Everything was in his favor; he was not only learned, so learned, in fact, that he was promptly dubbed the "scholar in politics," but he was rich, and therefore immune from all sordid temptation; he was a gentleman. Mr. Lodge's forbears had been respectable tradesmen who knew how to make money and to keep it—and the latter trait is strongly developed in their senatorial descendant. From them he inherited a fortune; he had been educated in a select private school and then gone through Harvard, whence he emerged with an LL.B. and a Ph.D. attached to his name. By all the established canons he was a "gentleman" as well as a scholar. In the intervals between teaching and writing he had found time to be admitted to the Boston bar.
With that equipment it could be safely predicted Mr. Lodge would go far. He has. To-day he is the leader of the Republican party in the Senate of the United States.
He early justified the promise. While still a Congressional freshman he drafted and introduced into the House the "Force Bill," which came to a violent death in the Senate. That Bill was not only a prophecy but it is a resume of Mr. Lodge's career. It is partisanship gone mad.
On the pretense that it was intended to secure fair elections in the South, but actually, as described by a member of the House at the time, to prevent elections being held in several districts, it placed the election machinery in the control of the Federal Government, which, through the Chief Supervisor of Elections, to be appointed by the President, and his Praetorian Guard of Deputy Marshals, would have controlled every election and returned an overwhelming Republican majority from the Southern States.
The Bill was typical of Mr. Lodge and the way he plays politics. The Force Bill would probably have ended ingloriously the political career of any other man, but Mr. Lodge had the luck of being a gentleman born in Boston. Boston is slow to forget. A quarter of a century after the Civil War, Boston still remembered that conflict, its heart still bled for the negro deprived of his vote; and a Boston gentleman could do no wrong—to the Democratic Party.
The House amused Mr. Lodge, but it was too promiscuous for a person of his delicate sensibilities who shrank from intimate contact with the uneducated and the socially unwashed. Henry Cabot Lodge always creates the impression that it is a condescension on his part to God to have allowed Him to create a world which is not exclusively possessed by the Cabots and the Lodges and their connections.
All that is only an unfortunate manner. He is really the friend of the people, abominating snobbishness and aristocratic pretensions; in his younger days, when he was campaigning for Congress, he was known to have slapped a constituent on the back and called him familiarly by his first name; even now, although he has long ceased to be a politician and has been canonized as a statesman, the old impulses are strong in him. When the time draws near for his reelection to the Senate, he goes back to Massachusetts, there to take part with the common people in their simple pleasures, and affably to extend a cold and clammy hand to voters, who still venerate him as a scholar in politics and a gentleman. So it will be easily understood why one of Mr. Lodge's temperament should early have cast his covetous eye on the Senate, and at the first opportunity moved over to that more select atmosphere, which he did in 1893.
When Senator Lodge entered public life the flagrant spoils system was rampant. A little band of earnest men was fighting to reform the civil service so as to make it a permanent establishment with merit and fitness the tests for appointment instead of political influence. It was a cause naturally to appeal to the "best people" of Boston, and Mr. Lodge, being one of them, having inflexible principles and a high code of honor, threw himself eagerly into the reform movement and became its apostle. His principles were so stern and unyielding, he demanded such an exalted standard of private and public morality, that, although he worshipped the Republican Party with a devotion almost as great as the memory of that grandfather who laid the foundation of the family fortunes, with a sorely stricken heart he was compelled to differ with Mr. Blaine and to flirt with those Ruperts of American politics, the Mugwumps.
"The man who sets up as being much better than his age is always to be suspected," says a historian, "and Cato is perhaps the best specimen of the rugged hypocrite that history can produce."
As a summary of the character of Cato, this is admirable, but no one would call Mr. Lodge "rugged."