I

I.

T so happened that about the first thing I ever heard Mr. Colby say seemed to explain in a sentence why he is succeeding where so many men of his own sort have failed-though that was not the intention of his remark.

I was asking him to tell me just how he happened to go into the now famous fight last year which smashed the machine, busted his boss, and, best of all, frightened the boss's bosses so thoroughly that within the last few weeks they have actually surrendered (shrewdly enough-pending the expected reaction!) and are preparing legislation in accordance with the demands of the platform on which he won his place as the youngest State Senator of New Jersey.

Now, I had warned him that The Outlook had asked me to write something about him, and here was a good chance for him to intimate delicately that, "recognizing the sovereign right of the people, perceiving how they were being misrepresented, he considered it his sacred duty, at the sacrifice of time and money, to throw himself into the breach," or something of that sort. Moreover, this could have been backed up, for I knew that in his fight against the railroad and allied corporate interests which owned the government of New Jersey he had spent about thirty thousand dollars of his own money inherited from a railroad-builder. His father was the late Charles L. Colby, of the Wisconsin Central Railroad. I knew, too, how hard he had worked all last summer, giving up his plans for fun and absenting himself almost entirely from his young wife, which he probably considered a greater sacrifice.

However, this was his answer: "Well, you know," he said, with a smile very different from that of a self-satisfied reformer, "I'd like to think I saw a vision or got religion over night, but as a matter of fact it was because I got mad."

This is not a mere illustration of Mr. Colby's engaging candor, which pleases the people, who nine times out of ten know a real man when they see onethough few of the bosses and fewer reformers seem to understand this-the unexplosive kind of candor which appeals to voters as much as it perplexes the bosses and annoys their employers, including both the hypocritical kind and the "honest grafters " who would feel so much surer of "getting him eventually if he only took the high and holy purpose pose. This reply tells much more than that this firm-jawed, blue-eyed young man of thirty-one is a good fellow, with common sense and an adequate sense of humor, though that is important enough, especially since "they" are doing their best at the present moment to give him a big head-which again illustrates their shrewdness.

In the first place, Mr. Colby did not go into public life from an abstract sense of duty; if he had, the chances are that he would have gone out long since from a concrete sense of failure. He went into politics very much as he went in for football at Brown University not many years previously; he liked the game, he wanted to make the team, and also doubtless had a normal human desire to run with the ball. He is charged with ambition. I, for one, hope he is guilty of that terrible crime. But as he became captain of the best eleven his college ever turned out, and is now leading the most successful reform movement his State has ever known, and as it requires team-work to advance the ball in both these games, it looks as if he knew how to keep this normal human trait from developing abnormally.

But the chief reason Mr. Colby is making a success of reform is that he is not a Reformer. He was caught young, and did not go into the game with preconceived notions to work out. He played as he was coached from the side