Photograph by C. H. Overton, Cortland, N. Y. NATHAN MILLER IN 1887, AT THE AGE OF 18

teaching at the time of the organization of a Harrison and Reid campaign club in the fall of 1892. The village folks thought he did exceedingly well; so wel! that when, in the following winter season, a home talent dramatic entertainment was given in McLean, the young school-teacher was invited to participate. The community also remembers about this that his talents in drama were as inadequate as his campaign speech had been triumphant. Miller never was an actor. He never could be. Whatever he thinks or whatever he does has naturally the clear merit of being real, genu ine, and straightforward.

In 1897 the Republican party in his home county was very badly beaten by a fusion ticket, and the time was ripe for a change in leadership. It came the next year, when Miller, at the age of thirty, became the undisputed political head of his county. In 1902 he was appointed Comptroller of the State of New York to fill an unexpired term, and at the succeeding election retained his seat by the vote of the people of the State. In less than a year, however, he was appointed by Governor Odell to suc ceed Justice Burr Mattice, who had died.

It was this ten-year period from 1892 to 1902 which gave him his practical grip upon the machinery and organization of politics in the State of New York. He sat with the Platt leaders in the frequent meetings in the city of New York. He learned exactly how the wheels go round and why they go. Naturally loyal though he was to the

party organization, he perceived already that some of the Platt practices were exceedingly harmful to the party and the country. He grew up in the old school of politics and his later judicial training made him cautious and con servative. Nevertheless nothing has ever counted so much with Nathan Miller as integrity and reasonableness in any public man or in any party policy. And his old acquaintances in politics laud his sound judgment as an organiza tion man and his unerring instinct as to what was the right thing to do.

Miller's early profound political experience has been of enormous advantage to him as Governor. He understands the psychology of the average party man and political leader in the State of New York as no Governor has in the present generation. He has been able to work with the politicians in and out of the Legislature with less friction than has been the case with any Governor I have ever heard of. They feel him to be in a very real sense one of their kind, and when he asks them out of his clear vision and determination and intelligence to do things which they never dreamed of they just do them without cavil or reproach.

It is this early cautious organization training in the old school and the long separation from active issues while he was on the bench and a naturally quiet and unheated mind which give in Governor Miller the accurate impression of a conservative personality. Many individuals of a progressive temperament have consequently been misled into the belief that the Governor was a friend of reaction. There is nothing in that. Whether they say much about it or not, dyed-in-the-wool business and political reactionaries in the State of New York are as disappointed in Miller as the most hectic liberal. When the Governor took firm hold of the deplorable transit situation in the city of New York, the more reactionary representatives of the property interest in metropolitan transportation were in high glee. They are more sober now. The Miller policy in New York traction affairs lends itself as little to reactionary injustice as it does to Hearstian or Hylanian demagogy. And certain politicians are not reconciled at all to the Governor's waste-saving reforms. The light of reason and sound sense illumines brightly the economic and political area of the commonwealth under the Miller leadership. There is not much room for the bogies of reaction or radicalism within range of the Miller vision.

It is true that the Governor has grown in sensitiveness to wise measures of human advance since he has been at the head of the government in Albany. Early in his administration progressive persons thought that they detected a defect in sympathy on the human side of government. Whatever there was to that is an aftermath of a necessarily secluded life upon the bench in the

(C) Paul Thompson

GOVERNOR MILLER OF NEW YORK (A recent photograph) period between 1903 and 1915, when the country was ablaze with liberalism under Roosevelt and his compeers. Transport a judge from the bench once again to the human arena of politics and government, and you must give him as much time as a kitten to get his eyes open. We all remember how it was with Hughes in 1916. But if a judge has it in him, as Hughes has and Miller has, he soon sees things as they are forming in the mold of the popular will, and guides his policies rationally in accordance therewith.

I call Governor Miller a conservative liberal. He is willing to go as far in reasonable advance as the government and the people are able to pay for and manage measures of advance. The trouble with the radical liberal in mos! periods, but especially in the present economic crisis, is that he would have us in hot water and bankruptcy at the same time. Miller would make us think as we go and pay as we go and always have a little balance of caution in the policy and money in the treasury. His administration at Albany has been characterized by intelligence, economy, and responsibility. In a time of chaos Miller would lay anew in industry and politics the economic foundations of an ordered liberty. The Port of New York, the transit system of the metropolis, the barge canal, the unused water powers of the State, the penal and charitable institutions, the government bureaus, the political machines, have all felt the molding and developing touch of the

master hand. And liberal measures of progress have not been forgotten. The juvenile court idea, which Judge Lindsay has made immortal, is established by the Miller administration for the commonwealth of New York. Hereafter dependent, delinquent, and neglected children will be taken care of without giving them a criminal record, and those of them who prove worthy and competent will have their chance in the human society of which they are a part. Another important piece of evidence of liberal interest in human welfare on the part of the Miller administration is to be found in the establishment and generous endowment of a division of maternity, infancy, and child hygiene in the State Department of Health. This piece of humanitarian policy is designed to accomplish under State auspices, State rules, and State funds much more than is contemplated by the widely heralded Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act of the National Congress. New York accepts no funds from the Nationa! Government, repudiates the SheppardTowner Act as an encroachment in a subtle fashion upon the activities of the States, but undertakes on its own initiative to protect to its utmost mothers and little children not knowing how or not. able to care for themselves.

Miller was a member of the highest courts of the State of New York between 1903 and 1915. He was on the trial bench for a little more than a year, when he was designated by the then Governor Odell to the appellate division of the Second Department in Brooklyn. He remained there until he was selected by Governor Hughes in 1909 for the First Department of New York, because Hughes wished to make the First Department a very strong appellate division. Here he stayed until 1912, when Governor Sulzer designated him to sit on the Court of Appeals. He therefore had in the Comptrollership and the various courts a wide administrative and judicial experience. Abruptly in 1915 he resigned from the Court of Appeals before he was fotry-seven years of

age.

The sources of his power are clear. He has by nature a very keen legal, analytical, logical mind, with a fine edge from experience. He has the capacity to devote himself assiduously to his daily task. In spite of a somewhat frail body from boyhood, he can assimilate any quantity of hard work. His mind is able to concentrate closely upon an argument and take eagle flight through briefs and records to find out what the issue is. While he was a local political leader in his young manhood, he was noted for his remarkable judgment. He was strategist of no mean order. And these qualities have grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength. And withal he is very quiet and modest and even-tempered, with nothing vindictive in his nature: a very courteous man, patient, unruffled, and unafraid.

a

There is about him no sentimentality and almost no visible emotion. But that there is a deep vein of true sentiment in him, let the following attest. One of his first acts after he had begun to accumulate a surplus in the law was to purchase a fine farm of seventy-five acres near the village of Cortland, upon which he placed his father and mother in their declining years. They had lived on the farm a very short time when his mother, of whom he was very fond, suddenly died. A little time afterward he came from New York to spen1 the Sunday in the village of Cortland, and asked one of his closest friends to walk with him to the cemetery where the body of his mother was buried. It was a site which he himself had selected, so he told his friend, on high ground overlooking the little farm of seventy-five acres, which, he said, had been the center of almost the whole of the unworried content and happiness which his mother had ever known.

The taunt of the demagogue seeks to brand Miller as a corporation lawyer on the ground that he has frequently been since he left the bench the attorney for corporate business. Corporation lawyer as an opprobrious epithet came with the wave of emotional liberalism out of the West, where the main form of corporate business is the railway and where the term corporation lawyer means a railway counsel who lobbies in Washington and is the hired man of railway power, with at least the assumption running against him as a free and independent American citizen. In the East, on the other hand, any man who aspires to the front rank of legal eminence is sure to be the counsel in much corporate business, because in the East the main forms of business are corporate in character.

"Ireland Revisited"

FREDERICK W. CLAMPETT,

a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and a keen student of the problems of his native land, presents an extraordinarily clear picture of conditions in Ireland in an article which will appear in next week's Outlook.

What Bernard Shaw said to him concerning De Valera is as compact and trenchant a comment upon the folly of the Irish Republican leaders as anything we have seen. It represents Shaw at his best.

But

And many lawyers of the first rank and of the first quality of citizenship, who keep the door of their offices wide open to all who may wish to enter as clients, naturally have much corporate business as their experience and reputation enlarge. But the real men among them are not affected in their obligations or opinions as American citizens. Lesser ones among them may, and unquestionably often do, imbibe corporate bias which they sometimes carry with them into citizenship and government. the real ones do not. One afternoon at two o'clock, when the Great Northern Securities case was before the Supreme Court of the United States, a representative of Morgan and Hill appeared at the office of Elihu Root and retained him as counsel. At four o'clock on the same afternoon Edward H. Harriman, who was arrayed against Morgan and Hill in the substance of this famous case, also appeared in the office of Elihu Root, seeking to retain him as counsel. If Harriman had arrived at ten minutes before two instead of at four o'clock, Mr. Root would have been Harriman's counsel, and not Morgan's, before the Supreme Court of the United States. But when Elihu Root was in the Senate of the United States or was High Commissioner of the American Nation at The Hague or in the great international conference at Washington, his country was his client, and all the powers of an intellect unsurpassed in this generation were employed for his country.

When Nathan L. Miller left the bench, he became the counsel for a great corporation. But he retained the right to have private clients and argue cases, and his most important business until he became Governor was the defending of causes of great moment before the First Department Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals. The point is that he has a mind of far too great keenness and integrity to be influenced by corporate bias. Throughout his term as Governor his State has been his client.

He is a National example. There is no State in the Union where precisely the things which most need to be done in the present governmental crisis have been so well done as in the State of New York under the Miller Governorship And he has maintained a practically perfect party solidarity in the Legislature. He has recognized the unquestion able fact that the American system of government cannot work without responsible leadership, and he has had the human tact and the practical sagacity as well as the high intelligence to furnish the leadership.

Miller can think. And he can act. And he has the courage to do the thing which for the moment may be unpopular, but which is right and is rapidly discovered to be right by public opinion. In the possession of these qualities he is a National asset. The country at large has too few like him in the high places of power.

N°

OT that I pretend to be one of them, though small Elizabeth did say a while ago that "Aunt Caro would never grow up, would she?" And I assured her solemnly that I never would. For, as every devotee of Barrie knows, youth is a matter of the spirit. I am sure that, like my young contemporaries of the moment, I was much older at eighteen than I ever will be again, should I live to be eighty. It is fortunately going somewhat out of fashion now to think that youth has no problems. Why, there is no period like it for a sense that all the weight of the world is on one's shoulders. Indeed it is, too, for the ignorance of youth is a far heavier burden than the wisdom of age. By thirty we have learned to "pass the buck," and by forty we have built up an effectual system of defenses, so that we avoid the impact of burdens which we cannot lift efficiently. Sometimes, indeed, we build our counteroffensive so well that it repels all attacks, but of that species I shall not speak. Youth, however, is comparatively naked. Its armor is weak, and it is open to the penetration of every burIden which blows where it listeth. No, I do not think I should like to turn the clock back, myself. If years have brought me a touch of rheumatism now and then, they have also brought me the blessed assurance that I need only assume the special burden which is made with a hollow fitted to my individual shoulder measurements.

My young friend Lucy and I have been reading "Dancers in the Dark" and other productions of the "young intellectuals." She is perplexed by them, being herself "young," sweet-and-twenty, as we once said, and a collegian. She says that she knows some girls that maybe are like that girl in "Dancers" and some fellows that could pose as world-weary youth if there were any one to pose before. But her chief worriment is the kind old ladies and dear old gentlemen who think that all girls and boys of the college type indulge in cheek-to-cheek dancing and petting parties. I could tell her of a greater danger than that, but I refrain. She has enough on her mind now. I suggest that she and her sort do some writing on their own account, but, as she justly says, she is too busy doing her daily work. Now Lucy could, I think, qualify as an "intellectual," whether she ever makes Phi Beta Kappa or not. Even in my own day we did not think that a sure augury of intellectualism, and experience has not increased faith. I remember a most “shocking" damsel, one whose gyrations were quite of a piece with the ultra-moderns, who "won" Phi Beta Kappa, married a college president, and settled down into the

ost conventional of small-town hostses. The mediocrity which enveloped

her was complete. The "young intellectual" of our class, with leanings which were whispered to be ultra-radical and dangerous, now writes sonnets of impeccable purity of style and ultra-orthodoxy. For we had quite a collection, even twenty years ago.

When I was Lucy's age, I knew a woman about whom many spicy stories lingered from the days of my mother's youth. She retained a great deal of vivacity of manner and witty conversation, which made her amusing company for the world of her daughter's contemporaries. And her daughter was the most properly brought up, carefully chaperoned, prosaic maiden you could imagine. I think that is about the usual way, my dear Lucy. These pseudohorrifying young people are the alternate swing of the pendulum, offspring of my whilom friend and harking back to their grandmothers in a good many cases, even if the dear old ladies do deny the day ever existed when they were young clips themselves. There were girls who did things we did not approve when I was in college. I make no doubt that there are many more of their kind now in the sedate halls of Alma Mater; but there are more girls there too. The proportion may be larger, but that it is very much larger I doubt.

The trouble is, Lucy, that the shouting minority always gets the most attention. Sometimes the shouters are on the right path, and sometimes not; but so goes the world, so goes progress, if you will. We must not suppress the shouting, because it will break out somewhere else if we do, like tying down the safetyvalve; and, besides, we cannot raise much if we do not plow up the ground. To-day they are using dynamite, and say it does the business much more efficiently.

These young people are silly, vulgar, if you will, and bound to no good end, apparently; but, take my word for it, they'll get switched off into the freight yard and lost in ten years. They have no pertinacity, even for evil. This is the time when their blood runs fast, and they must get the superfluous energy out of them. The country is over-prosperous and bread easily won, so there is no sav. ing grindstone of toil to "take it out of them." But out of them it will come, Lucy, some day. "The Ten Commandments will not budge, and stealing stil! remains but stealing." Of all the selfordained reformers and radicals of my day, there is not one who has achieved any influence in the world's affairs un less he or she has undergone a conversion to the wisdom which is alone serviceable. I used to worry over them too a little, though not a great deal, having enough to do to attend to my own more pressing problems. I think that the fact that my interests lay in the classics and

history helped me to keep my head and saved my tears, for I read in Horace about willful maidens who were acquainted with all viciousness clear to their rosy finger-tips, and many admonitions to the Roman youth to remember the integer vita of the preceding generations. Horace is fine reading to-day. True, Rome fell because her civilization broke down under the assaults of luxury and vice. Perhaps ours will do the same? It may be, Lucy, it may very well be.

Of

The more you read history, the more profoundly and deeply, the more you will be impressed with the certitude of ancient truths. As a condition of our ability to choose right we must be able to do otherwise. I know all the arguments of your young friends concerning economic or philosophical determinism, but life has shown me too many facts to take their theories very seriously. That's one of the burdens that youth bears, but learns in time to shift. course some one may say, if I bring up Lincoln as a man economically and hereditarily doomed to failure, that Lincoln was a transcendent genius, not a norm by which other men may be judged. On the other hand, the job offered to him was one needing a transcendent genius. There are countless lesser jobs, all mighty necessary in the economy of things, and all open to men of lesser genius, who can do them in as high a degree of comparative perfection as Lincoln did his. And, Lucy, I've seen man after man and woman after woman rise out of the most impossible circumstances and do that very thing. That's one of the advantages of years. You can explain the working of the machine by facts from your own experience. You saw just a little of it in our economics class this year, didn't you? Peggy was a dear girl, a most attractive girl in her way, and her violent modernism nearly swept a lot of you off your feet. It sounded rather good-to sweep away all the old injustices, all the old inequalities, all the old slaveries-until you began to test out her theories. Then you found how much had to go along with them. Marriage, for instance. There should be no unhappy women, bound to cruel husbands whom they did not love. Until you realized that along with the overthrow of the bonds of matrimony must go the home, the loving care of father and mother for the children, the ideals of duty, of stability, of faith and honor to a pledge. I watched you day by day under the assaults of Peggy's glib tongue and her woeful ignorance of the facts of history. She somehow thought she was Minerva, sprung full armed from the head of Jove, until we began to test her, to bring her up against actualities. You remember the day she used the example of the Pilgrims to bolster up her arguments for

Communism, and when we told her it was a failure, said that was because the men who tried it were a "bunch of theorists and intellectuals, and didn't know how to work." Shades of our hard-working and high-minded Pilgrim ancestors! When we showed her that the contrary was in fact true, that the failure of the Plymouth experiment was due to the same thing that has caused the downfall of the Russians, was the same old truth that work as a means of grace stands foremost, that to labor is to pray as truly in the twentieth century as in the eighth, you experienced a remarkable revulsion of feeling towards Peggy. I think Peggy did you

a lot of good. You saw just how foolish and hollow her ignorant theories were, and in time you saw just her own measure of selfishness and instability. The world will teach Peggy-in fact, you taught her maybe more than she taught you-but meanwhile she taught you a tremendous deal.

Lucy, dear, our civilization may fall, just as that of the Jews fell after the days of Solomon, or as did that of ancient Rome. When a mother disciplines a naughty child, she is not thereby ruining the child's life; on the contrary, she is preserving it, she is teaching it needed lessons of self-control, of power to choose the right.

So, my dear Lucy, don't worry over these "young intellectuals." They'll get over it in time, and a new crop take their place. Just remember that there are really a very great number of people in the world who think just as you do and are striving for just the same honorable and clean and forthright aims. Very many more of you, in fact, than of the weaker kind, that Peggy represents. Only you are inarticulate, she is glib. She has to be, poor thing! All the right, all the security, is on your side, Lucy. Her volubility is really an effort to justify herself to her own conscience. It is too bad she should waste so much effort on such a useless task.

I

WAS naturally disposed to be an independent in politics, especially in city and State politics, where sometimes the conflict of character and personality called for more consideration than in those larger National campaigns of opposing issues. I was a believer in election reform, and in later years became president of an organization for vitalizing the party primaries.

The William R. Grace-Tammany fight in New York in 1882 was the first political campaign in which I took an active part. Grace was an excellent Mayor, gave the city a good business administration-so good and so independent that Tammany refused to renominate him. But the independent voters gave him a banner and backing: Republicans, too, joined the ranks; and Grace was re-elected.

In this campaign I served as secretary of the Independent Executive Committee, with Frederic R. Coudert as chairman. Two years later, being then in business, I aided in organizing the Cleveland and Hendricks Merchants' and Business Men's Association, which paraded 40,000 strong from the lower end of Broadway to Thirty-fourth Street.

A few days before the election the Republican managers called a ministers' meeting in New York. About six hundred clergymen, representing all denominations, assembled at Republican headquarters to meet the candidate. Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, a brilliant orator, was selected to address them. In concluding his speech, which on the whole was dignified and temperate, he stigmatized the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."

Mr. Blaine, great politician that he was, failed to repudiate the sentiment on the spot. Extraordinary efforts had been made, and with some measure of success, to secure the Roman Catholic vote.

I was present at Democratic headquarters when the reporter who had

been sent to this meeting returned. Senator Gorman asked the reporter to read from his shorthand notes. When he came to the expression, "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," it immediately arrested the chairman's attention. He had the reporter write it out. The Democratic managers saw its importance, and had the whole country placarded with posters headed "R. R. R.," with many additions and variations. The election proved very close, the victory depending upon the vote of New York. The official count gave the Presidency to the Democrats by only 1,047 votes. Without doubt, the number changed by Dr. Burchard's remarks decided the election.

Because of the closeness of the New York vote the Republicans did not at once concede Mr. Cleveland's election. There was a feeling of nervous appre hension. Jay Gould, who controlled the telegraphic lines, was accused of holding back the returns. The Tilden-Hayes contest was recalled, and the recollection did not serve to allay the fears of the Democrats.

It was imperative that the uncertainty be dispelled and that confidence be expressed in the announced result. So the Merchants' and Business Men's Association held a victory mass-meeting at the Academy of Music, then the largest auditorium in the city. This celebration had an assuring effect throughout the country. August Belmont was chairman, and I, as secretary, presented the resolutions. Among the speakers were Henry Ward Beecher, Daniel Dougherty of Philadelphia, Algernon S. Sullivan, and others. Beecher's eloquence was interspersed with humor. Replying to waggish remarks that Cleveland would not fit in the Presidential chair because of his avoirdupois, Beecher said:

"If the chair is too small, then make it larger."

The campaign over, I devoted myself

again to business. When a member of the National Committee with whom I co-operated while organizing the merchants' movement asked whether there was any political office I aspired to, I replied that my only wish was that Cleveland should live up to the political principles which brought him the support of so many independent voters.

MARYLAND SENATOR PROPOSES

DIPLOMATIC CAREER

A talk I had almost two years later, however, resulted in a shifting of my plans for the future. In September, 1886, I was in Chicago on important business. At the Palmer House, where I was stopping, I met Senator Gorman, of Maryland, who had just returned with several other Senators from a Far Western trip.

One evening, while we were sitting together and talking of matters political, the Senator mentioned that during the trip he and his son had read my book, "The Origin of the Republican Form of Government in the United States." He remarked that it aided him towards a clearer view of the sources and early growth of our form of government. This remark was followed up with a surprising suggestion. S. S. Cox, the Minister to Turkey, had resigned, or was about to resign, the Senator said, and he would like to recommend me to the President for appointment to that post. It would provide suitable circumstances, he added, for further studies of government.

The entire conversation served to make me think along new lines. Occupying my consciousness, it diverted my course in a way of which I had not dreamed. I was married, had two small children, and with these responsibilities was deeply absorbed in making my way in business. I had no thought of a political career, nor of service in the diplomatic corps. I had never

given much attention to our foreign relations.

When I returned to New York. I conferred with my father and brothers. They encouraged me wholeheartedly, saying they would look after my interests and not permit them to suffer. Without this generous offer on their part the position would have been impossible, for to maintain it adequately would require an expenditure of several times my salary.

The salary of Minister to Turkey had been reduced to $7,500, though subsequently restored to $10,000; and in order to live properly we had to rent a winter house in the capital and a summer house outside, or live in hotels, as Mr. Cox and his predecessor, General Lew Wallace, did. General Wallace was restricted to his salary, and felt compelled to decline the invitations of his colleagues because he was not in position to reciprocate. His "Ben Hur," by the way, he had written before his sojourn in the East, and not afterward, as is often supposed.

Shortly after this time the relations

Charles R. Miller, a leading editorial writer of the "Times," who died on July 18, was another; and John Foord, whose death by accident occurred in Washington only a few days ago as I write, was another. Foord was then editor-in-chief of the "Times." He took up my appointment with both President Cleveland and Secretary of State Bayard. Schurz encouraged me and said he would speak to Oswald Ottendorfer about having me appointed. Ottendorfer, proprietor of the "New-Yorker Staatszeitung," was a client of our law firm and knew me well. Subsequently I saw him, and he wrote to Cleveland strongly recommending the appointment.

between Senator Gorman and President Cleveland became strained. This had the effect of shelving all his recommendations for appointments. The Senator apprised me of the situation, and advised me to use such influence as I might be able to command.

Originally the post had not been of my seeking, but now that my expectations

Cleveland was favorably impressed, but hesitated. America's chief concern in Turkey, he said, was the protection of the American missionary interests. He would not like to appoint any one to this mission who might be objected to by the two missionary societies, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Presbyterian Board of Missions.

had led me to make all sorts of new plans I wanted to see it through. Help was freely offered, and from sources so gratifying that a mere expression of interest would have been flattering.

A. S. Barnes, the publisher, was an important member of the American Board. Barnes knew me well. He had been in frequent consultation with our law firm when we represented Brooklyn in its action to compel the Atlantic Avenue Railroad to sink its tracks. Barnes brought the matter before his Board, resulting in its Prudential Committee sending a letter to Cleveland expressing full approval of my appointment. They merely suggested that I be asked not to hold any receptions on the Sabbath, as one of my predecessors had done. This intimation was not necessary, as I would naturally have refrained from offending the religious sensibilities of my nationals at that post.

I also conferred with Carl Schurz, with whom I stood on intimate terms, and with John Foord, another friend. In the early 80's we used to have a lunch club that met about once in two weeks at a little French restaurant, Louis Sieghortner's, at 32 Lafayette Place, now Lafayette Street, in a house that had been a former residence of one of the Astors. We used to discuss various political and reform matters-the "Mugwump" movement, the Cleveland campaigns, or what not. There were ten or twelve of us, and Carl Schurz was one:

HENRY WARD BEECHER'S LETTER TO
PRESIDENT CLEVELAND

The greatest American preacher of his time, Henry Ward Beecher, heard through one of his trustees of Plymouth Church that I was being considered for the Turkish post, and that there was some hesitation about appointing me because of my religion. He wrote a notable letter to the President on February 12, 1887. I am happy to be the possessor of the original, which was given me by Governor Porter, then the First Assistant Secretary of State, and I quote from it:

Some of our best citizens are solicitous for the appointment of Oscar Straus as Minister to Turkey. Of his fitness there is a general consent that he is personally, and in attainments, eminently excellent.

But I am interested in another quality-the fact that he is a Hebrew. The bitter prejudice against Jews, which obtains in many parts of Europe, ought not to receive any countenance in America. It is because he is a Jew that I would urge his appointment as a fit recognition of this remarkable people, who are becoming large contributors to Ameri