NE afternoon in November, 1907, at the height of the recent financial storm, a slight, unpretentious-looking man sat in the lobby of the St. Regis, in New York, reading a newspaper. His glance was attracted to a small paragraph buried in the mass of Wall Street news, very much as he was buried in the crowd of important-looking persons who towered above him. The paragraph stated that the Arnold Print Works, of North Adams, Massachusetts, had gone into the hands of a receiver.

The modest-appearing little man donned his overcoat, wormed his way outside, hailed a cab, and was driven downtown to the office of the company, and had a conference with Mr. A. C. Houghton, its president. Then things began to hum. The two gentlemen telephoned around town, and quickly assembled the principal creditors of the concern.

"Gentlemen," said the small man, "there are twenty thousand people in North Adams, one-half of whom are dependent upon this factory for their bread and butter. If it goes to the wall half the houses in town will be for rent, grass will grow in the streets, and there will be poverty and misery. Moreover, the banks may be closed by a run. If they go under they will wreck the merchants."

The creditors were loath to grant a compromise. Finally, one of them, an important-looking citizen, whose picture has appeared in every ten-cent magazine for two years past, with an impressive cough said: "I'll tell you what we'll do, Senator: If you will act as receiver, we will back you up."

"Oh, if the Senator will act as receiver it will be all right," chimed in the other creditors.

He

The Senator returned to his hotel. He walked the floor that night, turning the problem over in his mind, for he was a busy man. In the morning he had reached a decision. He had been thinking of the working people in North Adams. agreed to act as receiver. The news was telegraphed to the panic-stricken town. Little groups of operatives discussed it on the street corners. The storekeepers discussed it behind their counters. The bankers discussed it in their private offices. Everybody said:

"Murray Crane will act as receiver of the print works. Now, everything will be all right."

The gloom which had settled over the little town was shaken off. The sun began to smile. Confidence returned. Since then, in spite of most discouraging business conditions, the Arnold Print Works has been running, and a satisfactory outcome is assured.

Who is this man Crane?

He came to the United States Senate in 1904 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the venerable George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts. The Senate received him without much interest. Although he had been a successful governor of his state, and had declined appointment as Secretary of the Treasury, and the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, it was thought that he could not make his influence felt in the Senate for many years.

Winthrop Murray Crane took his seat in the clubroom of aristocrats, and began to look about him. He studied the Senate as he would have investigated a business proposition. By and by he began to dis

cover things of which older senators had never dreamed. He mastered details first, and then branched out.

Soon, when a senator approached another senator and talked confidentially of a matter, the other senator would say: "What does Crane think about it?" It was not long before an increasing number of senators were saying this, and until it is ascertained where Crane stands, it is thought inadvisable now to do anything.

His committee room is sought by statesmen-who have been in the Senate so long that half their families are on the government pay-rolls-wishing to consult a man who has not yet thoroughly warmed the seat of his mahogany chair, or scraped any varnish from his new desk. These senators, growing enthusiastic, pound their thighs, and declare that "Crane is the best mixer I ever knew." So he is, but he is a "mixer" who does not "mix."

There is nothing "hail fellow well met" about Senator Crane. He does not line the boys up at the bar and tell stories by the yard, although he can spin a good yarn, and he never dashed up to a fellow and slapped him on the back, in his life. If anybody ever slapped Senator Crane on the back probably there would be a funeral. He is not built for a "mixer."

He has an almost effeminate hand, which he slips timidly into yours when he greets you, and there is no grip about it. It is a very unresponsive hand, not at all suited to a United States Senator with a reputation as a "mixer." When he ventures from the security of the Senate Chamber to navigate a cautious course to the House or to his committee room, he always hugs the wall with a shrinking modesty which makes persons who behold him swell with pity. Probably nobody ever knew Senator Crane but to love him. Possibly he is a "mixer"; but if he is, he is a new breed - he has never been catalogued.

There is one place where he is not a "mixer," and that is at the "Other end of the Avenue." It is reported that he has been there, and is familiar with the road, but the watchmen and doorkeepers and messengers do not know him.

When the Presidential situation began to grow warm it was but natural the leaders should ask, "Where does Crane stand?" They are still asking it. He has

been mentioned as the campaign manager of Hughes, Knox, and others, and has been spoken of for the nomination himself. It has not been discovered just where he does stand. One day he is to take charge of the Pittsburg ambition; the next he is rushing off to Albany. One thing is certain, if William H. Taft is not nominated by the Chicago convention, Winthrop Murray Crane will have much to say as to who will be chosen, and he will be the "Mark Hanna" of that candidate's campaign.

There is no great similarity, however, between McKinley's promoter and Senator Crane. Mark Hanna, when he came to an obstruction in his way, battered it down with catapults and rams. Murray Crane will not permit any obstructions to exist. He will look about two miles ahead all the time, observe a stone wall, and choose another route. If he manages the next campaign he will not open any headquarters, and there will be no brass bands. These are not the Crane methods. He will dart around, like a busy little tug, quietly, invisibly, and by and by the great crowd of spectators will behold the ponderous. ship to which the Crane tug is attached making well-defined movement and edging in toward the dock but they will overlook the tug. Senator Crane is not showy, and if he had his choice of a committee room at the capitol he would select one in the sub-basement.

There is no better judge of human nature in the Senate than he. If he does manage some man's campaign next fall, a good way to make easy money would be to play that man all three ways. He has infinite common sense, which at times makes him a unique figure in the Senate, never picks a "piker," and never makes a blunder.

In Massachusetts half the people call him "Murray." He was born with a golden spoon in his mouth. His father left him the Crane Paper Mills, at Dalton, and at seventeen he went to work there, and learned the business in every branch. To-day his private fortune is estimated at from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000. He has always been a generous spender for his party, but it can be said of him that his wealth has not been responsible for his political successes. Thoroughly democratic, he is known personally to all of the employees of his mills, and has always given them the care of a father in times of illness

and death. He would rather do something for a friend in distress than for himself, and as he is always giving himself pleasure by such performances, he is a very busy and a very happy man. It is well known in Massachusetts that he has saved many firms and individuals from destruction in times of business stress, and he is affectionately known as the "Financial Undertaker." And he doesn't bury the corpse, either, but resuscitates it.

In the Senate Crane is known as the "Political Coroner." If there is a legislative corpse requiring expert attention, Crane is called in. If the Senate is in a snarl, and there is serious factional feeling on the Republican side, Crane is summoned. He is constant in his attendance upon these wakes. This has been one of his fortes in Massachusetts for years.

In the first session of the Fifty-ninth Congress he showed his genius for this business. A bitter fight raged between the White House and the Republican Senate over the Railroad Rate Bill. The majority were apparently hopelessly divided over the question of the court review provision. It looked as though the bill would be passed by a minority of the Republicans, acting with the Democrats. This, to be sure, would give to President Roosevelt a law which he craved, but it would be a Democratic law, and the Democratic party would get the credit for it. None realized this better than did the frail little Senator from Massachusetts. He finally effected a compromise, in which the President concurred, on the "Allison Amendment." The Republican party was saved from a wide split up the back. Winthrop Murray Crane did it.

All that he has accomplished in the Senate, however, has been done without previous knowledge of legislative affairs. He is an executive, not a law-maker. He had been a practical governor of Massachusetts, and put many reforms into operation, the necessity for which appealed to him as a business man.

He

entered politics in 1892, when, at the Minneapolis convention, he was elected Republican National Committeeman for Massachusetts. While he was governor, in 1902, a vacancy occurred in the cabinet of President Roosevelt. Up to that time the old McKinley cabinet had held over. As soon as President Roosevelt's hands were

free he offered the Treasury portfolio to Mr. Crane. Crane declined it. The Crane paper companies had, and still have, large contracts with the government. Thousands of dollars worth of Crane paper are used every year in the Treasury Department. It is not only unlawful, but unwise, for a man supplying wares to a government department to accept the chieftainship of that department, and Senator Crane naturally declined the position. This same question arose later when he entered the Senate. entered the Senate. To avoid criticism when he decided to take the offered toga, he transferred to his son that mill which had exclusively contracts with the government.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge looked with some favor upon Crane's appointment to the Senate. He was sure that Crane would leave the showy part of the job to him, and Crane has, but he has appropriated the practical part to himself. Senator Lodge gets more jobs for his constituents, but Senator Crane is building the greater reputation.

Crane will never try to undermine the senior senator. He plays no tricks. Hence, Lodge has accepted the situation, and has settled down to the accomplishment of his ambition, which is to become the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations when the distinguished Shelby M. Cullom steps aside, and prevent the introduction of the primary system into Massachusetts, which would result in some other man obtaining his job.

Unfortunately for the peace of mind of Senator Lodge, President Roosevelt wished Massachusetts to send a delegation to the Chicago convention instructed for William Howard Taft. Senator Lodge proceeded to deliver the goods. Senator Crane took the position that the selection of an instructed delegation would simply mean that the delegates to the convention might just as well don Western Union messenger boy uniforms. He has contended that only by an uninstructed delegation could the greatest popular participation in the Republican convention be secured. Hence there is raging in Massachusetts to-day one of the fiercest political fights in the country.

If the Taft managers had not attempted to tie, bind and deliver the delegates for their candidate, it is probable that the

Secretary of War might have secured a large majority of them. Those who know the temper of Massachusetts declare that the Taft tactics have made many independent men, who might have favored him, oppose him in the interests of independence in politics. And it is said that Taft is weaker in that state to-day than when Senator Lodge started out to hand the delegates, sealed, over to the administration. Winthrop Murray Crane has seen to that.

There was an attempt made to belittle Crane when he first ran for lieutenantgovernor, because he was a nonshowy person, with an unimpressive appearance in general - but it failed. Crane saw to that. He is a man of peace, in business and politics, but with his back to the wall he becomes a fighter. Diplomacy is his weapon, but he can wield a bludgeon, although he may have to use both hands to do it. Since he put Sam Winslow, who opposed him for lieutenant-governor, in the vanquished class, he has had no opposition. Even Sam Winslow is now on "his side."

Hence it has come about that Senator Crane holds the balance of power in the

destinies of Secretary Taft. If Crane would "come out" for Taft, and throw New England's delegates into his ample lap, the nomination of the War Secretary would be practically assured, for New England has eighty-two delegates in the Republican national convention, and Massachusetts is the leader among the states in that section.

A short time since things reached so critical a stage that the nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Mr. Taft was held out to him, if he would but be a "Taft" man. Senator Crane is not anybody's "man." He did not even consider the offer which was tendered to him.

It is probable that the fight now in progress in Massachusetts over the candidacy of Secretary Taft will not split the Republican party in that state, although a similar quarrel among Democrats would disrupt them, and there will be no open rupture between the senators. Senator Crane will probably win, in Massachusetts, his struggle for freedom of expression on the part of delegates in a national convention. Senator Lodge will bark, but he will not bite. Senator Lodge has an ambition.

ITHIN the past few years, on the American stage, we have had presentations of Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Twelfth Night," and "As You Like It." The success which these productions enjoyed is sufficient to refute the oft-repeated assertion that the public will not go to see Shakespeare.

And what brilliant and enchanting oases these plays made in the generally arid waste of the modern drama! Moonight revels in fairyland, sun-bathed Illyria, green-bowered Arden: how different

from the scenes that the stern old Norwegian drew, up there in the cold, dark North. North. What a prodigal luxuriance of fancy, what an fancy, what an exuberant joyousness, what sheer poetic magic, what rich and genial creations of imaginative genius, what a vibrant, pulsing spirit of youth and life and love and beauty, are revealed in those plays of the great Elizabethan! It would seem as if the primal Earth Spirit, the spirit which in Goethe's Faust "weaves the living garment of deity," had entered into the soul of the Stratford player as he wrote these comedies, and decreed that whatever he might touch should spring into forms of rarest charm and pure delight.

But Shakespeare wrote when the world was young, when the sun still shone bright on flowers and field, and the soul of man drank in the glory of it and was simple and calm and glad. He wrote before Schopenhauer wrote, before Leopardi wrote, before Nietzsche wrote, before the cold and callous man of science peered out into the infinite spaces of the star depths and into the rocks and ruins of the past, before Darwin and Haeckel and Spencer assailed the work of the Man of Nazareth, before the seething turmoil of a complex society begot the Weltschmerz and the spiritual unrest and the bitter questionings and ceaseless cravings of the present.

So we do not have any more Midsummer Night's Dreams or Twelfth Nights. Instead of Shakespeare we have Ibsen. Instead of Oberon, we have Peer Gynt; instead of Rosalind we have Hedda Gabler; instead of Viola we have Ellida Wangel, "The Lady From the Sea." Instead of Hermia and Orlando, Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The literature of the present bears somewhat the same relation to the literature of Shakespeare's time that Arnold Boeklin's "Todten-Insel" bears to a landscape by Corot. What have become of the beauties that poor Keats dreamed of- of the

magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn? We no longer have such pictures as that of The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution, round earth's human shores, or that incomparable one that Shelley

drew in "The Cloud":

That orbéd maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn.

We of the modern world seem to have lost, in great measure, the power of wonder and delight in the marvelous, the beautiful, the strange and subtle things of life. Our poetic sensitiveness, our responsiveness to

All beauty, and all starry majesties,
And dim trans-stellar things,

as Francis Thompson phrases it, have been appreciably dulled. The magic suggestion of "an elfin storm from faery land" or "twilight saints and dim emblazonings" no longer calls forth the eager imaginative

comprehension that it once did. We are no longer naive. We have become sophisticated; we are the victims of disillusionment.

People nowadays look back with amusement, not untinged with contempt, upon the emotional and sentimental raptures of the eighteenth century literature, upon Wertherism and the comedie larmoyante and Richardson's novels. These productions are thought to be rather mawkish now. now. Yet one likes occasionally to turn from the neurasthenic heroes and heroines of modern European literature to Goethe's Werther, the gentle, loving dreamer, the sweet, sad, emotional idealist, keenly alive to sensuous influences and perceiving the mystic harmonies of nature. And one sometimes wonders if the ultra-modern school of writers would not be more truly human and more universally intelligible if they gave fuller expression, not only to man's sense of beauty, but to the gentler and more appealing emotions of the heart.

Time was when the public welcomed gladly the works of poets who sang of joyous beings who "wander on silver wings among the blossoms of earth, breathing perfumes on the flowers, or rest in buds of the moss-rose in palaces lighted by the sparkling gems of jewelled crowns." But contemporary European literature, at least, gives us nothing like this or like "Werther" or like "Twelfth Night." But we have the jarring slam of the front door as Nora leaves "A Doll's House"; we have Sudermann's Magda stepping over the corpse of the poor, old-fashioned colonel, out into the modern world, whose witching allurements she has been unable to resist; we have Hauptmann's Helene, lusted after by her own drink-maddened father, stabbing herself to death - "Before Sunrise." And as if this were not enough Oscar Wilde paints for us the picture of Salome kissing and cuddling the gory head of John the Baptist under the green flare of a stage lamp!

Most modern European literature seems to be either morbidly brutal and pessimistic or wildly erotic; in surveying this work we find ourselves confronted in turn by the "flowers of evil" and the gloom and mire of naturalism. Germany, whose "intellectuals" not long ago were acclaiming the ravings of Teamster Henschel and the leprous despair of Poor Henry as the