department and set it running, to compose the differences between the existing mechanisms transferred to it, to man and equip the new bureaus created especially for it, to trim the overlapping functions of all these component parts and readjust their relations so as to reduce their friction to a minimum: of this there was no room for doubt. Moreover, the new department had been for years a dream of Mr. Roosevelt's. It was one of the progressive ideas advanced in his first message as President. Mr. Cortelyou had been closely associated with him throughout the period in which the dream acquired substance, and Congress molded that substance into its final form. What had been in the President's mind had passed thence into Mr. Cortelyou's by daily contact. The factor knew just what ends his principal had in view, and the means by which he purposed to reach these, if possible. No one else, probably, could have executed his initial plans with so little hesitancy and so few mistakes.

CHAPTER VI

TWO COUNCILORS IN PARTICULAR

Secretary Shaw's personality-His rise in the world—A Yankee

who gets there"-Postmaster-General Payne-The Cabinet politician-Faulty training for an investigator.

LIMITS of space forbid my touching especially on any of the members of President Roosevelt's Cabinet except those who have gone out or come in during his term. The most notable of his own appointments are those of Secretary of the Treasury Shaw and Postmaster-General Payne. Both were made while the young President was still somewhat new at his work, and the choice of men for two positions of so commanding importance affords us an interesting glimpse of his mental processes.

Leslie M. Shaw was a lawyer and banker in a small interior town. He had acquired no repute as a financier. It is doubtful whether his name was recognized, when first mentioned by the press in connection with the succession to Lyman J. Gage, by ten readers in every hun

dred, and even the ten probably had vague and variegated notions of who he was. The President himself did not know him on his business side, but only as a conspicuous political figure in the Middle West. They had met a few times while Mr. Roosevelt was making one of his campaign dashes through the upper Mississippi Valley; all the rest of their impressions of each other were absorbed from the atmosphere and an occasional anecdote.

Shaw was genial and hearty in manner, a good story-teller, fond of his joke. But from behind his bluff and apparently careless exterior he looked out upon the world through a pair of keen, shrewd, gray-blue eyes that saw a deal more than their owner always cared to speak about; and his quiet chuckle often had more significance in the ears of his intimate friends than his words. He was too self-poised to be a respecter of persons; the multimillionaire could no more unsettle his equanimity than the wage-laborer. He was candid enough, even when addressing a Republican audience, to praise President Cleveland for saving the public credit in the stormy days of 1893-94. Mr. Roosevelt took a fancy to him at their first meeting and retained a vivid memory of it.

MR. SHAW'S ORIGIN

But why should this man have been chosen for Secretary of the Treasury? Thereby hangs a tale.

Mr. Shaw was a Vermonter by birth. Early in life he had drifted to Iowa, where he had received his education for the bar and begun practise. Like a multitude of others beginning in the same fashion, he found the law a hard taskmistress, and her prizes few and slow of dispensation. He struggled along for a while without complaint, but his Maker had not given him eyes and ears and a brain for nothing, and he began to consider whether there were not ways, outside of the narrow path of his profession, by which he could stimulate his lagging income. A visit to his boyhood home suggested a plan. The farms there were pretty well worn out, and mortgagors could not afford to pay more than 4 or 5 per cent interest on their loans; at that low rate, indeed, they often found themselves unable to keep up, and stories of foreclosure, discouragement and removal were to be heard on every hand. But in Iowa, behold the difference: rich soil, heavy crops, well-packed granaries, a thrifty, contented farming population, and yet loans on farm mortgages commanding 8 and 10 per cent.

The difference was traceable, of course, to the fact that Vermont was an old community, long known in the haunts of capital as a next-door neighbor, whereas Iowa was a stranger at a distance, hazily confused in the minds of most of the Eastern money-lenders with the rest of a big Out West whence their loans sometimes came back and sometimes didn't.

One bright morning young Shaw awoke with a start. "Why," said he, "should I not take some of the Eastern capital which is going begging at 4 and 5 per cent, and clap it into Iowa mortgages which will gladly yield 8 and 10, and pocket half the difference as my commission?"

It did not take him long to put this ingenious scheme into execution. It worked to a charm. Without ceasing to be a lawyer, he became also a banker, making Iowa farm mortgages his specialty. His Western friends were delighted to have the means of enlarging their borders, putting up additional buildings, buying new machinery. His Eastern friends were delighted at the increase of their revenues. His firm made money hand over fist.

Then came the first threatening sign. Two or three bad-crop years wrought Kansas into