MR. PAYNE'S TRAINING

ference in the nature and training of the two men affected their points of view. Mr. Roosevelt had been throughout his career fighting in the open and challenging all comers. Mr. Payne had never held public office, but had done all his work as a disciplinarian within the Republican organization and his fighting from behind the party breastworks. When a season of stump-speaking was to begin, he had prepared the statistics of crime among the Democrats and the history of numberless virtuous acts among the Republicans, with which to impress listening crowds; but never the reverse. If an

investigation was to be made for the purpose of collecting material for the next campaign book, it was never his own party, but the other, that he caused to be investigated. He was puzzled to decide just how to go at the task of raking over the misdeeds of his Republican associates.

Who could tell whither the trails might lead? Might not the revelations be seized by the Democrats and used as campaign capital? Would it not be best to have all the house-cleaning done by the family, and within the family, and its results known to the family alone? Grub out every rootlet and shred of dishonesty, by all means; but would not needless publicity

give rise to scandals, and scandals damage the party?

The President's theory was that no amount of publicity could possibly damage the party, or anybody connected with it, so much as a suspicion in the popular mind that the Administration was drawing a cloak over crime. The detective machinery must be set to work secretly, of course, lest some of the offenders take fright prematurely and spread the alarm among the rest, and those who were clever enough should be able to cover their tracks and baffle pursuit. But if, as seemed inevitable, the facts should leak out, no attempt must be made to deny or minimize them; to mislead the people would be worse than advertising the whole business to the world at first.

Mr. Payne's lifelong habit of sneering at accusations aimed against him and his, however, was too strong to be overcome in an instant. Before he was fully aware of what he was doing he had begun throwing contempt upon the published accounts of the investigation in progress. When the charges of Seymour W. Tulloch were filed, he set out with an assertion that they did not amount to anything, and then, when their substance had found

"HOT-AIR" CHARGES

its way into print in spite of him, jauntily dismissed them as merely "hot air."

No extraordinary keenness of insight is needed to see the folly of such an attitude when assumed by the head of a great department toward a scandal which had tainted the whole atmosphere of that department. The time for discovering that the Tulloch charges were only "hot air" would have come when the charges had been examined and discredited by evidence, or the lack of it. It was the same way at every stage of the proceedings. First Mr. Payne would talk to no one about what was going on, then he would go to the opposite extreme and become loquacious. One day he would insist that the press had dragged up the whole miserable business for sensational purposes, and was magnifying molehills into mountains; the next, he would declare that, gross as were the iniquities already brought to light, he foresaw worse revelations yet to come. These shifts of position were attributed in some quarters to bad faith and a purpose to deceive the public, in others to a frequent change of policy by the Administration. As a matter of fact, they were merely the fruit of Mr. Payne's idiosyncrasies. He had been for years an invalid,

whose illness took on changeful phases from day to day. It might find him in good spirits on waking, and leave him in deep dejection at bedtime. One week he needed all his will power to force himself through his regular routine of duty, the next would see him as eager as a fighting-cock. Time-tried campaigner as he was, the maker and destroyer of other men's political fortunes, he had a heart as tender as a woman's in the presence of distress; and a fresh discovery that some trusted employee had been leading a double life would throw over him a pall of depression of which he could not relieve himself for a fortnight.

Through the whole of this trying period the single prominent figure that stood always in one place, with face turned in one direction, was the President's. His policy never wavered, his force of character overrode every obstacle. Even the indefatigable Bristow, the special investigator clothed with the powers of detective, judge, jury and executioner, seemed inclined to pause now and then in his work and turn aside for a moment when the train of testimony bore too straight toward some public officer high in confidence; at once would come fresh orders from the White House, never fired