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YOULD what happened to Blaine in 1884 have happened to Har A ding in 1920? The Harding lande was so overwhelming that it is y enough to say now that no unard last-minute fluke could possibly e thrown the victory to Cox. But elections are never decided until ballots are cast. It therefore beved the most cocksure Republican ler or newspaper, even two weeks ore the last election, to be careful of ry action and to weigh every uttere. If the chances between the two didates had been very much more 'n during October than we now know m to have been, "Harvey's Weekly," withstanding its ardent advocacy of rding, might easily have turned the les in Cox's favor because of a most creditable cartoon in its issue of Ocer 23, in which the sensibilities of Roman Catholic brethren were ply wounded by a shocking caricae of their cherished doctrine of the maculate Conception of the Virgin

ry.

Colonel Harvey's post-election statent that he knew nothing of that tact, tasteless, and irreverent cartoon til he saw it in print has been acted at par by all fair-minded men, they applauded his fine expression regret for its appearance in his rmal; for every true American rects his neighbor's convictions, even en he does not share them.

t is therefore to be hoped that the ignation excited by that cartoon n among thoughtful Protestants in Republican party will teach polians and editors a lesson that will not forgotten in future campaigns. In hotly contested election an apparly trifling incident-some error in itical strategy or some thoughtless erance by a candidate or one of his

partisans might easily at the last moment lose a victory that was almost

won.

The blow thus unwittingly dealt to Mr. Harding-which, had the election been close, might have been fatal-came from a journal that was extremely friendly to him. While the incident and its lesson are still fresh in mind it may interest readers of The Outlook to recall a really fatal wound that was received by another American statesman and Presidential candidate "in the house of his friends." I refer to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Burchard's famous phrase," Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," which, on the very eve of the election of 1884, snatched the Presidency from the hands of James G. Blaine. The writer happens to know from first-hand knowledge a good deal of the inside history of that fatal phrase.

DRIFT OF IRISH TOWARD BLAINE

About three weeks before the 1884

election, the writer spent a Sunday at the summer home of Mr. John Wanamaker, the great Philadelphia merchant. Among the guests was the Rev. Dr. R. M. Thompson, a distinguished Irish Presbyterian, who (I think) was a Professor of Political Economy in the University of Pennsylvania. He told me that he was in correspondence with leading Irishmen all over the United States; that the Irish vote for Blaine would astonish the country; that he was in personal touch with scores of Irish "Blaine sonal touch with scores of Irish "Blaine Clubs" in different parts of the country, composed of Irishmen who up to that time had always voted the Democratic ticket. Dr. Thompson's statement only confirmed the widespread rumors of a drift toward Blaine on the part of Irishmen, who were attracted by his magnetic qualities and by his liberal attitude toward the Irish.

Mr. Blaine himself, a year or more after the election, told my father that about three weeks before the election, while he was at his home in Augusta, Maine, he received an invitation from the Republican National Committee to attend a great banquet to be given in his honor in New York City during the week immediately preceding the election. His acceptance was published in all the newspapers.

Mr. Blaine further said that shortly afterwards he received a letter from a certain newspaper correspondent in New York, who was unknown personally to him but who represented himself as being an ardent Republican. He implored Mr. Blaine not to come to New York, but to remain in Augusta, as the fight was already won. This unknown newspaper man wrote him a second and a third time, expressing his fears that "something" might be said or done during the proposed visit to New York that might lose the election. Of course that correspondent did not dream of Dr. Burchard's fatal remark. Possibly he may have been afraid of the cry of "Wall Street influence" that would be raised, and which actually was raised, in connection with the famous "Millionaires' Banquet that was given to Mr. Blaine during that visit to New York.

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BLAINE WAS SUPERSTITIOUS

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Mr. Blaine told my father that he had a vein of superstition in his nature; that the thrice-repeated warning from his unknown newspaper friend actually got on his nerves," making him think of Remember the ides of March;" and that he seriously thought of recalling his acceptance of that invitation. But he did go to New York, where, by a mere accident (as will be shown further on in this article) he listened

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York City, of which the writer was a member. The meeting took place on the Saturday night before the election of 1888. Dr. Burchard was a member of that coterie and was present. -1 It was Chi Alpha's custom at the meeting immediately preceding a Presdential election to lay aside its usual programme of theological discussions, and for every member, whether he was Republican or a Democrat, to speak of the issues and prospects of the election according to his convictions.

When it came the turn of the late Dr. Henry M. Field to speak his mind, he told us, among other things, that he had just come from Baltimore, where he was present at a large dinner given to distinguished people of both parties. Among those present was a very pretty young woman who was a Roman Catholic and the daughter of a Confederate officer. Lifting her glass of champagne toward Dr. Field, she gave him this saucy toast: "Here's to Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion!"

II was aghast at what, at first thought, struck me as being a most unkind and tactless reference to Dr. Burchard's famous blunder, and I looked around to where the latter sat, expecting to find him blushing with embarrassment. But Dr. Field knew more than I did as to how Dr. Burchard had finally come to look upon his faux pas of 1884. From others and from Dr. Burchard himself I soon learned the story of his subsequent change of attitude in regard to Mr. Cleveland, whose election he had so unwittingly and innocently brought about.

During Mr. Cleveland's first Administration the Pan-Presbyterian Council met in Washington and Dr. Burchard was a delegate. The Council went in a body to the White House. to pay their respects to the President. Mrs. Cleveland stood at the side of her husband to receive the delegates as they filed past. When Dr. Burchard was presented by name, Mrs. Cleveland, with that winsomeness which has always so endeared her to every one who met. her, was so gracious in the welcome she extended to the gentle old man to whom Mr. Cleveland was in a special sense indebted for his unexpected election that Dr. Burchard's stiff Republicanism began at that moment to thaw.

How far that change in his po litical leaning ever went I do not know. But the writer will let Dr. Burchard tell his own story of how he finally came to look upon the part he played in Mr. Cleveland's election. The following is the substance of what Dr. Burchard said to Chi Alpha at that Saturday-night meeting just before the election of 1888.

Taking his text from Dr. Field's humorous reference to his epoch-making phrase, Dr. Burchard then quoted those words of Holy Scripture, "Out of the

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mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.

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He confessed to us that he had been a mere babe in "politics;" that in his address to Mr. Blaine he had only expressed what had often been said pubpressed what had often been said publicly, in previous elections, without damage to the Republican cause; and that at the time he knew nothing of the peculiar danger of any such remark in the election of 1884. He then went on, in a detached and delightfully. naïve way, to philosophize over the results of his chance phrase.

He reminded us of the fear that used to be entertained in the North before 1884 that if the Democrats ever came into power "the South would be in the saddle," and that it would then rip up all the legislation growing out of the Civil War. He then showed us (as by that time had proved to be the case) how groundless had been those fears; and he spoke in justly high terms of the wise and conservative Administration of Mr. Cleveland.

BURCHARD PREDICTED COLLAPSE OF THE SOLID SOUTH

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He next referred to the effect of that Administration upon Administration upon the general political development of the country. Before Mr. Cleveland's election it had always been the "Solid North" against the "Solid South." As an inevitable result of that sectional division of par

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ties it had never been possible in the South to discuss frankly and intelligently the various economic and political questions that had nothing to do with the differences between the North and South. For that reason the South had continued to be solidly Democratic because the Republican party was the party of the North-a most unwholesome state of affairs.

Dr. Burchard then said that Mr. Cleveland's Administration had laid the bogey of "Southern domination," and he predicted that the way would eventually open for a frank and intelligent discussion in the South of the broader questions of economic and political policy, which he believed would in time run new and non-sectional lines of party cleavage.

And he concluded his remarks by saying that, for the reasons given, he had finally come to look upon himself as the humble, even though foolish, instrument in the hands of Providence for ushering in a more National era in American politics, which would in time. displace the sectionalism of the decades immediately following the Civil War.

His truly wise remarks along that line made a deep impression upon all the members of Chi Alpha. After thirty years Dr. Burchard's prophecy has at last been fulfilled, for it is now evident that the "Solid South has been broken up for good.

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THE

HE BOOK TABLE: DEVOTED TO BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS

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ence.

First in order and first in ability comes Irs. Edith Wharton's "The Age of Inno." The species of "innocence" preailing in New York's fashionable society 1 a period now nearly half a century ago as the innocence of an artificial, convenonal, and dull society. It was a little efore the "Four Hundred" phrase inented by Ward McAllister obtained vogue, ut there was already the idea of an exlusiveness the lines of which were those f wealth, family connection, stiff social ntertainments, and patronage of the opera, ather than those having relation to the world of art, literature, brilliant talk, or ntellectual impulses. What was outside of his New York self-constituted circle was considered by it as dubious; life and culure "abroad" were practically unknown quantities. This time and the people and etting for the story are described with ainstaking art, from Brown of Grace Church to the few great moguls whose mile or frown made or unmade "social tanding." As a picture of the upper lasses in our metropolis as it stolidly olidified itself in the decade or so after he Civil War, the novel is curiously aptivating; no one but Mrs. Wharton ould have rendered the description so lelicately exact. There is irony behind t all, but not the bitterness of scorn or ontempt. It is an etching, not a cari

ature.

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Into this self-satisfied and self-centered group comes a Polish countess, an Amerian girl who has made an unhappy mariage abroad. She is regarded with suspiion, and is received only when the one amily whose social supremacy is almost mperial takes her up. She is accustomed o free social interchange with writers, painters, and diplomats, to witty talk, to Freedom from dulling conventionality. Contrasted with her is a charming young ociety girl who is loving and sweet

The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

In Chancery. By John Galsworthy. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

Blind: A Story of These Times. By Ernest Poole. The Macmillan Company, New York.

FOR A DAY1

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natured, but who simply does not conceive that "what they do " and " what they say " -"they" meaning society -can be disregarded. Between them hesitates the young New Yorker, Archer; he is bound by commitments to the girl of restricted nature, but longs for the woman of deeper and stronger character. In the end the bonds of convention and pledged honor prevail, but the struggle is a passionate one and leaves Archer disappointed and disillusionized.

The play of social forces and individual striving is subtle and strong. Mrs. Wharton's new novel is in workmanship equal to her very best previous work. Indeed, one is strongly inclined to declare this the best piece of American fiction of the present season. Its qualities are not superficial; its situation is led up to with admirable skill, so that the intensity of interest gradually tightens and strengthens. In its restrained art as well as its clear-sightedness the book is finely wrought. In the give and take of dialogue between the many minor characters there is ample entertainment. In its adequate dealing with a large motif this is a book of far more than ephemeral value.

"Possession" is the controlling passion of Mr. Galsworthy's novel. It controls, dominates, and dully obsesses the minds and action of most of the members of his Forsyte family. Not alone possession of money and solidly invested property, but of art works for their property value, of families as something appertaining to each Forsyte personage, of wives as personal belongings. The hardest-headed Forsyte of them all, Soames, the author tells us, "collected" his second wife as he did pictures. And Mr. Galsworthy, with a touch of genius, shows us this same Forsyte at the end of the story trying to conceal very his disappointment because this wife has borne him a daughter instead of the son that he had longed for as the most important of his personal possessions (he knew she would have no other child), but as he looked at the child suddenly "the sense of triumph and renewed possession welled within him. By God, this, this thing was his!"

So, too, Soames felt toward his first wife. He cared nothing for her after marriage except as an appendage to his pride of possession. Revolted, she left him for a man who did love her. Years after he decided to institute the divorce proceedings which his pride had so far forbidden. It was solely that he might make another loveless marriage and add a son and heir to his possessions. But, when he saw again this woman who despised him, there sprang up in him the sense of frustrated ownership, and in a mad passion he tried in vain to regain possession. And so with other Forsytes; whether heavily or wildly, they clung to what they had and built up a family tradition of wealth, power, and selfish mastership.

These Forsytes are descended from or survivors of those we met in Mr. Galsworthy's "Man of Property." It is a serious drawback that the first dozen pages or so of this book are a regular barbed-wire obstruction because of their

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intricate tangle of genealogy and relationships. The reader who perseveres, however, will be rewarded by as fine and penetrating a study of temperament and heredity as is often written-not "highbrow or philosophical, but dramatic, tense, and vivid. As with at least one other English novel of this season, the British divorce law, for the broadening of which there is now a strong agitation, suggests the situations. It is an amusing and curious turn that its provision which requires an applicant for divorce to prove that he or she has begged the recreant spouse to return and condone, almost blocks one divorce, while in another case it brings a repentant husband back from South America, much to the disgust of his wife, who, despite her formal demand for restoration, had hoped never to see him again.

Mr. Ernest Poole's "Blind" is by its plan debarred from a centralized situation and unity of construction. It is truly "a story of these times,” but in the sense that the publishers indicate when they describe its narrator, Larry Hart, as one who "sits in the darkness that is his heritage from the Great War, who lives over again a truly American career, covering forty years of National growth and change, and peers adventurously into a future of tremendous unborn forces, both good and evil.” Larry is naturally more or less of a reflex of Mr. Poole's own experience as observer of social service and industrial wrongs, writer of correspondence from Russia, Germany, and elsewhere abroad, ardent longer for the coming of justice and fairness. Larry is blinded in the Great War, but the book's title is of moral rather than physical intent. Hope and faith in the future are shown in his words: “In all the peoples of the earth there is a reserve of idealism, courage, devotion, and endurance, the presence of which we barely suspect, we who are so tragically blind. A Russian engineer once said: 'We are beggars sitting on bags of gold.' That is true of all humanity. And through the years that are coming the gold will appear to our opening eyes.'

It must not be thought that the novel is one of social propaganda alone. It has fictional vitality because of the variety and realism of its shifting scenes, the good and bad human qualities of its actors, its rapid movement, and its precision in description. R. D. TOWNSEND.

THE NEW BOOKS

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

Socialism in Thought and Action. By Harry W. Laidler, Ph.D. The Macmillan Company, New York.

Why does Socialism exist? Because of economic and human waste and because of the inequality of wealth. Radical Socialists aim at the breakdown of capitalism, at class struggle, at collectivism. The very extreme radical effort in Russia has resulted simply in a dictatorship by the proletariat, a regime characterized by conservative Socialists as devoid of any redeeming feature. In the present volume the author shows what has taken place in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Great Britain, France, Italy, and other countries, including our own. He discusses the Socialist criticism of

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