ample, was ahead of his generation in political liberalism, but in all matters affecting religious belief or affiliation he was one of the most intrepid rear-guards. The same was true of Mr. Gladstone in England a generation earlier.

It is a commonplace of speech that race and religion should have no place in politics. But it is not a commonplace of action. It never has been. We have had in the past our Know-Nothings, Anti-Masonic parties, Ku Klux Klans, A. P. A.'s, and Molly Maguires-indeed the country has rarely been without some sort of organized intolerance aiming to keep political power in the hands of "true Americans." Governor Smith is by no means the first to project the racial or religious issue into politics. His candidacy has merely lifted to a national level a national level what has hitherto been confined to State and local campaigns. Catholic governors and senators have at one time or another been elected in about half the States. It is difficult for Catholics to understand why so much consternation should be caused by a claim that is not new in principle, but only in degree.

In the election of 1828, most of the broader issues were lost to view. The tariff, the question of internal improvements, foreign policy, even the extension of slavery-none of these got much discussion. The whole campaign centered around the personal qualities, ideals, and idiosyncrasies of the candidates. Adams was no campaigner. A New Englander and an aristocrat, he recoiled from the sordidness of a rough-and-tumble campaign. He

thus acquired the handicap of being placed on the defensive. Jackson, on the other hand, carried his fight to the people. He had the advantage of an organization the like of which had not been known in national politics before. Its nucleus was Tammany Hall, which declared strongly for the Tennesseean in September, 1827, more than a full year before the election was held. There were State committees and local committees everywhere. Never before had there been such a campaign of rumors and whisperings, with their effective appeal to sectional motives and class jealousies. Jackson was pressed upon the public imagination as the friend of the common man and the foe of privilege. That phantom fellow, the common man, bulked large in the campaign of 1828—and he will in this one before it is through.

There were twenty-four States in the Union at this time. They had already gravitated into groups, Northeast, Middle States, South and West. New England was conceded to Adams and the Southern States to Jackson, even before the campaign began. Quite rightly so, as the outcome proved. We are accustomed to think of the Solid South as the product of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The reconstruction policy of the Republican party is often blamed for having thrown the territory below Mason and Dixon's line into the Democratic column to stay. But the South went solid for Jackson in 1828, every bit of it, and the border States as well. The real battle, therefore, was fought in the Middle Atlantic States and in the West. To a degree, history is repeating itself

in that respect to-day. Jackson was portrayed as a friend of the farmer and the frontiersman in the West, which he was; and as a friend of every other interest in New York and Pennsylvania, which he was not. In the end he carried both areas and was an easy victor. His vote in the electoral college was more than double that of his opponent.

Jackson was greatly aided during his canvass by his ability to capitalize a grievance. His friends believed that he ought to have been President four years before, and they made the country believe that he was a muchabused man. They iterated and reiterated the cry that he had been kept from the White House by corrupt bargains and the bigotry of the aristocrats. There has been a good deal of the same feeling with respect to Governor Smith since the Madison Square Garden fracas of 1924. Most of his friends are convinced that he should have had the Democratic nomination then, and but for his religion there can be little doubt that he would have had it. On the whole, it was his good fortune to have failed, for his chances of election would certainly not have been better in 1924 than they are now. He would also have been minus a grievance which his backers are losing no opportunity to utilize in their appeals to the proletariat.

If any one is in doubt as to whether the standards of political campaigning have been noticeably raised in the United States during the past

hundred years, he need only spend an hour or two looking over the "literature" which was thrust upon the electorate by both sides during the campaign of 1828. Nothing so ruthless would be tolerated to-day. The country was deluged with scurrilous pamphlets and handbills which contained little or no reference to the issues, but plenty of personal slander and innuendo. Jackson was pictured as a drunkard, a cock-fighter, a gambler, an adulterer, even a murderer. The famous "coffin handbills" bore the names of his alleged victims. Even the reputations of his wife and mother did not escape the malicious literary onslaught. Adams, on the other hand, was pilloried as a rich skinflint who never paid his honest debts, a swindler of the national treasury, a man who had married a foreigner and who never kept his word. One of the hostile cartoons showed him using a horsewhip upon a crippled old soldier who had dared to ask for a bite to eat.

It is hard to believe that votes could have been gained by this carnival of printed vulgarity even in the crude days of a century ago. Certainly we have climbed a huge turn of the spiral on the way to more dignified conduct in national campaigns. Whether the son of the new frontier will fare as well at the polls. as did the son of the old frontier, is for the future to disclose. In any event, he will not do it by the same methods, nor will he have similar methods used against him.

M

R. H.G. WELLS, a man of many convictions, gave forcible expression to one of them when he said a few years ago that Americans spend half their lives in a "loud glare," and the other half behind a very effective smoke-screen. They are as dexterous in courting publicity as in eluding it. "When you go to the United States," he wrote, "and see head-lines and interviews with a girl about her engagement, or with a professor about his resignation, you at first say: 'Good God, there is no privacy here at all.' Then you discover that outside that crude, cheap, hasty lighting-up of salient objects and events, there are abysses of darkness, immense pits where much goes on and nothing is exposed; and people, rich people especially, are unobserved in them, and doing the most extraordinary things."

This is a truth so manifest that no one dreams of questioning it. But the phenomenon is not confined to America or to the twentieth century. Long before newspapers began their enlightening career, astute men knew what to blazon to the world, and what to withhold from observation. How otherwise would the Delphic oracle have run its long and honorable course? How otherwise

would treaties, pacts, protocols, coalitions, concordats and the like, have come into being? In the press of to-day the columns of foreign news are padded out with fragments of unimportant intelligence enlivened with adroit speculation. We are told that the Prince of Wales has learned a few words of Welsh, that Mussolini desires all Italians to wear the same kind of head-gear (a thing abhorrent to the human spirit), that a poor little mission has been looted and burned in China. But an indiscreet explosion of poison gas, where none was supposed to exist, is lightly handled; and into the sacred sanctuary of the great god, Capital, no one ventures to intrude. When a Paris despatch is headlined, "Europeans to Keep Steel Sales Hidden-Trust Will Not Disclose Its Export Markets, or Sharing of Business Among Members," we know that Trusts abroad and Trusts at home are very much alike. One touch of finance makes the whole world kin.

The gentle wish-wash of social gossip which has a generous allowance of space in American newspapers rises occasionally (as when the Queen of Rumania visited our shores) into a tidal wave of imbecility. During our submerged period,

nothing seemed of importance save the lady's vapid utterances and amazing wardrobe, unless, indeed, it was the desolating fact-cabled hysterically from Paris-that her son, Prince Nicholas, had appeared in the rue de la Paix "with a hole of considerable size in the heel of one of his socks, which showed plainly above his Oxford shoe." Yet amid the feverish paragraphs which dealt with the intimacies of the queen's toilet there was never a word of information as to her purpose in coming to this country. Her too zealous publicity agents exhausted themselves in raptures over her "low-cut pumps of amber snake-skin," and left us to suppose she had journeyed all the way from Rumania to show them

to us.

Two years ago the managers of Philadelphia's ill-fated Sesqui-Centennial Exposition contrived adroitly to wedge a prize-fight (DempseyTunney) between a Greek play and a great religious ceremony. They were broad-minded men, devoid of prejudice. Reams of printed matter filled the newspapers for weeks before this epoch-making event. Preachers, women's clubs, "redblooded men" and "hundred-percent Americans" (terms of mystery both of them), uplifters and some dozens of societies for regulating other people's lives-all contributed their views. Much irrelevant information was offered and read. Yet, as the "New Republic" pointed out, the one thing that should have been known, Dempsey's physical condition (he had for years preserved a maximum of reputation on a minimum of fighting), was as carefully hidden as is the financial status

of Moscow. The betting was done in the dark, with results which should be but will not be a warning to bettors in the future.

A typical illustration of American sentiment concerning privacy and publicity is the ever-renewed dispute anent the printing of income-tax returns. People with incomes do not want the returns printed. They say, and with some show of reason, that taxes are personal calamities, and of no concern to the public. People without incomes not only want the returns printed, but take a somber delight in reading them. The more fabulous the figures, the keener the relish for this Barmecide feast, which appears to afford the feasters a ghostly form of nourishment. The conservative press supports, as in duty bound, the people with incomes, and denounces the printed lists as the surrender of life's last decency. The radical press supports, as in duty bound, the incomeless people, and denounces all efforts at secrecy as inspired by sinister motives. And to supply the comic element which is seldom lacking in public affairs, an occasional bootlegger or burglar (men who certainly have a need of, if not a right to, secrecy) takes pleasure in paying his taxes, and stating with commendable candor the nature of his avocation, and the profits accruing therefrom. One Chicago burglar of a humorous turn claimed a deduction for certain small tools lost on the job. Crime being a popular and lucrative American industry, it is only right that it should help support the government it

to

defies.

The eagerness of adults for "reve

lations" of any kind about anybody is like the well-remembered eagerness of children for a "secret." Nothing was ever so full of promise and so empty of fulfilment as the secrets of childhood unless it be the revelations of maturity. Think of the vogue accorded to the "true" biographies of distinguished、 Americans "The True George Washington," "The True Benjamin Franklin," when they first flaunted their verities to the public eye. Yet they were, in the main, indistinguishable from the presumably false lives which preceded and which followed them. A brief biography of Mr. Coolidge promised to tell "his whole life as a human being"-something which has never yet been told about anybody since the beginning of the world. "The Secrets of the White House," as revealed by its housekeeper, went no further in all likelihood than the President's inclination to economy and fish-cakes.

England may be less adroit than the United States in shadowing her 'abysses of darkness"; but in the matter of "loud glare" she stands second to none. The memoirs of the irrepressible "Margot," now the widowed Countess of Oxford and Asquith, were as loud as a saxophone, and as glaring as a Broadway electric sign. When some reminiscences by Mrs. Lloyd George were under consideration, the publishers thought fit to promise her readers "Fascinating glimpses into the secret history of politics" and "Intriguing sidelights upon leading personalities"-assurances which they must have known to be vain. The "Life Story of the Queen of England," as told by a "fire-eating Laborite" who was her

Majesty's "personal friend," belongs to the realm of harmless absurdities. But it does not sin on the side of reticence.

The indifference of the French to the private lives of public men (unless there is a cause célèbre) amazes Americans who like to know every day what their President is about. Président Doumergue has an official residence at Rambouillet. Half-adozen lines in the press suffice to inform the public that he has gone to it, and there is apparently nothing more to tell until he returns to Paris. Premier Poincaré has a summer home in Lorraine. When he goes there, another half-dozen lines announce the fact, and a soothing silence follows. What these gentlemen do with their moments of leisure is apparently their own concern. Now surely President Coolidge may be excused a little silence, a little secretiveness, a little inscrutability (if it came to that) in view of the fact that he has been compelled to live his outward life in proximity to a camera and a radio. Think of the fish he has caught and the worms he has caught them with? Think of the pictures of him in chaps and a sombrero! Think, good Heavens, of the pictures of him in the head-dress of an American Indian! Think of his few guarded words let loose upon the country! Think of the thousands of photographs of Mrs. Coolidge! Think of the hundred thousand allusions to her as "the first lady of the land." And think of a vast, keen, strenuous nation forever regaling itself with this infantile substitute for news.

23

James Gordon Bennett, in the height of his arrogant renown, said