by the solicitude you evince in the Van Alen matter. I am amazed by the course pursued by some good people in dealing with this subject. No one has yet presented to me a single charge of unfitness or incompetency. They have chosen to eagerly act upon the frivolous statements of a much mendacious and mischievous newspaper, as an attempt to injure a man who in no way has been guilty of wrong. I leave out of account the allegation that his nomination was in acknowledgement of a large campaign contribution. No one will accuse me of such a trade and Mr. Whitney's and Mr. Van Alen's denial that any such thing existed in the minds of any one concerned, I believe to be the truth. I think it would be a cowardly thing in me to disgrace a man because the New York World had doomed him to disgrace. Since the nomination was sent in I have left the matter entirely to the Senate, and I hear that the nomination was confirmed to-day. This ends the matter. I am entirely content to wait for a complete justification of my part in the proceeding.

I am sorry you regard this matter as so unfortunate and if anything could have induced me to turn away from a course which seems to me so plainly just and right, it would be my desire to satisfy just such good friends as you have always proved yourself to be.

I shall be glad to see you, at all times.

Yours very sincerely,

GROVER CLEVELAND.

Van Alen was confirmed by the Senate, but on November 20 he sent in his resignation, which Cleveland reluctantly accepted but urged Van Alen to reconsider his decision, as his (the President's) preference was emphatically that he accept the post and by the discharge of his duties vindicate the wisdom and propriety of his selection.

MIDNIGHT SUPPERS OF DELICATESSEN AND BEER

During the second term I saw little of the President. I was very much tied to business, and went to Washington only when summoned there to discuss a few international matters as they arose. But while I am reminiscing about my relations with Mr. Cleveland, I will jump ahead about ten years and speak of a visit he paid me for three days during March, 1903. He was to deliver an address at the Henry Ward Beecher Memorial Meeting in the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday evening, and he arrived from Princeton on Saturday. He was like a boy out of school.

We were going to the theater on Saturday evening, and I suggested Justin McCarthy's "If I Were King," played by Sothern.

"I hope it is not sad," he said; "I want to see it from start to finish;" and, with a smirk, he added: "For I am a hayseed." I discerned afterward that he would rather have seen a comedy or andeville.

When we got to the theater many in

the audience recognized him, and heads were constantly turning in the direction of our box. I mentioned it to him, but he said:

"Oh no, they don't know me any more."

After the theater we had a supper of delicatessen and beer at home, which I knew he would like, and he amused us with several funny stories and mimicry. My wife remarked that he might have made a success on the stage, and he replied that his friend Joe Jefferson had often deplored his having missed that profession. He mimicked the humorous Congressman Campbell of New York, who used to come to the White House, and, pointing to the room occupied by Cleveland, ask the clerk, "Is His Royal Nibs in?" And sometimes Tim Campbell made requests that Cleveland had to deny as unconstitutional; then Tim would come back with: "Oh, I wouldn't let the Constitution stand between friends!"

MORE IMPRESSIONS OF
GROVER CLEVELAND

At dinner on Sunday we were joined by Mr. and Mrs. John G. Carlisle, my brother Isidor, his wife, and his business associate, Charles B. Webster. Carlisle,

one of the most distinguished Senators in Congress, was former Secretary of the Treasury, and a close friend of Cleveland. When the champagne was served my wife said to the ex-President:

"Does Mrs. Cleveland let you drink this? You know it is bad for your rheumatism!"

He answered: "No, but I won't tell her."

They compromised on one glass. After dinner the conversation turned to the bond loans during Cleveland's second administration, the first made through J. P. Morgan & Co., and the subsequent popular loans-to keep the gold in the United States Treasury. The exPresident referred to his fight against the silver craze and said he had to abandon the fundamental issue, the tariff reform, to combat that dangerous heresy.

When the guests had gone, Cleveland wanted to know whether we would like to hear the speech he was to deliver that evening, and of course we assured him we should be delighted. This led to conversation about Beecher, and I showed him the original letter that Beecher wrote him in 1887 recommending my appointment to Turkey. He said he remembered it perfectly, and it was the thing that turned the scale while he was considering whether or not he could properly appoint a person of my race to a post largely concerned with the protec tion of Christian missions. I made bold to request the manuscript of his Memorial address to file with my Beecher letter, and he kindly consented, with the words: "Yes, certainly; they are kind of cousins."

After a light supper we drove to Brooklyn. Cleveland was ever punctual,

and I took care that we should arrive at the appointed hour, 7:45. It was pouring rain, and Cleveland anticipated that most people would be kept away; but when we entered the hall it was packed from pit to dome, and several thousand persons were turned away. At the close of the meeting hundreds crowded on to the stage to greet the ex-President, showing that the love and admiration of the people had in no degree waned.

The next morning we prevailed upon him to stay an extra day. He said he knew I had a speech to make at Brown University and would have to be busy. I assured him the speech was all prepared and the subject was "Brown in Diplomacy." He asked me to read it to him, and I did. He pronounced it appropriate and fine, which gave me some confidence in the success of the occasion, for I knew he was not given to flattery and would not have praised it without meaning it; that was not his style.

He had to go to Rockwood, the photographer at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, so I went with him. He said he had hundreds of requests for pictures and wanted a new one taken so that when people wrote for them he could refer such requests to Rockwood; similarly he had some pictures made by a Philadelphia photographer. That arrangement would save him much trouble. I asked Rockwood to take a special, large picture for me. He brought forward his larger camera and took one of the best photographs of Cleveland I have I had two finished; one for Mrs. Cleveland and the other hangs in my library.

ever seen.

For luncheon we met Isidor at Delmonico's. At the next table sat Charles F. Murphy, successor to Croker as boss of Tammany Hall, who requested me to introduce him to Cleveland. They had quite a chat, after which Cleveland remarked:

"He looks like a pretty clean fellow.",

During the meal our guest told us, with language, voice, and manner befitting the tale, how, when he was being spoken of for re-election before his second term, he met a farmer who said to him: "Now if you will go on sawin' wood and don't say nothin', they will give you back that job in Washington." No actor could have given a more vivid

characterization of that farmer.

That evening we went to Weber and Fields's Music Hall, on Twenty-ninth Street near Broadway. He suggested this himself. He said he liked to be amused at the theater and not saddened or instructed.

THE FINAL CONFIDENCES OF AN
EX-PRESIDENT

At about this period Cleveland from time to time showed evidences of illness. He called them stomach attacks. Whether or not his personal friend and physician, Dr. Joseph D. Bryant, had diagnosed the malady as more serious I do not know; but at times I rather inferred that he had. Dr. Bryant made it

a point to accompany him on several of his hunting and fishing expeditions, which were taken not alone for pleasure but as health measures, for a change of air and the outdoor recreation.

On and off during those years also, when the family wanted a little change, they occupied "the little White House" of my brother's at Lakewood. Cleveland liked its simplicity and because it was not unlike the parsonage at Caldwell, N. J., where he was born. Early in June, 1908, while the Clevelands were at Lakewood, the ex-President sent for my brother Isidor; he desired to have a talk with him. He seemed to wish to unburden his mind. This proved to be the last time he spoke to any one outside of his immediate family while still in the

very night he had another attack of his malady, after which, as I was told, his faculties seemed to go under a cloud. Two weeks later, on June 24, the country was shocked, though it was not unprepared, to learn that the ex-President had died that morning at his Princeton home.

On June 26 Grover Cleveland was laid to rest. The funeral was private; my brothers and I had received a note from Mrs. Cleveland asking us to be present. At his home we met about one hundred of his personal friends. It had been his express wish that there be no eulogy or funeral oration, and his friend, Dr. Henry van Dyke, conducted a simple service at which he read passages from

Wordsworth's "The Happy Warrior." In

a carriage with Chief Justice Fuller, Judge George Gray of Delaware, and Governor Fort of New Jersey, I accompanied the body to the cemetery.

For him there were no longer enemies to traduce and vilify. Perhaps no President had ever been so reviled by a hostile press throughout the country as this great man, and, strong as he was, these attacks quite naturally pained him. Like all men who struggle against the tide for righteous things, appreciation is often deferred, sometimes until after death. In his case, happily, it came while he was yet among us in the constantly increasing manifestations of admiration, love, and esteem by the people of the country.

ISSOURI is politically still a raw State. Rural Missouri is honest and narrow, and I am told that Governor Hyde, who is a progressive Republican and ran on the Bull Moose ticket for Attorney-General in 1912, has had Satan's own time with the farmers in seeking to provide even a reasonably adequate system of education for their own children. But they are learning. The city politics of St. Louis and Kansas City is known of all men as disreputable and commercial. In no State of the Union, probably, is the poison squad, which deceives and lies to public opinion, so vigorous and successful. It seems sometimes, I am told, as if the people preferred to believe the worst of shining marks. The anti-machine fight in Kansas City, which proved unusually successful only yester-year, has declined in vitality, and the sordid political comrcialists are creeping back into power. hope of the State is in progressive

Republicanism, which is reasonably strong. Old-Guard Republicanism is only another name for Bourbon Democracy. They help each other out.

Those who think that the idealistic issue of the League of Nations played any particular part in the recent contest of Senator Reed for renomination in the Democratic primary would do well to bear the foregoing factors in mind. Missouri is not at present a State to be violently moved by idealism, "super" or any other kind. At bottom it appears to be like most of this Middle Western country, unmoved by the League of Nations issue, pretty stolidly nationalistic and anxious to keep out of European embroilments. Probably that helped Reed, but it was not the issue. They like Reed in Missouri as a sporting proposition. He is a hard and brainy fighter, even though many call him unscrupulous. And the average plain Missourian likes that. I fear that the Reed

personality fits Missouri better than the President Wilson personality.

I have heard it much discussed in the East as to whether the Bourbon Republican vote helped Reed out in the primary. Of course the reader understands that some of these Western primaries are very free primaries into which the voter may go and line up with either party or any party. The opinion seems to be here that in St. Louis, for particular reasons, every effort was made by the Republican organization to keep their voters in line for the Republican part of the fight, but there appears to be no doubt that in the State at large many thousands of Republicans joined in renominating Reed-plenty of them to do the work. He actually won by only 6,000. And the serious and informed view here is that he will have much Republican support at the polls in November, and will probably win then. In this country the League of Nations

issue is thoroughly in eclipse. Except in spots, it appears that this is true of the whole United States, as completely true still as in the 1920 overwhelming election upon the issue. It certainly had little effect against Lodge in Massachusetts in the primary. It might be decisive at the general election in Massachusetts in a close fight, but in and of itself in Massachusetts it seems to have no vitality. In Nebraska, where United States Senator Hitchcock is running again on his record as a Wilson League supporter, the chances of the progressive Republican, Howell, are somewhat enhanced by the issue. Hitchcock, who is a shrewd politician and has made an able Senator, evidently senses it, as he has sought to counteract it by a clever and incisive speech recently in the Senate in which he denounced before the world the action of the French on the Rhine in employing savage Africans as armed forces and in setting up brothels for them. This propagandist antidote has been put to work in a multitude of German homes in Nebraska, although it is quite likely that it has come too late to be of effective political service. All the irreconcilables about the LeagueReed, Johnson, Beveridge, La Follette have come through with flying colors; on other issues, but their hostility to the League never flecked them, rather aided them.

The attitude of the Middle West on the tariff is interesting. They have not waked up to it yet at all. There is no mighty Dolliver to stir their hearts as the great Iowan did against the PayneAldrich Bill in 1909 and 1910. Further more, the tariff-makers in Washington have prepared in advance at least a temporary bulwark against a recurring Payne-Aldrich tragedy by high duties on lemons and almonds and wheat and other products dear to the heart and the pocketbook of the Western agriculturist. Besides, prices generally are so much higher on everything than they were in 1910 that the Western consumer seems numb to the addition of a mere tariff burden.

The wise ones have told me that they look for the Western consumer to wake up a little later on, if he begins to pay appreciably more for the things he buys. In the wheat country, for example in Kansas, the high tariff duty on wheat is a delusion. The world price of wheat in Liverpool is now so low that the cost of production in Kansas is higher than the Liverpool price. The State of Kansas is frankly worried about its underlying economic condition, which depends as certainly upon wheat as Cuba's welfare depends upon sugar.

There is an agitation growing in Kansas for State-owned elevators, as in North Dakota. The great economic difficulty about wheat seems to be that under present conditions it has to be harvested and marketed within one hundred days. And the system of transportation and storage breaks down in the presence of so great a problem. Vast stores of

"WORKING FOR THE

GOVERNMENT"

BY

HERBERT E. MORGAN

The men who work for the Government are not working for something remote from the life of every-day Americans. They are working for all of us, and their problems concern us as directly as though we made out their pay checks ourselves. Those who read Mr. Morgan's article in a forthcoming issue will be reading about men they themselves employ.

wheat lie along the tracks at the stations, without cover, for days together exposed to the weather. These conditions contribute neither to sound quality nor to sound economic price. A counterwail is going up from the Associated Industries, representing the employing interests, against the so-called Socialistic innovation, with North Dakota held up as a horrible example. But, strangely enough, many Kansas bankers and business men refuse to be stampeded by the display of the North Dakota bogie. They say, "Well, what are you going to do about it? Something must be done or the economic stability of Kansas is gone."

I wonder if those are not right who refuse to foam at the mouth even at the radical experiments of North Dakota, and who say that it is a good thing that we have political laboratories in the Western States where experiments can be tried for the whole country and the mistakes of the original experiments provided against in the later imitation. Kansas may move in co-operative rather than in Socialistic directions in solving her problem, but, like North Dakota, she must get the thing done.

The reflective view of the Middle West is that some of the crucial rates in the current tariff bill are too high. The country doesn't want to be flooded with low-cost German products and doesn't intend to be. It has too great concern for the standard of living and the standard of advance of its own laboring population. The Middle West avers that it is no secret in Washington among the faithful who are supporting the bill that something was put over on them in the sugar and wool schedules, and some others, by the ruling leadership in Congress, and they are very sorry it happened on sugar and wool especially, because they think it will soon show in every home after the measure gets into operation.

And the Middle West may be the first to kick the roof off. But not now. The Middle West doesn't care three whoops

about the tariff issue or the bonus issue or the ship subsidy issue. People here talk about strikes. These are much nearer to them and much more menacing. They are inclined to think that Washington has been wasting a lot of time on the other issues and was as slow as molasses in getting ready to do something about a greater matter. They share, I find, the parodied sentiments of the famed Lackawanna versifier:

How very slow, said Phoebe Snow,
The coal negotiations go.
Both words and might seem useless
quite,

When craniums are anthracite.

You may say that there is a measure of unreason in their attitude, and there undoubtedly is. The West has long combined reason and unreason in its political opinions, as everybody knows. But I am only writing of things as I find them. I am not weighing them in the balances of reason.

Kansas, of course, is in the throes of an experiment against strikes in the essential industries. This is so important that I think it worthy of a separate letter, but I may say here that the relations of the Kansas mines with the new Industrial Court were such that at least a fifty per cent production was kept up through all the period of the recent coal strike, and the railway situation in Kansas proper has been surer than in the surrounding States. One reason has been that the Topeka shops of the Santa Fe System were protected from the outset by the new Industrial Court Law; not by State troopers, but by previous experience with opposition to the provisions of the law itself. As go the Topeka shops, so goes the Santa Fe System. And the provisions of the new law with respect to picketing during strikes upon essential industries are such, and the pressure upon the local authorities under the law to preserve order is such, that, with Alexander Howat and five of his comrades at present in jail as an outstanding example, there was a freedom from intimidation and a freedom for strike-breakers to work which did not exist in the neighboring States or anywhere else in the Union. This may be a reason why the Santa Fe is not one of the roads in the West to come to terms with the striking shopmen under the Warfield agreement, but insists stalwartly upon the peace of unconditional surrender. There is much to be said on both sides about this compulsory experiment, and I will return to it in a later letter. It has its good and bad points, and is still distinctly in the laboratory stage.

But this I think can be said here. The Kansas agricultural population, which is the great majority element, is committed to the new law, and their belief in it will give the Republicans the victory in the fall campaign. If it were not for this issue, the unrest in Kansas might be as dangerous to the Republican party as the unrest in Michigan and Colorado.

S

OMETHING is known outside of

China of Chang Tso-lin, variously called the "Satrap of Manchuria," "First War Lord of China," and SuperTuchun, but little has been heard about Wu Pei-fu, the chief obstacle to Chang Tso-lin's ambition to control China south of the Great Wall.

Two years ago thousands of students from middle schools, colleges, and universities throughout China converted agitation into action and flocked to the camp of Wu Pei-fu to enlist in the almost holy crusade against the Anfu clique traitors who were selling their country's sovereignty to Japan. Wu, then a division commander unknown outside of military circles, suddenly sprang into prominence in the summer of 1920, when he executed a strategic withdrawal from Hunan, whither he had been sent to conquer the “rebellious South."

By what foreign military attachés pronounced to be the most brilliant military tactics ever executed by a Chinese general, Wu sent the opposing forces rolling back against Peking, defeated, disorganized, and fighting each other.

Wu Pei-fu's well-disciplined force by slow and careful stages made its way to Peking, disarmed the defeated troops, and relieved the capital, which was ready to do him honor. Then Chang Tso-lin, ex-bandit and uncrowned King of Manchuria, swooped down with his divisions, and, with a slur at "the subordinate military officer," appropriated the fruits of Wu's victory. At the same time he adopted the defeated soldiers into his own ranks. After all, Wu was but a division commander turned popular hero overnight. He had not the prestige nor the numbers to face the Manchurian war lord.

Wu withdrew with his loyal Third Division to the barracks built by Yuan Shih-kai, as the nucleus of his mon'cal establishment, in the out-of-the

BY UPTON CLOSE

way loess hills of western Honan, there to bide his time.

Wu spent the autumn, winter, and spring training his model army. Visitors, among whom was American Minister Charles R. Crane, to his camp in Honanfu (or Loyang, the ancient capital of the Chow dynasty, 1000 B.C.), found him very hospitable-inclined to drink a bit to excess in honor of his guestsand very busy.

In the spring of 1921, through the agency of an American newspaper man, he discovered that a secret pact directed against him had been concluded between Tuchun Chen Shu-fan at Shensi, the province at his rear, and Chang Tso-lin of Mukden. He refused to submit to this threat, and, having made a public oath that this world was too small to hold both Chen and himself, began immediate operations against the Shensi Tuchun.

In the course of this action Wu despatched to Shensi his subordinate, Brigade Commander Feng Yu-hsiang, popularly known as the "Christian general."

Feng is a man of the same ideals as Wu, and this demarcation of a distinct field of effort for Feng has ended the slight jealousy over popular idolism existing between them, and has united them in a common purpose.

Wu had no sooner established his influence in northwest China than the call came to him to take a hand in the Middle Yangtze situation. Hupeh, the most important province of central China and the one which contains the three "Wuhan" cities (Hankow, Wuchang, and Hanyang) situated at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han Rivers, had suffered for four years under the misrule of Tuchun Wang Chan-yuan, the most reactionary of the militarists. His rule was characterized by extortion, opium trading, and every form of official corruption. Although all the Chinese

armies were unpaid for months, Wang's soldiers had even greater arrears due them than others.

Driven to desperation, and encouraged by a disaffected populace, his soldiers had repeatedly mutinied. In three of these mutinies foreign interests suffered heavily. Some Japanese lives were lost, and Japanese, British, and American consular and commercial property was destroyed.

Chang Tso-lin, fearing for the prestige of militarism, decreed that Wang should stay. Hupeh local leaders, however, bribed the military of the neighboring province, Hunan, to undertake an offensive against him.

Sun Yat-sen, whose Commander Chen Chung-ming had just added the province of Kweichow to his recent conquest of Kwangtung, immediately sent agents to Hunan in an attempt to enlarge the affair into a general Southern invasion of the North. The whole country was thrown into apprehension. The U. S. S. Albany and other foreign cruisers and gunboats cleared for action and lay in the Yangtze off the foreign concessions. Every one was asking: "What will Wu, whose forces, lying half-way between Peking and Hankow, are the key to the situation, do?" At this critical moment and while Wu's troops were moving southward along the railway, not knowing which side they would support upon arrival in Hupeh, the writer visited General Wu, who had calmly remained in his Loyang headquarters.

"My foremost aim in regard to the Hunan-Hupeh situation," said General Wu Pei-fu to me, "is to prevent the interprovincial squabble from becoming a general war between the North and South. Aside from the resultant needless suffering which reoutbreak of strife of this nature would cause the Chinese people and the foreigners in our midst, no possible benefit therefrom could come to the nation. The ultimate reunion of