Agriculture, and the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Labour.

When I reached the Cabinet room I found there most of my associates. Josephus Daniels appeared to be hugely enjoying the experience. He was having sensations at the rate of a dozen a minute. He came toward me, exclaiming: "Isn't it great? Isn't it wonderful?" Secretary Redfield also was having numerous palpitations, with Burleson and Garrison as close seconds. McReynolds, Lane, and William B. Wilson were taking the experience calmly. McAdoo, I imagined, was saying to himself: "How in the mischief did I get here and what am I doing?" And Bryan!!

The President slipped in quietly, looking very trim, alert, and well, greeted us charmingly, and took his seat at the head of the table. He acted as naturally as if he had been doing the same thing all his life. He was not in the least nervous. He seemed to have a firm grip on himself and on the situation. I felt that he knew where he was going and how he proposed to get there. I recalled that he had been studying government all his life, and that he had had several years of experience as Governor of New Jersey. There was no mark of the recruit about him.

After a brief pause, he said: "Gentlemen, I thought we had better come together and talk about getting started on our way."

After a few good stories and some witty remarks from the President, Bryan, and others, we discussed when we should take the oath of office. It was agreed that as many as possible should be sworn in that afternoon, if the Senate had acted and confirmed our nominations. Each

of the others said that, in conformity with custom, the head of his department had called and had asked his pleasure about assuming his duties. As yet I had had no word of any kind from Secretary Wilson of the Department of Agriculture. Some matters of patronage were mentioned, but nothing of consequence was considered. The President decided that the first regular Cabinet would be held the next day, Thursday, at eleven o'clock.

As I sat at my place at the table, I found myself looking constantly at the man at the big end of it and at the man at his right, his Secretary of State. I had long known and watched both of them. I knew that they were about as different as it was possible for men to be. I had watched Bryan for more than twenty years. My attention was first called to him when he made a speech on the tariff in Congress about 1892. Some time afterward, I was visiting in Darlington, S. C. I called to see an old friend, Congressman George W. Dargan. This gentleman belonged to one of the old Carolina families and to the old school, and was one of its finest types. He was a charming man, a fine lawyer, and a student of affairs. He had great self-respect and, therefore, great courage. He was one of the best representatives South Carolina or any other state ever had. He was a Cleveland Democrat. Nearly every precinct in his district, after the free-silver movement got well under way, instructed Mr. Dargan to vote for the free coinage of silver at sixteen to one; but he not only did not do so; he made one of the three best speeches against the proposal that were heard in Congress during that struggle. Of course, he was left at home in the next election, much to the loss of the state and the nation.

When I saw Mr. Dargan, I spoke of the Mr. Bryan who had made a speech on the tariff and asked him what he thought of him. He answered: "He has a fine voice and a good presence, but he really doesn't know anything at all." I was to be reminded of this opinion many a time -the first time in Fort Worth, Texas, early in 1895, when I heard Bryan for more than two hours on the silver question. I discovered that one could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact or a sound statement.

Well, this man was now sitting on Woodrow Wilson's right as his Secretary of State-on the right of the man who had leaped into the place which Bryan had tried for twenty years to reach. He had never been successful, or tried out, in anything except in speaking or writing; while Wilson excelled him certainly as a writer and had demonstrated his ability also to act and to act wisely. Wilson, I reflected, is a student: Bryan is not. Wilson searches for facts, masters them, and interprets them. He knows history and has its teachings at his command. Bryan has never been a student. He has natural ability, but is untrained. He does not examine a question with a view to get all the pertinent facts, to analyse them, to interpret them, and to draw the fair and sound conclusion from them. Rather, he has impulses, mainly in the field of morals, and is constantly on the alert to get something which has been represented to him as a fact to support or to sustain his impulses. Wilson has a keen sense of direction; Bryan an uncanny sense for the wrong direction. Both, I believe, are men of high character and good intentions. Bryan, I believe, is honest. I think he is merely ignorant and unpractical. They are