INSURANCE

exposure, there has arisen a brood of petty insurance companies. Partly because of the folly and inexperience of their promoters, in a complex and difficult business, partly because of the direct intention to swindle, many of these companies are foreordained to fail. They are wrong in principle, and that those who insure in them will lose all is a mathematical matter, just as sure as that two and two make four. Upon the insurance superintendent of every State there is a heavy duty of responsibility to take nothing for granted, but to investigate thoroughly every company doing business in his State. Among insurance departments, two of the most vigilant are those of Wisconsin and Massachusetts. For those who are solicited to join to join new insurance companies a good rule is to write to the insurance department of either of these States and ask if the company has been licensed to do business there.

"Οι

URS IS A GLORIOUS COUNTRY," said STUART. "I love it. But, like Mr. CALHOUN, while I love the Union, I love Virginia more; and if one attachment ever becomes incompatible with the other, I scruple not to say Virginia shall command my STUART'S manly and straightforward declaration poor service."

of his stronger affection may not have been preceded by the searching of heart, the prayerful and humble balancing of rights and wrongs which, one feels sure, went before the formal renunciation of LEE, who, of all the Confederate leaders, military or civil, had the tallest moral and mental stature. But STUART'S words were the expression of the same simple and rugged character that made him a hard fighter and a dashing cavalryman. On both sides, the generation has almost passed to whom fair judgment of men and principles was made difficult by the personal recollection of battle, or of brothers killed. The younger generation on both.

REUNION AT RICHMOND

sides will make fair division of abundant affection between the gray veterans at Richmond to-day, Richmond to-day, whose romantic distinction. it is to have fought most valiantly in a lost cause, and the dwindling Grand Army Posts in every Northern village who went to war for so abstract a thing as the preservation of the Union, such and felt and acted upon thrill of patriotism as younger American may have the privilege to know.

A

no

PHOTOGRAPH printed in this paper last week illustrated one of those brutal mistakes of tact, one of the failures The of wisdom, committed by the victors in our Civil War. mistake of putting the work of reconstruction into the hands of

REGRET

carpetbaggers, who were far from representative of the best character of the victors, is made the more obvious just now by the recent appearance in London, as the most conspicuous in the conference of Colonial Premiers, of Botha, highest official of the British Colony, for whose independence he bore arms only seven years ago.

IN

N HISTORY THE NAME of KUROKI will travel far as one of a group of warriors and statesmen who created a wonder nation. The leaders of Japan, however able, in years to come will be only followers in the course set by these predecessors to whom Kuroki time will attach the romance of the Napoleonic marshals. was bred to swordsmanship and the long bow in a civilization. as remote from the era of steam and the Vanderbilt Cup Race This was his as that of Pericles or the Italian Renaissance. first trip to any Occidental country, and he came in the character of a man who, in battle after battle, as the commander of a modern army corps, had beaten the troops of a European Power. The meaning of such at career is a thing for other peoples to consider We found him well before they boast of their own greatness. a noble figure of soldierly simplicity, as modest and as gracious as he was in the crisis of his fortunes at Liaoyang. His at home in any society, though a dignity would make him The maze of impressions which he stranger to its customs. carries back after his swift flight includes many strange sights to his samurai eyes, from the high buildings and industrial power to theatres where women appear in tights. Whatever his can not doubt the sincerity of our conclusions about us, he admiration or our good-will.

K U R O K I

THAT

No decent

HAT THE MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATURE will pass the bill "To Permit Savings Banks . . to Establish Life Insurance Departments" seems assured. This will be a new departure in legislation. It was conceived by Mr. Louis D.. BRANDEIS of Boston, and has been carried forward by him with the assistance of the Massachusetts Savings Insurance League. This paper has already fully explained its purpose and effectto permit savings banks to do a life insurance business for the benefit of wage-earners, to supply at something like cost the sort of insurance now furnished only by private companies like the Prudential, which makes a profit of 219 per cent per annum, and the Metropolitan, which makes a profit of 28 per cent; and furnished on a system which returns to the wage-earner only a grossly inadequate fraction of what he pays in. regard for fairness could deny space to the defense which the vice-president of the Metropolitan makes in the advertising pages of this paper. Doubtless, so long as a large proportion of men remain so constituted that they will not pay their fifty cents a week for insurance until a collector comes around to get it, there will remain plenty of room and plenty of business for the Prudential and the Metropolitan. But those wage-earners who have the instinct of thrift and system should be provided with a means of insurance where they can get the value of their money. This the Massachusetts law will supply. With due regard of the danger of superlatives, it may safely be said that no more important legislation than this will have been passed in any State during the past year. Persons who wish to establish Savings

INDUSTRIAL INSURANCE

Bank Insurance in other States can secure a model bill and full information by writing to the Massachusetts Savings Insurance League, 2A Park Street, Boston, which has had charge of the movement in that State.

Α

woman.

LADY PROFESSOR of English in the Ohio Wesleyan UniYou can versity has written a book about the short story. not, of course, write a good story by reading a book, any more than you can make a train go by putting a treatise on transportation in the empty locomotive fire-box, but the mute, inat glorious De Maupassant of Asparagus Centre, Ind., can With the least be taught a few of the more simple motions. entire nation trying to write and an appalling number getting its pieces printed, anything that tends to clarify the public's critical judgment and boil down the time required in assimilating, or trying to assimilate, some small portion of the fictional output should be hailed as And any a public benefaction. honest ditch-digger, by reading such a work, ought to know whether his message will find its most fitting frame in a thousand-word "surprise story" or a five-act melodrama, and he 66 'collectI will have at his fingers' ends the "emotional element, ing material," "the plot story," the "first person story," and all the rest of the shop talk. We can see him glancing hastily over a turgid five-thousand-words, involving the eternal triangle of two women and a man or two men and a "Ah!" says he, "another 'three-leaved clover plot!'"' and, having thus applied the authoress's neat label, tosses the magazine away. All this saves time. Sentimentalists will be dismayed to learn that love of the conventional romantic type "is, romantic type "is, at best, a fleeting passion, which the two characters concerned, when they have entered upon the real business of living, tuck away in a remote corner of memory, seldom overhauled. "If they must be driven to the altar," says the authoress, "they should be made to marry plausibly. Do not balk at first sight of an emotional climax; having struck an emotional key, do not tone down at the close, and if it becomes necessary to picture the love-scene, rely largely on suggestion; do not elaborate love-making; give only samples of the conversation and a modicum of endearment. short, do not drag an alcove scene into the broad glare of the footlights." What the reading of such a book can do is shown by the authoress's students. Before taking, they chose for their compositions titles like "A Victim of Ohio Weather,' After "A Ramble for Specimens," "An Exciting Experience.' taking, they wrote exactly like PoE and called their stories "The Cremation in Seventy-seventh Street," "The Man with the Blue Goggles," "The Tallow-pot of No. 56," "The Whistling

WRITING FICTION

Corpse," etc. To those aspirants who send their contributions. to this paper's short-story contests in longhand on the back of wall-paper this volume is earnestly recommended.

WHY

HY IS IT that good representative juries are becoming increasingly difficult to secure? Even with Our curious system of exempting the most intelligent, there remains a generous sufficiency of material from which to draw a panel representing the enlightened conscience of the community, if jurydodging were a less general practise. The unwillingness is easy to comprehend. There is little satisfaction for mind and soul in determining whether the Metropolitan Straphangers' Transit Company ought to pay $16,000 or 6 cents for bumping some humble citizen into the hospital; and even in a conspicuous murder case the chaste joy of having your picture in the daily papers (looking as if it ought to be in the Rogues' Gallery) scarcely compensates for the pains of being held under lock and key for several weeks, guarded in your goings-out and your comings-in by an intelligent and refined police officer. Still, good men could be found, in plenty, doubtless, to endure the inconveniences of the service were it not for the suddenness of the onset. Jury duty comes upon a man with the unexpected abruptness of an avalanche, or a toothache, or a bequest. On the briefest possible warning, it binds him to its chariot wheels, and he must either wriggle out or leave his business to look after itself, and his family to go on the projected vacation without him, while he sits in a pen and grills over the slap-stick wrangles of two verbivorous lawyers. Is there any logical reason why the qualified citizen should not be informed of the impending service-say, two or three months in advance, so that he might put his house in order?

JURY DUTY

HER

ERE IS TROUBLE for the doctors. The University Medical Society of Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago proposes to render them superfluous. Through its instructions every man becomes his own physician and proceeds to heal himself by a combination library and medical correspondence-school system. The University Medical Society "is interested in no, drugs or medicines of any kind," but it is interested in selling a "MEDICOLOGY" book called "Medicology," which, it modestly states, is "indispensable to the life, health, and happiness of mankind," and with which goes a scheme of free medical advice by mail, analogous to that of those conspicuous philanthropists, Lydia E. Pinkham and Dr. Peruna Hart

man.

Medical books there are, written for the public, which possess undoubted value; but a perusal of the advertising circular of the University Medical Society does not indicate that "Medicology" belongs in this class. As a sample, the combined wisdom of the twenty-two renowned medical men," who are supposed to have collaborated in the work, on the subject of yellow fever, is given in a capsule dose of a page and a half. The renowned twenty-two have succeeded in compressing in this

education of the

gives a rather JURISPRUDENCE amusing idea of

the mode in which ABE RUEF planned to help a mortal judge get at the truth, before his confession made this particular elaboration needless.

A NEGRO SCHOOL

important or more full of difficulties than in our Southern States. To the request, therefore, of the Fort Valley High and Industrial School, in the Black Belt, at Fort Valley, Ga., we are glad to make what response we may.. It now makes a plea for funds, to be sent to the treasurer, L. G. MYERS, 54 William Street, New York, and it deserves assistance from the North, as do all those educational institutions which are working soundly for the solution of the special problems of the South. Particular emphasis is laid on industrial training, especially directed toward turning out tradesmen and agriculturists. The control is in a board composed of Northern and Southern men. The institution hopes to become Georgia's Tuskegee.

book, called "The Train, ing of the Human Plant,'

ex

FREEDOM AND

presses, in analogies sometimes forced, his beliefs on the young. His most definite principles are two: begin education late, and have it individual. For ten years at least the child should roam unlettered, with goats and flowers, tin cans and brambles. About the degree to which city life limits this opinion Mr. BURBANK is a little vague. On his other point, of individual DISCIPLINE training, he does not discuss at all the greatest difficulty; namely, the stimulation and suggestiveness of class work, and once granted a class the necessity of somewhat uniform topics and progress. The difficulties on both these subjects are real. There is a conflict between the advantages of freedom and the advantages of training. There is a conflict between the advantages of adapting study to personal needs and the advantages of having children work together. These conflicting truths make some of the hardest practical problems faced by educators every month and every day.

11

THE

C

HARLES W. FAIRBANKS is bald on top of his head. This fact does not appear to a person situated below and in front, for the well-known reason that several trained hairs have been taught to lie in parallel columns running from a point just above the left ear to a point approximating the same locality on the right side of the head. A side elevation of these trained hairs creates a thin illusion of hair, and generally deceives the casual observer into supposing that no wide baldness prevails upon the Vice-Presidential sconce.

At the

This is not an intensely important matter. worst it proves no more than that, as has been charged, Mr. Fairbanks has not the courage of his 'baldness; but, if not a sure index to his character, it is at least in harmony with the rôle which he has chosen to assume in public life. There is a thin veil of seeming -a rather undeceptive and easily removable fabric, to be sure-which Mr. Fairbanks has, with some ingenuity, draped across the bald spots in his business and political career.

With as gentle hands as the task permits, it has become the duty of the writer to part for a moment the artificial web which drapes the Fairbanks bumps. The curves and outlines may not look just as they did before, but the contour will be that of fact. It may be bald, but it will be Fairbanks.

The inquirer into the Fairbanks past always arrives upon the Fairbanks book. There is but one Fairbanks book, a neat duodecimo bound in baby-blue. Its cover bears the legend in bright gold letters, "Life and Speeches of Charles Warren Fairbanks, and on the title-page is the author's name, William Henry Smith. This is the official Fairbanks book. Mr. Fairbanks had it written. He paid the author and the publisher, and he supplied the facts. Then he helped to circulate it as a campaign document. On his Western tour during the Roosevelt campaign in 1904 Mr. Fairbanks handed out copies to all who came aboard his private car until he reached the Pacific Coast, when, for some reason, he desisted, and several hundred pounds of the "Life and Speeches" were boxed up and freighted back to Indiana.

Creating the "Self-made" Myth THE book cost Mr. Fairbanks more

than he had planned. In arranging with the W. B. Buford Publishing Company of Indianapolis to bring out the work, Mr. Fairbanks gave assurances to this firm that 300,000 copies would go into the national campaign. The Republican National Committee, he said, would take 250,000 copies, and the Indiana State Committee 50,000 copies-cloth-bound at twenty-seven cents, paper-bound at thirteen cents, in wholesale lots. As things turned out the National Committee took none, and the State Committee was content with a paltry 5,250, mostly in the thirteen-cent edition. This led to a trifling dispute between Mr. Fairbanks and the author as to whether the $100 which had been paid to Mr. Smith when he began the work should not be applied on the publisher's account, but this was settled quietly, and Mr. Fairbanks sent his check to meet the deficit so caused.

The author, William Henry Smith, must be distinguished from another William Henry Smith who is mentioned in the work. The latter, now deceased, was Mr. Fairbanks's uncle. The author has been well known in Indiana for many years as a political and literary hack. Smith did the work under the immediate supervision of Mr. Fairbanks, who corrected copy and read proofs. He was the sort who would naturally be selected to do the job as done. He was paid for what he did and presumably was satisfied. So enough of Mr. Smith.

The book is interesting in three ways; for what it tells, for what it fails to tell, and the authoritative character of both. There are glowing tributes and eloquent omissions; but both the spoken and the omitted word gain new point from the certainty that Mr. Fairbanks has approved of both. "In one respect,' says the book, Charles Warren Fairbanks is a self-made man -that is, he has succeeded in life without the adventitious aid of wealth and influential friends."

What, in this sterilized account of his rise, is the carefully unmentioned fact? Merely this, that Mr. Fairbanks owes all he has to the timely help of two rich uncles. His first employment, after leaving college, was handed to him by his uncle, William Henry Smith, who made him manager at Pittsburg, Pennsyl

vania, of the branch office of the Associated Press, with a salary of $20 dollars a week and an understanding that he was to have time to study law; and his second regular employment, some months later, was handed him by Uncle Charles W. Smith, who made him-then a briefless cub just admitted to the barsolicitor for the receiver of the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western, now the Peoria and Eastern Railway, at a salary of $5,000 a year. (And it is well to recall, in passing, that this was in the panic times of 1874, when an assured income of $5,000 a year, in a town as small as Indianapolis was at that date, was equal to something like $10,000 or $15,000 now.)

The uncle who was thus able to play Special Providence to young Fairbanks was manager of the road for which his nephew was appointed counsel. The road was bankrupt, and George B. Wright had been named receiver. This very generous salary came to Fairbanks in the way of a wedding gift, for his marriage took place some ten months after this appointment, and the $5,000 salary (which had begun at the more modest figure of $80 a month) was then raised, and dated back to the time of his appointment.

But there is no mention of this salary, or even of this uncle, in the chapter in the "Life and Speeches" on his struggles at the bar. There one reads that, after choosing Indianapolis for the scene of his triumphs, because he "readily saw its future possibilities, he determined loyally to reach the top, "if patient, persistent work would take him there." "The fight to reach the top might be a very hard one." He and his newly married wife "could not tell; but they were brave of heart and brave of hope.' Mr. Fairbanks "was a hard student" and "integrity of life and purpose was his birthright." So wrote the hand of the

VICE-PRESIDENT FAIRBANKS AT HIS DESK

hired biographer; so passed the proof beneath the subject's cautious blue pencil.

It is not necessary to adventure into controversial regions to see that Mr. Fairbanks has in this account done injustice to the wealth and influence of the two relatives named. Both uncles were men of prominence even in that day. William Henry Smith was a pioneer in journalism, and one of the organizers and stockholders in the old Associated Press. It was as manager of this great system for gathering and disseminating news that he was able to set up his entirely inexperi

PRESS

enced nephew as manager of the Pittsburg branch of the Associated, at an easy living salary with time to spare for studying law; and it was the money of this Smith which laid foundations for the very considerable wealth of Delevan, his son, who is the present nominal owner of the Indianapolis "News," and is known, both in Indianapolis and Chicago, as a man of large means and extensive investments.

The other uncle, Charles W. Smith, is known in Indiana history as a "pioneer railroad builder.' At the time he gave his nephew the exceedingly good position mentioned, this Smith was manager, not only of the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western road, of which George B. Wright was receiver, but he was also general manager of, as well as stockholder in, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. This uncle is still living. Some years ago he moved to Southern California, where he interested himself in traction and railway properties, and built a beautiful home, which is one of the show places in Pasadena.

It is without mention of this helping hand, or allusion to the "adventitious aid of wealth," that the sterilized biography flows on. "Step by step," it says, "he climbed up in his profession. At first clients came slowly, then they multiplied rapidly, and success was assured." For "when he entered on the trial of a case he gave it assiduous attention and close study, depending on the law and equity rather than upon any chicanery or tricks." For "he had nothing of those elements in his make-up."

It is interesting to hear, for example, as from his own lips, that he is "never a self-seeker, and that "his successes and his honors have come to him because of his native ability, his industry, and his conscientious discharge of every duty, whether of private or public

life." Who would gainsay the modest generosity of one who hired a man to write this about himself, and then passed it out from the rear platform of his private car?

In brief, the Charles Warren Fairbanks of his "Life and Speeches" is a self-made, struggling hero. There is a touch of the Lincolnesque in his beginnings. A log-cabin was his birthplace; the plow and harrow were his childhood toys; knowledge came with self-denial, and the pine knot was his torch of truth. His trouserings were torn, and his scanty table was spread at the cost of menial labor, of jobs at splitting wood and mending roofs pursued in leisure hours and on holidays. His professional career was slow and hard.

And from the first blue cover of the official biography on the left to the last blue cover on the right the word "railroad" is not used.

Censoring the Word "Railroad"

MAYBE that conspicuous omission

would not be important if it did not indicate the working of the Fairbanks mind, moving clandestinely, by exclusion. It is hard to conceive that even a hired biographer, writing the life of a man who, from the age of twenty-two, has been nothing but a railroad financier-it is hard to conceive that biographer Smith had the genius to see that the word "railroad" does not go well with politics these days. To the penetrating student of the Fairbanks personality and the Fairbanks method the absence of the word suggests the careful blue pencil of the man who paid to have his life thus written.

And then there is a hiatus to 1888. The poor young man has become a millionaire, and has commenced to job in politics and aspire for office. In three years more he has bought a paper and begun to influence publicity. In 1896 he had learned the art of owning legislators, and (says Smith) "all eyes at once turned toward Fairbanks for Senator, and all hearts declared the place was rightfully his."

Much may be pardoned to a campaign biography, written by a hired biographer-much of suppression, much of euphemism, much gentle and skilful skating away from dangerous or disagreeable spots, much tinting with soft lights of harsh facts. But even in such biography plain falsification-or a wholesale suppression, which comes to the same thing-can not be over

looked, especially when Mr. Fairbanks reads the proofs. Lest, then, it be thought that too much stress is laid on the statements of a bit of political puffery, it should be explained that this inspired history of Mr. Fairbanks is but a sample of a great volume of inspired publicity entirely similar in its kind and origin. Mr. Fairbanks owns many newspapers; others he controls and influ

ences.

And thus it comes to pass, as a result of Mr. Fairbanks's habit of holding the hand which writes the history, that there is an easily recognizable portrait of him as he wants to seem, a biography of him as he thinks it well to be set down in contemporary records, a manufactured personality which Mr. Fairbanks deems better adapted to political preferment than the real one. And it is hardly possible to write, of Mr. Fairbanks as he is without rather frequent allusion to the familiar Fairbanks of paid fiction and suppressed fact. To show the Fairbanks methods of publicity, control, and manipulation, a few typical, though they may seem trifling, incidents may be mentioned. The first occurred at Indianapolis at the time the committee named by the Republican National Convention in 1904 waited on the Vice-Presidential nominee to notify him formally of his nomination. As is not unusual on such occasions, only about half of the committee were present at the ceremony, and the crowd was small. But it was Mr. Fairbanks's wish to have the event appear of considerable moment to the world at large. So he edited personally the press reports. Calling in the correspondents, he crossed out the list of the committee absentees and insisted that the reports sent out should say that the committee of notification "consisted of the following," naming the full membership of the committee as constituted by the convention. The number of people on the lawn-at a liberal estimate not more than six hundred-he swelled by his blue pencil to several thousand. In similar manner he edited the accounts sent out from Indianapolis, telling of the reception given him by his fellow townsmen after his return from the nominating convention at Chicago. "The Marion Club, with a membership of a thousand, acted as his escort," was the phrase substituted for the bald fact that about seventy-five out of a membership of nine hundred and sixty turned out. This reception-it may be told in passing-was arranged by Mr. Fairbanks's manager, Joseph Kealing, a message over the longdistance telephone from Chicago being the first intimation Indianapolis had of such event. And it may be added that it was Mr. Fairbanks's check which paid the band that accompanied the Fairbanks carriage from the station to his house.

Another case of attempted editing occurred while he was campaigning in his special train through the West. He quarreled with the representative of the Associated Press who was sent with him, because the latterwho is universally recognized as one of the most conscientious and reliable men in the businesswould not swell the crowds and the enthusiasm to the measure of Fairbanks's demands; and the latter even wrote to the management in Chicago endeavoring to have this man recalled. On another occasion the Indianapolis correspondent of a a Cincinnati paper, in which Mr. Fairbanks had secretly acquired a financial interest, was, at Mr. Fairbanks's written demand, peremptorily dismissed for having too favorably mentioned Senator Beveridge in an article which was supposed to be a review of Indiana politics.

Fairbanks's Firm Grip on the State Press

EVANSVILLE, Fort Wayne, and Anderson are the only other considerable towns having daily papers, but their fields are limited, so it is easy to understand how Indianapolis, with its rich and well-edited papers, and its radiating railroads, dominates the State, and how, Mr. Fairbanks having control of that field, no anti-Fairbanks fact or sentiment can find expression in Indiana. The Associated Press does business from the office of the "News," and it is easy also to see how the hereditary influence of the Smith family can aid the Fairbanks purposes even through the channels of that generally uncontaminated mutual and non-partizan agency for gathering news.

How much is omitted, and how much is twisted they have no way to know.

For how, indeed, is the average citizen of Indiana, reading the accounts of the national campaign of 1904 in his Indianapolis "Star," to know that a telegram had been sent from Fairbanks's special train while it was touring northern Indiana, giving orders: "Keep Beveridge's speech off the first page. How is he to know that the files of the "Journal" office, when that paper was sold to the "Star," contained a letter from Fairbanks complaining in authoritative tone because the account of a speech which he had delivered at Evansville contained a mention also of the junior Senator's address? He does not know. Or, if these incidents should be denied-and they are selected at random from many of a similar sort-let the reader pick up the Fairbanks papers and read paragraphs like this: "Doubtless this inevitable reaction in the public mind" from Roosevelt-"explains the growing tendency to turn to Vice-President Fairbanks as the man for 1908-a man who, while supporting and aiding the President's splendid and energetic work of reform, is, at the same time, of the more conservative 'constitutional' type of public servant." (Indianapolis "Morning Star," Tuesday, January 22, 1907.)

years

One of the largest elements in Mr. Fairbanks's political entrenchment is the control he exercises over the Indiana press. The principal paper in the State is the Indianapolis "News.' This paper Fairbanks acquired as an incident to his plan to enter the United States Senate. This was previous to 1896. In order to hide his interest, the "News" has been run as an unincorporated partnership concern, and the paper's real control was quite unknown until 1899, when Mr. Fairbanks tried to freeze out his associate, Colonel W. J. Richards, whereupon, in 1900, it was thrown into a receiver's hands and sold at auction for $927,000. The name of the purchaser was not disclosed, but it is well known that the earnings go to Mrs. Fairbanks.

The only morning paper in Indianapolis is the "Star." This also is controlled by Mr. Fairbanks. He holds the bonds, amounting to $200,000, on this and the other properties, which comprise what is known as the "Star League." (This "Star League" includes the Muncie "Star" and the Terre Haute "Star.") Associated with Mr. Fairbanks in this control is D. G. Reid, of the Rock Island Railroad, between whom and Mr. Fairbanks there is a working alliance. The Indianapolis "Star" has a monopoly of the morning field.

Mr. Fairbanks has bought and suppressed three papers since 1901-the "Press" (Independent), the "Journal" (Independent Republican), and the "Sentinel" (Democratic). It is probably a conservative estimate to say that Mr. Fairbanks has a million dollars invested in publicity properties in and out of Indianapolis.

How the Spot-light is Switched in Indiana IN all this control of the press secrecy has been a main consideration. Mr. Fairbanks does most things under cover. In business he is a mole; and in his control of the press he has employed all manner of subterfuge to hide his hand. His stock in the Indianapolis "Journal" was long carried in the name of his brotherin-law, M. L. Milligan of Springfield, Ohio, and he has never owned publicly to his interest in the "News" or theStar League" properties, or to his part in killing the Democratic organ, or suppressing the other properties which were in unfriendly hands.

It is fair, then, to presume that a majority of the people of Indiana do not know. They read these papers, and they form opinions on what they read.

old

Such is his gentle art of molding public thought- the hired biographer and the owned newspaper.

Possibly the public, as well as President Roosevelt, will be surprised to note another discovery which is set forth in the editorial above cited. For that also says: "Simultaneously it develops that the country is loath to follow the President longer at the swift pace to which he invites it."

The real attitude of Mr. Fairbanks toward President Roosevelt is easily traced through his personal organs. When he fears an

open break there will be a paragraph like this:

WASHINGTON, March 26.

Vice President Fairbanks will lunch with the President at the White House to-morrow. The President is a firm friend of the Vice-President and often extends to him the courtesies of the White House." (Indianapolis "Morning Star," March 27, 1907; Washington correspondence by Louis Ludlow.)

But when the paper is engaged in its chronic task of trying to undermine the Roosevelt influence, there will be damnation by faint praise, or a cowardly sort of half-afraid unfriendliness, expressed in such typical phrases as these, from the "News":"Almost wholly devoid of that 'strenuousness' of which the people have grown so weary," "thousands of reasoning and sober-minded citizens' will be more willing to trust to Judge Parker "than to longer trust Mr. Roosevelt, with his vagaries and lawless, disquieting impulsiveness."

Such are samples taken at random. The Indiana public will read them here with the benefit, for the first time, of the enlightening information that the paper which printed these and other "tainted" comments on national politics was owned by the very Fairbanks whose boom they subtly boost. These extracts illustrate the uses to which the secret ownership of a newspaper may be put.

Turning once more to the portrait painted by Mr. Fairbanks in his book one reads that "Senator Fairbanks is by nature kindly. In him malice or envy or enmity never had a place." "His characteristics are frankness, sincerity, friendliness, and seriousness. He is frank and open in all his dealings.'

Mr. Fairbanks has subjugated Indiana and is now after larger game. His first adventure into the national arena was when he captured the nomination for Vice-President. In his well-edited biography he had that honor thrust upon him-another instance where there is a meagreness of fact. "He did not seek the nomination,' says William Henry Smith. But "many of his ardent friends [see Chapter XVI, p. 199] and many of the party leaders, looking to the advantage of the party, urged him to announce himself as a candidate for the place." But "this he declined to do." "To all he frankly said his preference was to remain in the Senate, but as he would not give encouragement to those who were advising him to become an avowed candidate for the place, so he would not lightly make up his mind to openly decline it if tendered by the party."

Such is the hired biographer's account of a long and characteristically secret campaign which Fairbanks made to secure this nomination. He began many months before. He employed his usual agencies. His alliances were what they are to-day-Harriman and the national politicians of the old Hanna crowd.

The Harriman alliance was well shown during the preliminaries to the Republican Convention at Chicago