the second trial alone had occupied twenty-five days, one hundred witnesses had been heard, a cartload of letters and documents had been read, and the counsel on both sides had argued thirty-five hours. The testimony of some of Howard's victims was really touching in its manifestation of the innocence and confidence with which they had paid their hard-earned little sums to him, and trustingly accepted

all his procrastinating and lying statements and his false documents. Even to the last some refused to give up their faith in him, and said that their business was still in his hands. His position in the church appeared to have a charm for them, and to make a martyr of him. There seems to be no limit to the credulity of those who are the heaviest sufferers from this species of fraud. H. Sidney Everett.

THE approach of the presidential campaign reminds every thoughtful man that duties of a new kind in national politics have presented themselves. Tasks of administration now call for attention more loudly than the old party tasks; and the qualities of the President that we elect, for the next term at least, are of greater importance than the political doctrines that we emphasize. Recent events have made this especially plain.

Certain of the old problems that have come over from the immediate post-bellum period yet engage us, — let us hope in their vanishing forms: such, for example, as the tariff, — whether we shall keep the rates of duty as they are, or make them higher or lower; and the currency, whether we shall continue a forced-loan form of it, and thereby perpetually encourage inflation. These, of course, are important problems that we have not yet disposed of. But to these are now added quite as serious and urgent duties of a new kind, which impose an unusual responsibility on the President, and which ought to put us in a thoughtful mood as we approach the election; for they are all administrative duties. Shall we be wisely bold or simply reckless in our relations with other governments? Shall we make sure, as experience has taught us that it is wise

to make sure, of a safeguard in the character and courage of the chief executive against an inflation of the currency? Shall we continue to extend the classified civil service till it take in the most isolated postmaster and the remotest consular agent? It is well for us to try our presidential candidates by these tests before the nominating conventions meet, for afterwards we shall have but two to choose between, and these two, it is little comfort to reflect, may both be "convention accidents."

There is the greater reason, too, for a critical estimate of candidates now, because the campaigns for the nominations have been begun with all the old vulgar self-assertion, as if the prime duties of the time did not call for a President of whom office-seeking should be unthinkable, and as if the time of sheer party tests had not gone by. There was a period, of course, when party tests were perhaps the best tests, and when parties were our most important political instruments. Blunt and cumbersome as they were, they served fairly well for the main work in hand a generation ago. By party management we made sure of the results of the war; and the party, being a sort of army, was a convenient instrument for the massing of opinion on contested subjects during the reconstruction era

and after. It naturally took on military methods and even military nomenclature. Not unnaturally, too, the party was unduly magnified, and almost overshadowed the government itself. And it is from some of the evils of this very system that we must now make our escape; for even the presidency became part and parcel of the party, and thereby lost much of its proper use and dignity. So completely, indeed, was the chief executive merged in the party that he came to be regarded as its servant. The saying became current that any respectable man would make an acceptable President if he were loyal to his party. Thus a presidential election came to have no meaning except as a contest between the parties. This degraded position of the executive office falls so far short of the proper or historic conception of it that wonder is expressed at every election why this great civic act of choosing the head of the republic is not more impressive. After an election, men congratulate one another for a day or two, or exchange good-natured gibes, and go their way as if nothing uncommon had happened. It necessarily follows, when the party obscures the presidency, that we choose commonplace men to the office.

But if we are to make any real political progress, the relative position of the party and of the President in our political machinery must now be changed, if not reversed. For the new duties are not duties that the parties seem able to take up and perform; and for the lack of their ability or willingness to take hold on these new duties they have lost their compactness. Every election reveals more clearly their shifting boundaries. One year one party is "obliterated;" two years later the other party is "obliterated;" and two years later still the first party is again "obliterated." The stolid practitioners of politics, who regard each obliteration as the crack of doom or as a call to perpetual power, forget that on every occasion the

obliterated party is the party just then in authority, and that obliteration is only another name for popular weariness of the latest performance. With their unerring discrimination between a real duty and a sham duty, the people know that the parties no longer lay hold on the vital matter. They will soon see, if they do not already see, that it is to the President now to executive officers, indeed, of all grades that the conscience of the nation looks for the next steps in political progress.

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Moreover, we are far enough away from the time of party strife to see that the presidency was too lightly esteemed during the whole period from Lincoln to Cleveland. If during this time we had had Presidents who stood out from their party and somewhat above it, if indeed there were men who could have done so,

we might have kept our politics on the heroic level that we reached in the impulse to save the Union. We might at least have kept political life up to the level of our every-day life; for it is a shameful thing that while we have so wonderfully added to the devices for comfort and multiplied the opportunities for growth, lifting the life of the people, and broadening it, and making it fuller than ever before, our politics have constantly fallen to a lower plane. Legislatures have declined; municipal misgovernment has brought humiliation; the spoilsman has everywhere been active, if not everywhere dominant; the inflationist, repeatedly rebuffed, has repeatedly risen; and the demagogue has revived a forgotten part in the Jingo. During this time we did accomplish the one large political task that we took in hand, for the South is again an integral part of the Union. But so long as we forgot our administrative duties in our party zeal, the whole tone of political life, when it did not become criminal, at least became commonplace. And the measure of the lapse has been the decline of our executives, great and small.

If, therefore, it were ever true that any respectable man who "has made no party enemies," and who stands the test of party loyalty, is a proper presidential candidate, it is not true now. In fact it was never true. No one can study the work of the recent Congresses without reaching the conclusion that we have less to fear if there be a resolute man in the White House, whichever party be dominant in Congress, than if either party be dominant in Congress and we have not a courageous executive. The Fifty-First Congress, which was Republican, in 1890 dallied with inflation instead of strangling it, and enacted the so-called Sherman coinage law, which President Harrison approved. Congress and President suffered, whether for this reason or not, an overwhelming defeat. A disastrous financial panic came inevitably; and the Fifty-Third Congress, which was Democratic, was called in extra session in 1893 on purpose to deal with the currency. The House reëlected to the speakership a free-coinage member, and repealed the silver-purchase clause of the mischievous act only under compulsion. The result of the work of each Congress alike was that President Cleveland had to resort to unusual measures to maintain the national credit. To the executive fell the duties that Congress had shirked.

To go back further, it is easy to show how the part played by the President has always been a more important part than mere party tests contemplate. It was President Jefferson, and not Congress or his party, that made the Louisiana purchase. It was President Jackson, and not Congress or his party, that put down nullification. It was President Lincoln that rose more quickly to every high occasion than Congress or even his party. It is to three post-bellum Presidents that we owe vetoes of inflation bills; and it is to recent Presidents, rather than to Congress or to either party, that we owe such progress as we have made in civil service reform. Contrariwise, to two

weak or perverse Presidents, one just before Lincoln and one just after him, we owe heavier burdens than can ever be computed.

Of course we shall have further need for parties; and whether we need them or not, neither one of them is going really to suffer obliteration; but before another absorbing party conflict comes, that party which is wise enough to use the present opportunity to magnify and strengthen the executive office and to further administrative reforms will have not only a tactical, but also a prodigious moral advantage. But if we are asked this year to elect a man President merely because he is a Republican or merely because he is a Democrat, we may not make any advance at all; and the party that nominates a man for no other reason than that he is a partisan hero will show that it has no sense of the present opportunity.

Moreover, the presidential office constantly becomes, by an accretion of responsibilities, a more important office. The presidential functions continually get broader. The time is past, if it ever was, when a man, simply because he is a successful politician, can successfully fill the post. For example, there has been a constantly widening range of activity through the members of the Cabinet. The secretaries have themselves become great administrators to an extent that neither the public nor the politicians appreciate. When, for instance, under the Postmaster-General there are 70,000 postmasters, to say nothing of the employees under these, and when there are great tasks to be performed in increasing the efficiency of this service to a point not yet reached or dreamed of, and especially when the reformation of this great branch of the service from the spoilsmen is in the hands of the Postmaster-General; when the Secretary of the Interior has such far-reaching functions as are implied in our dealing with the Indians and with such of the public lands as are

left; and when the importance even of the Secretary of Agriculture has become so great that it touches the whole rural population, when these lesser Cabinet offices reach so far in their responsibilities and activities, the greater portfolios are of correspondingly greater importance. The almost incalculable amount of scientific work conducted by the government, a mere title catalogue of which would fill a volume, is all more or less affected by the appreciation and the spirit of the executive and of the members of the Cabinet. The Cabinet is a part of the executive machinery not even mentioned in the Constitution, which has grown now to the very first rank and value. A man of the widest culture and experience is required to diffuse a proper spirit through this vast organism, the like of which, in many respects, does not exist anywhere else. The sheer breadth of the presidential function and influence has far outrun the anticipation of the fathers and the necessities of any preceding time.

There is still another reason why a mere party hero is no longer necessarily an acceptable presidential candidate. There has been a specialization of executive functions. Men are selected for mayors of cities more and more frequently by reason of their executive qualities, and less and less by reason of their party allegiance; and it is with increasing frequency, we think, that governors of States are chosen from among the available men who have been mayors, or who have had some such executive experience. There is clearly such a thing as training for high executive duties, and the increasing appreciation of this fact makes the spoilsman's conception of the presidency more and more absurd.

From whatever point of view we regard the subject, therefore, the selection of presidential candidates is one of the most important acts in the whole range of our political duties; and it is unfortunate that serious discussion of the fit

ness for the presidency even of avowed candidates is usually put off till it is too late to affect the action of the nominating conventions.

Of the conspicuous candidates for the nomination of either party the earliest to begin his campaign was Mr. Thomas B. Reed. Now Mr. Reed's career has not been a career directly to train him for the presidency. His experience has not been executive, except as the duties of the speakership may be regarded as executive, as they are, of course; but nevertheless they differ essentially from the duties of the President. His political life began in 1868 as a member of the legislature of Maine, to the lower house of which he was twice elected, and to the upper house once; then he became attorney-general for the State, and afterwards solicitor of the city of Portland; and in 1876 he was elected to Congress. He has since been reëlected without interruption, and at the end of his present term he will have served for twenty years. For nearly thirty years, therefore, he has been continuously in the public service, and beyond doubt he has unusual talents for public affairs.

He entered Congress after the period of the great reconstruction debates; for in 1877, when he took his seat, the Democrats had a majority in the House. His congressional service, therefore, has fallen within the later period of party skirmishing, a time of continuous clash, for the most part on less important topics than the great subjects of the first decade after the war. In exercise of this sort he soon won distinction. Strongly partisan and exceedingly quick at repartee, he has every quality of an effective leader in a running party debate, and a leader he soon became. His practiced readiness in condensed speech is remarkable, and the epigram is his chief weapon. "A statesman," he recently said, "is a successful politician that is dead;" and the sentiment as well as the saying is char

acteristic. When, as Speaker, he was counting a quorum in the House, and one angry Democrat strode down the aisle exclaiming, "How do you know I am present? "Mr. Reed's reply was, "Does the gentleman deny that he is present?" A prosy Democratic member, in the course of a debate, once remarked that he would rather be right than be President. "Do not be alarmed," Mr. Reed replied, "you will never be either." This is not wit, but rather a cleverness at retort, and eighteen years of continuous practice has given him great skill. By his impromptu performances, always courageously and often defiantly done, he rose to the leadership of his party in the House. He did not rise by the part he took in the thorough discussion of any great subject. Not more

He has never

than half a dozen times in his whole congressional career has he made a set speech. Although Mr. Reed has accumulated much miscellaneous information, he seems not to have made himself master of any subject or group of subjects. It has been wholly as a party leader that he has risen above the rank and file. He has never identified himself with any great cause. set a moral force in motion. As a member of the Potter committee to investigate the presidential election of 1876, he did one of his most conspicuous services to his party, but his clever crossquestions were designed not so much to bring out the historic truth concerning the election as to fasten upon the Democratic candidate the stigma of a thwarted attempt to buy the office.

The leadership of his party in the House naturally brought him election to the speakership when, in 1891, the Republicans had a majority in the House. It is on his career as Speaker that his present prominence rests; and his greatest achievement in the chair was the reformation that he made in congressional procedure. In this Congress the Republicans had only a small majority. The

Democratic minority, therefore, could technically absent themselves, and, unless all the Republican members were present, balk the proceedings for lack of a quorum. Technically, to absent one's self it was necessary only to refuse to answer when the roll was called. A member could keep his seat in the House and yet be "absent." This method of bringing the proceedings to a halt had often been adopted, and had by use acquired a sort of legitimacy; and the Democratic minority proposed in this way to prevent objectionable legislation. Common sense and public necessity demanded that some way be found out of so absurd a predicament.

Mr. Reed was equal to the emergency, with a surplus of energy left over, indeed, which spent itself in unnecessary and sometimes undignified comments from the chair. In spite of precedents and in spite of the rules of the House, he himself, as Speaker, counted a quorum and declared a quorum present. This was common sense, at least, and, as Mr. Reed expressed it in a somewhat loose phrase, it was also in accordance with the broad principles of parliamentary law. Certainly it was a necessity. His error, if he committed any error, was, as usual, an error of impetuosity. But his purpose was accomplished, and Congress was forever thereafter, no doubt, freed from such an absurd system as had long been in practice. It was a noteworthy and courageous achievement, in every way characteristic of so well trained and determined a party leader. The stormiest sessions that had been held for many years followed this bold action of the Speaker. But he was imperturbable and unswerving.

It is this achievement that not only made certain his second election as Speaker, but has given the principal impetus to his candidacy for the presidential nomination; for this resolute action has, for the time at least, made him a party hero. Now, there is nothing in