teenth because you had more than once, of course, discussed with me the circumstances which have long made it a serious personal sacrifice for you to remain in office. I know that only your high and exacting sense of duty has kept you here until the immediate tasks of the war should be over. But I am none the less distressed. I shall not allow our intimate personal relation to deprive me of the pleasure of saying that in my judgment the country has never had an abler, a more resourceful and yet prudent, a more uniformly efficient Secretary of the Treasury; and I say this remembering all the able, devoted and distinguished men who preceded you. I have kept your letter a number of days in order to suggest, if I could, some other solution of your difficulty than the one which you have now felt obliged to resort to. But I have not been able to think of any. I can not ask you to make further sacrifice, serious as the loss of the Government will be in your retirement. I accept your resignation, therefore, to take effect upon the appointment of a successor, because in justice to you I must.

"I also, for the same reasons, accept your resignation as Director-General of Railroads, to take effect, as you suggest, on the first of January next, or when your successor is appointed. The whole country admires, I am sure, as I do, the skill and executive capacity with which you have handled the great and complex problem of the unified administration of the railways under the stress of war uses, and will regret, as I do, to see you leave that post just as the crest of its difficulty is passed.

"For the distinguished, disinterested and altogether admirable service you have rendered the country in both posts, and especially for the way in which you

have guided the Treasury through all the perplexities and problems of transitional financial conditions and of the financing of a war which has been without precedent alike in kind and in scope I thank you with a sense of gratitude which comes from the very bottom of my heart.

"Gratefully and affectionately yours,

(Signed) "WOODROW WILSON.

"Hon. William G. McAdoo,

"Secretary of the Treasury."

On December 16, 1918, McAdoo surrendered the great post of the Treasury, which he had held for nearly six years, to Carter Glass, of Virginia. On January 11, 1919, he turned over the Railroad Administration to his successor, Walker D. Hines.

THE MEASURE OF THE MAN

"I go out of public life," McAdoo told the Treasury workers when he bade them good-by, "with a most intense admiration for our institutions, their value, and their power. Their inspiration and their idealism have been revindicated and set forward as a result of this great war. I go out with the deepest feeling of affection for mankind at large, and an interest in humanity on an enlarged scale."

Unconsciously-or perhaps out of that subconsciousness which brings man in tune with infinity-he had struck the keynote of his own character. Men take from public office, as from all commanding experience, exactly what they put into it; and ultimate judgment of any man in public life must be made not only from the face of the record but also from the background of his personality. Next to President Wilson, McAdoo

was the great outstanding figure of wartime America. To take a metaphor from one of his tasks, he stood at the semaphore tower of the world's traffic, directing, switching, expediting the finances and the transportation requisite to win the victory. Upon him rested the obligation of holding a clear track for the nation's service. What manner of man was he for the task he accomplished?

Every man of distinction has a dominant characteristic which determines the tenor of his decisions. In McAdoo the quality was an understanding human sympathy which rose above his other evinced and salient characteristics as definitely and as high as the Monument looms over Washington. It is almost safe to say that this quality was the fundamental determinant in every grave decision he made during his Secretaryship. It is a judicial quality which kept his judgment suspended until both sides of the case had been heard. It took into account the equities of those who never appear in court. His heart never ran away with his head he was about as maudlin in the Treasury as old Andrew Jackson had been in the White Housebut the gift, or burden, of seeing the world's troubles with eyes which seek to find ease for the troubled was the pack which McAdoo carried into public life.

Out of it came his reactions to the vital issues of the time. The driving of vested financial interests from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Act, the Farm Loans, the Tariff legislation, the War Risk Insurance and Adjusted Compensation for soldiers and sailors, the general orders on the railroads-the hundred and one points of legislation and administration touching the lives of the average men and women of the country -came from his passionately determined sense of jus

tice for the crowd. Too executive to be demagogic, he put into action with no blare of trumpets the reforms for which demagogues had long clamored. Out of his Americanism came the inception of the revival of the American Merchant Marine; and in that, as in the other measures, he was fighting the battle of the ordinary American.

From his sympathy, too, came his advocacy of the rights for which the leaders of the cause of women were battling. His act in giving equal pay to women in the Hudson Tunnels for equal work with men had taken him indirectly into public life; and he continued his active interest even when the question became the focusing point for bitter opposition. In a letter of November 1, 1917, to Mrs. Victor Morowitz, of New York City, for the purpose of urging that the State of New York adopt Woman Suffrage, he wrote:

"The discriminations against women in civil and industrial life are wholly repugnant to democratic ideals and institutions, and work grave injustices to them. The principle of equal pay for women who perform the same character of service as men, is clearly right, but it is almost universally denied. This unfair discrimination against women can not be justified on moral or economic grounds, and yet it is accentuated because women have not the right of suffrage, and, therefore, are unable to influence potentially the enactment of just laws which would give them equal opportunities with men. I believe that if women were given the right of suffrage there would be improvement in our civic ideals and that the economic discriminations and disadvantages under which they are now forced to labor would gradually disappear, with benefit not only to women but to the life of the nation."

In the belief that woman's demand for suffrage should be based upon economic and social as well as upon civil and political grounds, he declared that "the highest conceptions of social justice can not be attained until women are given full political rights."

On other questions of the public weal, child labor, the rights of labor to living wage and bettered working conditions, tax reduction, and-after the warthe soldier bonus, his stand was determined by the same liberalism of general attitude.

To win his results he had to work with men and through men. His executive ability gave to others the impression of his amazing versatility. He had the ability to handle men, individually and in groups, even when their policy was opposed to his own, without arousing personal antagonisms. Intent upon his ideal, he would present his case with a smile and a story, taking his hearer upon Abraham's bosom. A fighting blade for keenness and swiftness, he flashed out whenever occasion demanded defense of the principles which were part of him.

His ready and easy accessibility in office, his long and wide-swung tours for the Liberty Loans, made him a familiar war factor to the American public. His genius for friendships took him into every walk in life. It was inevitable that even during the war some of his friends should suggest his candidacy for the Presidency in 1920, a suggestion which he repelled with determination. "I am not only not a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1920," he wrote on October 2, 1918, to a newspaper man who advocated his selection, "but I have no desire to be such a candidate. The great responsibilities which the war has imposed upon me can not be successfully discharged if I should have any