of twenty-five thousand workers, their addresses, and their various prices, and run off with it, though it was undeniably the property of the committee. No reform organization in an ordinary year could win against that disciplined army, each division squad of which knew the voters in their precinct, who were safe and unsafe, who would come of themselves, who could be won, and who could be safely bought, scared, cajoled, or played upon by all the motives men know. A tidal wave might come, as in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt, with the Republican machine swept the State on the Progressive ticket and left the regular candidate, President William H. Taft, with a pitiable 273,305 against Roosevelt's 447,426, 51,807 greater than the Democratic vote for Wilson. Two years later the Republican machine elected Governor Brumbaugh by a vote of 534,898, the regular Republican vote on an off year, a plurality of 222,345 over the Democratic candidate. As for Roosevelt's friends, they polled a pitiable 10,506 votes, and that divided between "Bull Moose" and "Progressive." The sudden and unexpected success of Gifford Pinchot in the Republican primaries in Pennsylvania and the row of defeats of the regular Republican candidates for a nomination from North Dakota eastward in Iowa and other States are only a jolt to the regular organization. In Pennsylvania last June Gifford Pinchot and his managers conducted an able campaign, but they paid no attention to the choice of the new state committee provided for in the state primary. Mr. Pinchot was duly nominated, and in a week discovered, when the state committee met, that the conduct of his campaign was in the

Even Boies Penrose grew doubtful as the twenty-four years he sat in the Senate drew near their end. The association he had so diligently cultivated, election division by election division among the negro voters of the eighth ward, left him with little else, though all doors had once been open to him. A man's friends and his health, his personal life and his temptations, are closely related. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. The splendid physique, the imposing figure, the face of keen thought and thorough training, left only a wreck behind—a wreck with memories it were best not to record. In 1894 he was forced to withdraw from his nomination as mayor. An association of clergymen, by a campaign of personal criticism, was able to defeat him in his own city. It was powerless to prevent his election as senator three years later, but the bitter blow he never forgot. Just before his death he said wearily:

"Now that I know my own abilities through experience, I see that if I had stayed in my profession, I would have become one of the leading lawyers in the city, respected by every one. Now I know what men, as they see me passing alone through the street, say."

Yet he had far more in him than the

mere manipulation of a political machine. He knew by instinct, penetration, and experience what issue would move the many. In November, 1919, when he had just dealt defeat to the opposing city Republican machine in Philadelphia, he came back elated to his committee-room, where he sat as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the chief honor of his senatorial career, won against public opinion, and a protesting Republican minority led by Senator Borah.

"What is to be the Republican issue next year, in 1920?" I asked him. "The tariff?"

"I wish it might be," he said. "I believe in the tariff, but I am sorry to say the tariff has become a back number."

"Reducing the extra taxes on large incomes and estates?"

"I have great sympathy with wealthy men, but this would be inadvisable."

"You ought to have sympathy with them, when I remember how often you have touched them."

It was in 1920, as the tidal wave proved.

This election added to the voting vote on a scale unprecedented. The votes cast numbered 22,000,000. They had risen one half. The election divisions have increased, or will increase, in the next Presidential election in proportion. They were 40,000 on a rude rough estimate. They are to-day nearer 60,000. When Senator Penrose spoke of the number of men with whom he must keep in touch, there were from 4000 to 5000 election divisions in Pennsylvania. There are now 7300. By 1924 there may be 8000 or 9000. The number of active political workers have proportionately increased, and Senator Penrose spoke only of the men in one party.

8 4

The experience of Boies Penrose is the experience of the American people. Here was a man who began with a just ambition and a justifiable desire to use his great powers, which, like most

"What is to be the leading issue?" Taking his best senatorial pose, he said:

"Americanism."

"You are the man I have been looking for. Of course, if it is to be the issue, you know what 'Americanism' is. What is it?"

"Damn if I know," said the senator, relapsing to the weariness of the years; "but," with a sudden keen look of the trained politician who reads the public turn earlier than others, and, too, with the responsible gravity of a leader of men, "you will find it is a damn good issue to get votes in an election."

directing the affairs of a great democracy. He had training. Wisely, he began at the bottom of the task. Cynicism is neither the best background nor the most stimulating atmosphere. Harvard has perhaps too large a share of it. It was not absent in his early environment; it was present in his own temperament. But cynicism, like humor, clears thinking and prevents self-deception. He entered politics, as his book on city government abundantly shows, believing in administrative reform as a need and a remedy. He was swamped in the machinery he won the privilege of directing and ruling. The need of keeping in touch with twenty-five thousand men over a great

State absorbed time, energy, ability. The experience is frequent in American public life. All democratic institutions show like perils in their working.

The small select group which managed the Revolution had in 1790 an active voting population of not over 150,000, in all, to instruct, inspire, lead. To-day the number of men in both parties who run our election divisions is at least twice as large. The governing group of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period responded to a congressional caucus of a few score. It rose to national conventions, at the start self-selected. The party primaries, which directly and indirectly choose these conventions and nominate all elected officials, grew until the State had to superintend them. The voting vote at these primaries steadily enlarges. A group of States, in primaries, cast 2,550,000 Republican votes, or one quarter the Republican vote cast in these States.

This grows with every contest. In New York State the Republican party leaders, finding themselves unable to manage it, have summarily abolished it. It is idle to suppose this instrument for expressing the public will and preference can be laid aside when other States in the country possess it.

The election officers were once unpaid volunteers, chosen as the election opened, often with a free fight in progress. To-day they are officers named in advance under legislation and paid by the State in nearly all our commonwealths. They count and declare the votes. Party workers bring voters to the polls. They materialize the voting vote. These are indispensable to the expression of the public will. Votes are cast and elections decided by their efforts. This body of party workers,

probably 600,000 strong, is to-day secret, unpaid, irresponsible, unwatched by law. The mere possession of a list of these votes is an instrument of power, a path to the control of voters held and known only by party leaders.

They will go through the same evolution as election officers in the pollingplaces. They will be regulated by law, recorded in lists open to law, and in the end, perhaps, paid by the State. This will not prevent the individual worker from going his own ancient way, but it will deprive party leaders of the special and tyrannical powers they secretly possess and publicly use to carry out their own policy and purpose in "bringing out the vote." Exactly as elections in the last fifty years have become less corrupt and more orderly, more directly expressing the public will, so parties in the future will be more responsive, more orderly, less under personal control.

IN THE CENTURY for July, 1921, I pointed out that eventually the public treasury must pay the cost of putting before the people the "publicity information" of a contested election. The first step toward this has already been taken in Oregon and other States. The step proposed now is as needed and as inevitable. As long as the great sum needed to instruct and inspire voters comes from private contributions, corruption will exist. As long as the organized body of party workers in each election division is a secret pretorian guard rewarded and directed by party leaders, party leadership will be corrupt or corrupting, self-seeking, leaving power in the hands of men so absorbed in its direction that they cannot either create wise public policies or execute them, as Senator Penrose's life and career pointedly show.

My acquaintance with Ladew be

Y acquaintance with Ladew began, en route from Paris to the Riviera, about the time of the armistice. We occupied the same compartment in the wagon-lit. We were both in khaki and we were both being sent down to Nice by a paternal government to convalesce after many weeks in army hospitals. Before the war, I gathered, he had divided his time between his hunting-box in the Meadowbrook country of Long Island and his camp in upper Canada, while I confessed that I had spent my life journeying about the world in quest of the picturesque, the novel, and the adventurous.

"If you ever want a companion on one of your trips," he remarked one day, "I wish that you would take me along." Thus it came about that three years later I wrote him, reminding him of his offer, and asking him if he would accompany me to Persia. "Of course I'll go," he answered. "What's more, I 've a car in England, so why can't we go as far as Constantinople by motor?" I assured him with great enthusiasm that we could, and we proceeded to make our plans accordingly.

Ladew met me in Paris toward the end of March. His car subsequently proved to be a long, low-slung, rakish craft with the power of threescore horses beneath its silvered hood. His

chauffeur, whose real name is Patrick Dunn, but whom Ladew had rechristened John, had likewise served in the A. E. F., the experience which he gained while driving ammunition trucks up to the firing-line by night standing us in good stead later on. He proved to be the best driver it has ever been my fortune to ride behind.

It had seemed perfectly feasible to motor from Paris to the Bosporus. True, I did not know any one who had actually done it, but there were roads all the way. I had seen them many times from the Orient Express, but many things might have happened to the roads and bridges of southeastern Europe during four years of war, and that an entirely new set of political conditions had arisen in that region, did not occur to us.

Nowadays, in the countries beyond the Rhine, one is required to deposit in cash the amount of the duty on his car at the frontier of every country which he wishes to enter, and I might add parenthetically that the chances are very slim indeed of ever getting this deposit back again. Moreover, every country requires that these deposits be made in its own currency, and to carry the necessary currency, we should have required a trailer. In Austria, for example, at the rate of exchange which prevailed when we were

there, the deposit on our car would have amounted to something over ten million crowns. That we crossed nearly a dozen frontiers without once making a deposit was due to Ladew's tact and persuasiveness and to the fact that, before my leaving Washington, the representatives of the countries that we purposed to traverse had been kind enough to provide me with letters to their respective frontier authorities and on my passport to put diplomatic visés.

The distance by railway from Paris to Constantinople is approximately two thousand miles, but by the route we followed it was nearly three thousand; for we were told of so many interesting places off the beaten track that, instead of keeping to the main highways, we zigzagged erratically across the

the whole of southeastern Europe, thus adding immensely to the interest of our journey and bringing to us many adventures which we would not otherwise have had.

We started in March, because we hoped to cross Mesopotamia before the beginning of the hot season, but if one is going only as far as Constantinople, the ideal time to make the journey would be in May and June. The roads in Hungary and Thrace, which are all but impassable in the early spring, would then be dry, and the snow would have disappeared from the Black and Bohemian forests and from the Balkan passes.

As it was, it was still bitterly cold when we left Paris, and we shivered despite our fur-lined coats and the many rugs in which we were wrapped. And as we tore eastward, instead of becoming warmer, it grew steadily colder, and in Nancy, where we spent the first night, the ground was covered

with snow. We crossed the Rhine at Kehl, which is the bridge-head of Strasburg. Here there was considerable delay, due to the innumerable formalities which must be observed on both the French and German sides. Somewhat to my surprise, the German customs officials were extremely courteous, their attitude being in marked contrast to the arrogance and bruskness which characterized officialdom in the fatherland before the war. And this same courtesy was shown us everywhere. Before leaving Strasburg I had purchased a small American flag, which John had fixed to the hood of the car, so that the Stars and Stripes fluttered before us all the way to the Bosporus. I was warned in France that this display of the flag might provoke unfriendly demonstrations in the former enemy countries, but it proved to have exactly the opposite effect. On only one occasion did the sight of it arouse resentment. On a country road in Bavaria we inquired our way of an old peasant woman. Pointing to the flag, she exclaimed scornfully: "You are Americans. Don't ask me

to help you."

Neither Ladew nor I had ever visited the Black Forest, so, when the concierge of the hotel in Baden-Baden suggested that we take the road which leads through it to Stuttgart, we did. Instead of keeping to the valleys, as we had expected, our road steadily ascended, the forest becoming denser and the snow deeper the higher we climbed. Soon all signs of human habitation were left behind. We did not even see one of the charcoalburner's huts which we had associated with the region. There were no signposts and no one from whom to ask our way; and then it began to snow.