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York descended upon the White House according to their long-established custom, and informed him that his course was injurious to business interests, had already greatly depressed railway securities, and was likely to bring on a panic. The young President received them graciously, heard them with patience, and dismissed them with an irritating little question, which the American people may have occasion to ponder more than once in the future, saying: "Gentlemen, you see I am President, sworn to execute the laws of the United States. Do you expect me to put a ticker in the Department of Justice?"

The attitude of his mind struck the public favorably. On extended tours throughout the country he took the whole community into his confidence, outlined his plans, gave the people a glimpse of his aspirations and hopes for the future of democratic government in the world, and when he returned to the capital he was already President in his own right, with credentials so authentic that no National Convention of his party would dare to take them away from him even if it had the power to do it.

After the election of Mr. Roosevelt as President, the forward movement within the lines of the Republican party became National. He succeeded in bringing the Government very close to the hearts and lives of the people. The working men and women of the United States found him in eager sympathy with their plans to regulate the hours of labor, to promote the safety of life, and to modernize the obsolete industrial code, borrowed from the common law, which left American workmen practically without redress when injured by accident in the course of their employment. The business world soon found out that the President of the United States had no quarrel with any honest man, nor with any legitimate enterprise of industry or commerce; while the petition of commercial bodies scattered throughout the country for the amendment of the Inter-State Commerce Law, a petition long neglected in both houses of Congress, found in the President not only an indorser, but a fighting champion unacquainted either with weariness or fear. The last four years of President Roosevelt's Administration set a standard for the pub

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lic service which makes old-time political methods forevermore impossible in the United States. The American people not only approve the things he stood for, but his way of standing for them turned out to be attractive beyond precedent to the every-day citizen. He not only seemed to know how to fight, but how to make it easy for men to fight with him; and, what is still more to the point, he knew how to touch the sources of public opinion in such a way as to make it necessary for those to fight with him who did not in themselves have a very strong motive to, participate. When he began the contest for the rate law, he did not have five men in the Senate with him, and few, if any, dared to believe that it was possible to overcome the indifference of the Senate and the open antagonism of its leaders. Yet before the warfare was over the opponents of the Administration were crying for quarter, and ready to make the vote for the measure unanimous. It is not recorded that he read anybody out of the party. On the contrary, by direct appeal to their constituents, he made every man an obedient servant of his party. He had a good many people opposed to him; but it is impossible to imagine him turning aside from the work in hand to debauch the public service, either by extending patronage as a bribe or withholding it as a penalty, to coerce the legislative department to follow a course contrary to the will and interests of the people of the United States. He put emphasis on party fidelity; but nobody ever accused him of thinking that the harmony of a party is more desirable than its integrity.

The so-called Insurgency of to-day is the protest in Congress and out against the failure of the Republican party, as represented by its official leadership, to follow the main road to good government in the United States which was opened and cleared of obstructions through seven years of struggle and sacrifice under a leader standing thus head and shoulders above his brethren. There were a few men in both houses of Congress who would infinitely rather retire from public life altogether than to see the old partnership between the speculative business interests of the country and the Government of the United States resumed under the

auspices of the political party which has inherited the great traditions left to mankind by the life of Abraham Lincoln. These men have sought no quarrel with their political associates. They have demanded only the right to represent their own people in their own name. In the House of Representatives they fought for a measure of self-government in that great popular assembly, and, under the leadership of men like Victor Murdock, of Kansas, and Judge Norris, of Nebraska, both newcomers into the parliamentary arena, and more than a score of others, some of them veterans in the service, they have revolutionized not only the procedure of the House, but the spirit and motive of its deliberations as well. Now that the conflict is at an end, everybody will be able to see that their demand for an enlargement of the right of the people's representatives to express their opinions, to secure timely consideration of public measures, and to perfect proposed legislation by amendment, was not, after all, so revolutionary as to warrant the executive departments of the Government in declaring them aliens, unfit for the privileges of the household of the Republican faith.

The little group in the Senate, less than half a score in number, were equally within their rights as Republicans when they exposed the real character of the Aldrich tariff revision. They were not fighting the Republican policy; they were fighting a bill, the authors of which had treated the Republican platform, defining the just measure of tariff rates, as a practical joke on the public. It was not a measure which represented the wisdom of anybody in either house of Congress. No member of the Senate Finance Committee was able to stand up on the floor of the chamber and offer a reasonable explanation of any important details of the bill. Such members of the Committee as deigned to participate in the debate would have been absolutely helpless if they had mislaid the memoranda prepared for their use by persons who have not yet been elected to the Senate; although it is understood some of them are now candidates. No man can carefully read the hearings before the House Committee on Ways and Means during the last twenty-five years without seeing that the very language of

our tariff laws, in all the more important schedules, including the punctuation, has been handed in to the Committees of Congress by interested parties on the outside. It is in vain for men like Senator Aldrich to justify what has been done by publishing certificates signed by so-called experts in the New York Custom-House. A resort to such witnesses only confirms the public in its suspicion that he has done, during the last twenty years, a very much larger tariff 'business than has been warranted by his capital stock of knowledge and direct familiarity with our industrial affairs. It has been a shock to the moral sense of Republican voters of all kinds to find out from the lips of Senator Aldrich himself that the sum total of the Senate's contribution to the new law is represented by the cheerful suggestions of two employees of the New York Custom-House, both Democrats, one of them a henchman of the late Senator Gorman, and the other a played-out politician from California. It might have been possible for some of us to have overlooked the source of the wisdom which found its way into our tariff revision if it had not been for a wellgrounded suspicion that back of these over-advertised customs experts stood the lobbyists of the textile associations, with a more distinct influence over the opinions of the experts than they had themselves. The group of men who refused, even under the lash of party discipline, to swallow down the dose which was thus prepared for them, have no intention of leaving the Republican party. They intend to stay in the party; to contend against the evil influences which are seeking to use it for money-making purposes; and so far as the tariff is concerned they present an affirmative programme which will make future revisions of the law, if not easy, at least free from the scandal which arises from the interchange among our enterprising captains of industry, duly represented in both houses of Congress, of reciprocal benefits, in the distribution of which the rights of the public are altogether forgotten.

The contest against the use of the legislative power of the Government to promote private interests has already made such progress in both houses of Congress

that in the recent session it was said with bitterness by the old leaders that there was a Republican majority in neither House nor Senate. If that be true, how does it come that the work of that session is now everywhere exhibited as a conclusive evidence of the wisdom and efficiency of the Republican administration? The conspicuous distinction of the recent session lies in the fact that it had the moral vigor to maintain the independence of Congress and to take the bills, prepared for it in advance, and rewrite them in plain English for the benefit of the public, which has the right to look to Congress for the protection of its interests. Thus it has happened that the forward movement within the Republican party has not only more than held its own in Congress, bringing to the side of the somewhat lonesome pioneer from Wisconsin men like Moses E. Clapp, whose judgment of things as they ought to be is almost intuitive in its precision; Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, versatile in resources, powerful in debate, with a moral courage so invincible that when he went home last spring to give an account of his stewardship, the young men of Indiana put on a badge with these words, "He fights for the right, and votes as he fights;" A. B. Cummins, who in the railway debate exhibited a knowledge of the law so profound, an acquaintance with the practical problems of railway economics so intimate, and a

storehouse of energy and enthusiasm so inexhaustible, that he was able, without seeming to intrude too much into the discussion, to dominate for months the proceedings of the Senate; and Joseph L. Bristow, the new Senator from Kansas, a veritable crusader for righteousness, armed with modern weapons, of whom it has been said by one who listened to him when he pointed out, standing before a map on the walls of the chamber, the injustice of the railways in their dealings with the intermountain towns of the West, "This man is an enigma; he seems to be a composite of John Brown of Osawatomie and the French detective Vidocq."

One after another the young men in Congress are enlisting under the banner of Republican progress; but, rapid as are the changes taking place in Congress, they are slow and hesitating compared to the swift movement of events throughout the United States from one ocean to the other. These changes, so startling that we have to rub our eyes before we can believe, involve no portent of evil either to the Republican party or to popular institutions in America. They are preparing the way for a larger usefulness for public men and for political parties. Condensed into a single sentence, they mean the freedom and independence of the marketplace for American business and the freedom and independence of the Government for the service of the whole people.

For few have heard the names of Lord Raglan, the commander of the British, or Marshal St. Arnaud, who commanded the French.

There is something romantic about the very name of Florence Nightingale. It sounds like the name of the heroine of a fanciful story rather than that of a real woman. This impression is strengthened by Longfellow's beautiful poem, "Santa Filomena." For in that poem we see a figure flit from room to room in a "house of misery," and she seems a creature of the imagination. For most Americans it