"How is this, Josef-this is Saturday night and yet you have put on your baking-clothes?"

"You forget it is only two weeks until Christmas," I answered, as quickly as I could.

"Ah, then they have set you at the task of baking cakes!" she said, like one well pleased with having solved a mystery.

"Yes, and it may be that my skill will surprise you," I returned, laughing. And I went my way.

This time I met no one, but when I arrived at the little cottage with fuchsias trained against the porch I was in the company of a grocer's boy and his basket drooped with the weight of good things he was carrying. I did not ring the bell, because the old woman was already standing with the door thrown open.

...

"Well, well-Mr. Vitek, so you have really come! . . . And here is everything for the baking-even to the flavoring!"

With that we went into the kitchen and set to work. At first my companion was silent, but presently I said to her:

"What a sad affair we are making of this! There are some tasks that one should chatter over."

So she began to talk. But her gossip was mostly of old days. She spoke of her husband, and the children she had longed for, and once she mentioned her native land.

"The village I was born in was a pleasant place at any season," she said, "but at Christmas my mother made cakes like these and my father went into the forest and brought home a tree. . They were good people in their way and I had many happy times . .

"Would you like to go back?" I asked

her.

She looked at me sternly. "Does a woman return to the house of her father unless the man of her choice has proved unworthy?" she said, in answer. And I

All at once there came a ringing at the bell. The little German woman turned pale.

"Who can that be?" she cried. "Nobody rings my bell these days but you." "Wait. I shall go and open it. Have no fear."

As I went out into the hall I could hear the tramping of many feet upon the steps, and a murmur of voices, and bits of laughter.

"Well, what can be in the air?" I thought, as I threw open the door. Before me stood a company of women, and each one had a brown-paper bag in her hand, filled to bursting. They said not a word, but they pushed past me into the kitchen. When I followed them in I saw that they had gathered in a circle. The old German woman stood in the center.

"Mother," began one of the women— and for some reason I knew at once that she was the clever sister-in-law of my comrade at the bakery-"some time ago we borrowed sugar from you, and here we are, every one of us, returning what we took so unjustly."

And they all clapped their hands, and there were a few tears and a great many kisses and some laughter, until finally I thrust myself into the center of the ring and I said:

"Come, this is all very well, but we are baking Christmas cakes, and if you keep on in this fashion nothing will be accomplished."

Then came more tears and kisses and laughter until they filed out, one by one, and the little German woman and I were left alone. . . . Toward morning our task was finished and the kitchentable piled high with good things.

"Well," the little German woman said, with a sigh, "everything is done!"

"Not quite," I answered. "Put on your bonnet and cloak and come with me, for there is one thing more needed to complete your happiness."

Then I told her about my landlady, and her nephew in France with both legs

POLITICS is perpetual warfare be

tween two influences- -a desire on the part of the individual in it to render a maximum of good with a minimum of personal sacrifice and expenditure of one's own money and effort, and a desire on the part of the same individual to obtain a maximum of personal prestige and vainglory with a minimum of regard for public funds and public needs. Having said which, the writer hastens to add that the aberrations of politics are confined to no single political party of this or preceding generations. Modern methods may be more subtle because processes of deception are nowadays more complex, but fundamentally the art of fooling the people part of the time goes on from one administration to another, from one term of office to another, while the public intermittently learns its lesson and swaps its horses.

Greatest among the flaws of democracy nowadays is the lack of courage of the elected or appointed official. It is a declining standard. Mere recollection of the Clays and the Websters and the Calhouns and the Sumners and the Jacksons and the Adamses and the Hamiltons of yesteryears only accentuates the historical fact that valor is as rare in the political world as altruism is in the commercial world.

To watch affairs at the seat of government in Washington from year to year and then occasionally to make a trip across country where an abiding faith in the legislators rises with innocent reverence to meet you is to touch elbows with the tragedy of modern political life. People elect and people defeat, people praise and people condemn, people debate and work themselves into a fuming

VOL. CXL.-No. 836.-27

rage on the pros and cons of a political personality who all too often is neither worth the salary he gets-were the enterprise reckoned in purely commercial values-nor deserving the profound prestige bestowed upon him.

Instances without number accumulate from month to month and year to year of the debauchery of public office. Graft, that ugly word which no longer takes the crude form of money, but whose equivalent in social position, future business connections, or even promises of help in climbing a rung or two on the political ladder itself, is so deeply imbedded in our system of to-day as to be invisible to the community at large.

Ambition must not be confused with political strategy or political evasion of responsibility. How far an individual is privileged to withhold his neck from the noose that means political suicide, and how far he is obliged to accept political extinction so that a righteous cause may triumph or a great wrong be prevented, is an ethical question answered in individual cases only by a judicial balancing of the advantages to society in the one or the other course of action. Too often an uncompromising and stubborn insistence on a single point of view, when a more flexible person might have passed the issue by as too inconsequential on which to risk one's whole career, has nipped in the bud an otherwise useful personality on the road to fame.

In our own day the most conspicuous illustration of the dilemma just mentioned was the resignation from the Wilson Cabinet of Lindley M. Garrison, Secretary of War. Knowing now what we did not know then, the opportunity

for Mr. Garrison-had he compromised with the President and stayed in officewould have been politically tremendous. Imagine the kind of Secretary of War that Mr. Garrison would have made with a real war to be secretary of. Imagine his dynamic force in the War Department as big armies were being mobilized or big questions of purchase and supply had to be resolved. And what might the American people have bestowed upon him in the way of reward if Mr. Garrison had stood out as the organizing genius of our war machinery-especially in these days when the clamor is for a business man to become President of the United States?

Yet, knowing Mr. Garrison as I do, all the temptations of presidential opportunity would not have swerved him in the least. He would have stuck his head in the political noose again just as he did, insisting upon his point no matter what the reward ahead. He thought only of the cause he was arguingnational preparedness. And if Mr. Wilson did not regard Mr. Garrison as reflecting the views of his administration on that subject, the distinguished Secretary of War failed to see any reason for staying a moment longer at the Cabinet table. Other members of this and other Cabinets have compromised, have yielded, have set aside their personal views-not necessarily because they regarded it as expedient to do so in order to forward their political opportunities, but because they deemed themselves advisers of the President and no more obliged to kick up a fuss if the President differed with them than a general counsel or lawyer does if his client is disinclined to accept his advice. Some Cabinet officers argue that until we have Cabinet government and Cabinet responsibility, the sole obligation rests upon the President; his Cabinet is merely a body of individual advisers serving the man who gave them their jobs.

So, strictly speaking, the cases of political courage in a President's Cabinet

will differ from the instances in which officials actually elected by the peopleas a President of the United States seeking a second term or members of the Senate and House looking for re-election or elevation to the Presidency itselfplay the game of politics.

And what happens in Washington is repeated on a smaller scale with governors and would-be-governors in state legislatures or with mayors or would-bemayors in city councils and municipal bodies. The principle is the same. This is why our best citizenry is not found in public life. The processes are too objectionable, the road too much beset with toll-gates where the individual must pay tribute intermittently to the demands of selfishness.

Nowhere, however, is the whole business disclosed as completely to the naked eye as in the national capital. Watching the political behavior of Democrats and Republicans, Progressives and Insurgents, Independents, and the various factions of the big parties no matter what their nomenclature, many years of study in Washington reveal inevitable tendencies on the chart of political courage that mark, indeed, the ebb and flow of the tides of democratic progress itself. Sometimes the waves of reform come irresistibly forward, only to break on the shoals of political expediency. Sometimes they eddy merely and leave not a ripple on the placid surface of the governmental stream. Sometimes, though rarely, they make deep chasms and cut for themselves cañons where runs the whirlpool-interesting because distinctive, but not always effective.

Many men have come to Congress, no doubt, flushed with their success at the polls and determined to make their campaign speeches mean something. Many have sat as novices in the House or Senate and studied what seemed to them an atmosphere of indifference, a laissezfaire, all-the-time-in-the-world kind of an attitude written in the faces of the lounging, half-sleepy, half-bored Senators or Representatives who have served

long terms in Congress. Among the things which the new member discovers, in addition to his way about the confusing corridors of the Capitol, is that a man can absent himself from the sessions of Congress and nobody will be the wiser, provided he can "pair" his vote with an opponent or provided he can stay within hearing distance of the gongs and bells, which ring in all the adjacent buildings where members of Congress may be foregathering, and which summon them to the halls of the Senate or House whenever a vote is to be taken. And the new member learns the ropes quickly. To him is pointed out the half-dozen or more members who are always present at all sessions, looking out for the rest and playing watch-dog while the majority betake themselves to other pursuits, sometimes to the ball-game in the spring, sometimes to other cities to make speeches, sometimes to their own districts to mend political fences, but more often to their own offices in the Senate and House office-buildings where the member of Congress spends his time answering letters or meeting constituents.

Unquestionably the average Congressman finds little relief from intrusions upon his time. But he is himself to blame. For, as a rule, he encourages it when he is home. "Come to see me in Washington any time I'll take you around," is his promise to scores as he says good-by at home. As the vast majority never come to Washington, the promise is the essence of cordiality and hospitality. So many citizens regard the national capital with a mixture of reverence and awe that the consequent effect is almost the same as an invitation by royalty abroad.

But to satisfy the incidental desires of those constituents, not a few of whom feel that their votes should be recompensed by snug jobs, the member of Congress spends more of his time on private affairs than on public business. Would you not have him answer his mail? Must he not acknowledge the letters of his constituents? Certainly, but

of

if his constituents heard that he was the busiest kind of a man, and that he had to spend all of his time in attending the daily sessions, and that he was even too busy to answer letters beyond a formal acknowledgment, so busy, in fact, earning his salary and serving his constituency that he hoped the people from his home town would excuse him because he might miss an opportunity to serve them if he were diverted for a single day -that sort of answer might be the truth, as no doubt it often is, but, politically speaking, it would be fatal. No, the average member of the Senate or House is scarcely sworn in when he begins thinking of re-election. And the "boys back home" must be kept satisfied. If it isn't writing nice letters whenever Tom Jones and Mrs. Jones have a baby, it's a note of congratulation on Bill Jones's wedding or condolence on somebody else's death. Not infrequently, too, it is something more serious than any the preceding distractions-a troublesome letter from the head of the chamber of commerce, saying that the business folks are piqued because they feel the rival town of Bugsborough was given a bigger post-office or a government shipyard or a cantonment or some other government contract that might have brought revenue to the city. The conception which so many business men seem to have of the duties of their representatives in Congress is partly responsible for the low plane on which so much of our politics is conducted. The notion prevails in many cities that it is the sole duty of a Senator or Representative to camp on the door-step of the White House and receive Executive favors that mean financial advantage to their respective cities or to bludgeon the Secretary of War or Secretary of the Treasury, or other officials who have money to spend for various projects, into giving the same to the congressional district or state from which the aforesaid individual was elected. Let the state be a vineyard where wine-growers dwell, let it be a community where guns and rifles are