The Washington herald., 1922-11-26

and Louise Herrick WALL Hough-
ton-Mifflin Company.
-yERYONE at all addicted to
thinking. wondered. patient
~ ly or not, what was going
on in the mind of President Will
son and behind the locked doors
of the Cabinet room early in 1917.
Since then there have been reve-
. lations of a sort-chief among
them the articles of the devoted
Tumulty.
It Is only natural that the
Tumulty articles should have been
written from the standpoint Of an
enthusiastic partisan And not
even Mr.. Tumulty was admitted
In the Cabinet quarters when the
Cabinet was there.
The strong light Of publicity has
been let into those meetings and
the whole intricate maneuvering
Of the wartime administration be-
cause the late Franklin X. Lane
had to have some escape for his
feelings. and wrote detailed ac-
counts Of what went on there and
his resulting reactions to his
brother George These. and hun
dreds of other letters. painstak-
ingly collected all edited largely
by Mrs. Lane, add intellectually to
the true history of the troublous
times from which the nation has
not yet entirely emerged.
There is a brief sketch of Lane
~ a young man-his early lean
ing toward becoming a preacher
his ventures into politics and the
newspaper business-his friends
and associates Of those early days
on the West coast. Then follow
his letters-letters written to a
host Of friends, covering his life ]
and its myriad interests more
fully than any biographer could
hope to do.
Lanes letters, while a member
of the Interstate Commerce Com
mission, naturally cannot hold the
interest of his later epistles. and
this is no reflection on the earlier
writings. 1t is just that the later
expressions dealt with events of
towering interest. things that then
held the heart of the whole world
with a viselike grip.
Without self-approbation. 1t be-
came evident that many months be-
fore the word finally went to Con-
gress to declare war, Mr.. Wilson's
Secretary of the Interior saw that
the United States must inevitably
be drawn in. He set about the or.
ganizatton of industry as best could
be done. and no doubt materially
shortened the actual fighting time,
once the die was cast.
As late as February of 1917 Presi-
dent Wilson was opposed to any
large preparedness for war-and
war was declared early in April.
Near the end Of February the Presi-
dent resented 1t when Mr.. Lane
ventured to suggest that il the
country knew that the wives
OF American consuls had been
stripped naked at the German bor-
Nor hafhaA
writing on their flesh. and sub
1ected to other indignities. the
country would demand war. When
McAdoo. Houston and Redfield
backed up Lane. Mr.. Wilson Bit
terly reproached all of them with
appealing to the spirit of the code
duello." Lanes clear vision of
the true Wilson. even at this date,
Is shown in the same letter, when
he wrote, Il don't know whether
the President is an International
ist or a pacifisr. he seems to be
very mildly national-his patriot
ism is covered with film of phil.
osophic humanitarianism that
certainly doesn't make for punch
at such a time as this
In 1920. when Cox was riding
to a hard political fall, Lane
prophesied il. and laid the blame
on wilson-''the little Wilson"
sullen and doing nothing. not the
Great Wilson" of Lanes earlier
association with him. He specu-
lated on Harding. not as a bitter
partisan. but as a hopeful Ameri-
can.
rs Harding great and master
full in his simplicity. or trusting
and yielding? and il the latter.
where is the Hanna?" he asked
George w. Wickersham.
Lane was not a partisan of the
blind type. He had and frequently
expressed whole-souled admiration
for Theodore Roosevelt and Her
bert Hoover. But sometimes his
faith in democracy was severely
strained by events. Once he wrote
that democracy seems to be gov.
ernment by suspicion in large