
noisily, but still none the less truly.
He is the most democratic Secretary of State this Country has ever
had, and this includes Bryan to whose school, as has just been
remarked, he originally belonged. If we are ever to have democratic
control of foreign relations, it will be by the methods of Mr.
Hughes, because of the training and beliefs of Mr. Hughes, and as a
consequence of the most undemocratic control of foreign relations
which our Constitution attempted to fasten upon us.
A successful foreign policy requires public understanding and
support. The makers of the Constitution established in our
government a nice balance of powers between the various
departments, beautifully adjusted until someone thought of putting
a stone into one side of the balance. That stone is the people. The
Fathers of the Constitution had not noticed it. The executive put
it into its end of the balance some years ago, and the legislative
has been kicking the beam ever since. One nice bit of balancing was
that between the Senate and the Executive on treaty making. In
foreign relations, the President can do everything, and he can do
nothing without the approval of two thirds of the Senate. It is a
nice balance, which broke the heart of John Hay, frittered away the
sentimentalities of Mr. Bryan, and destroyed Mr. Wilson.
No one ever thought of putting the stone into it until the Senate
did so two years ago, by discussing the Versailles treaty in the
open, right before the public. The people got into the scale, and
Mr. Wilson hit the sky.
Mr. Hughes observed what happened. He is determined that the stone
this time shall go in on his end of the balance. He talks to the
country daily. He takes the people into his confidence, telling all
that can be told and as soon as it can be told. He makes foreign
relations hold front pages with the Stillman divorce case. He makes
no step without carrying the country with him. He comes as near
conducting a daily referendum on what we shall do for our
"interests" as in a country so big as ours can be done; and that is
democratic control of foreign relations, initiated by the Senate,
for its own undoing.
Into that balance where he is placing the stone, he will put more
of mankind's destinies than any other man on earth holds in his
hands to-day. His has been a long way up from the shy, sensitive
youth that one who knew him when he was beginning the law describes
to me. He was then unimaginably awkward, incapable of unbending, a
wet blanket socially. An immense effort of will has gone into
fashioning the agreeable and habitual diner-out of to-day, into
profiting by the mistakes of the New York governorship, of the
campaign of 1916.
One sees still the traces of the early stiffness; the face is
sensitive; the eyes drop, seldom meeting yours squarely; when they
do, they are the mild eyes of the Church! I suppose the early
experiences of the Church help him.
His attitude toward Colonel Harvey's and other of the President's
diplomatic appointments takes its color from his good father's
attitude toward the problem of evil. God put evil in the world, and
it is not for man to question. The President sends the Harveys
abroad; they are not Mr. Hughes', but his own personal representatives.
It is not for Mr. Hughes to question.
He grows a better Republican every day. And the Republicans of the
Senate are not reconciled. They feel like the man who saw the
hippopotamus:
If he should stay to tea, I thought,
There won't be much for us.
There won't be much for them. Enthusiasm grows among them over his
admirable fitness for reinterment on the Supreme Bench.