McClure’s Magazine

October, 1893.

Vol. I. No. 5

Copyright, 1893, by S. S. McClure, Limited. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

THOMAS B. REED, OF MAINE.
THE MAN AND HIS HOME.
By Robert P. Porter.

It was at a dinner in Washington that I had the good fortune to find myself seated next to Thomas B. Reed, of Maine. It was a brilliant occasion, for around the table sat well-known statesmen, scientists, jurists, economists, and literary men, besides two or three who had gained eminence in the medical profession. Mr. Reed was at his best, “better than the best champagne.” His conversation, sparkling with good-nature, was not only exhilarating to his immediate neighbors, but at times to the entire table. Being among friends, among the sort of men he really liked, he let himself out as it were.

Before the conversation had gone beyond the serious point I remember asking the ex-Speaker how he felt at the time when the entire Democratic press of the country had pounced upon him; when he was being held up as “The Czar”—a man whose iron heels were crushing out American popular government. “Oh,” he promptly replied, “you mean what were my feelings while the uproar about the rules of the Fifty-first Congress was going on, and while the question was in doubt? Well, I had no feeling except that of entire serenity, and the reason was simple. I knew just what I was going to do if the House did not sustain me;” and raising his eyes, with a typical twist of his mouth which those who have seen it don’t easily forget, he added, “when a man has decided upon a plan of action for either contingency there is no need for him to be disturbed, you know.”

“And may I ask what you determined to do if the House decided adversely?”

“I should simply have left the Chair, resigning the Speakership, and left the House, resigning my seat in Congress. There were things that could be done, you know, outside of political life, and for my own part I had made up my mind that if political life consisted in sitting helplessly in the Speaker’s chair, and seeing the majority powerless to pass legislation, I had had enough of it, and was ready to step down and out.”

After a moment’s pause he turned, and, looking me full in the face with a half smile, continued: “Did it ever occur to you that it is a very soothing thing to know exactly what you are going to do, if things do not go your way? You have then made yourself equal to the worst, and have only to wait and find out what was ordained before the foundation of the world.”

“You never had a doubt in your own mind that the position taken was 376 in perfect accordance with justice and common sense?” I ventured.

“Never for a moment. Men, you see, being creatures of use and wont, are naturally bound up in old traditions. While every court which had ever considered the question had decided one way, we had been used to the other. Fortunately for the country, there was no wavering in our ranks.”

“But how did you feel,” said I, “when the uproar was at its worst, when the members of the minority were raging on the floor together?”

“Just as you would feel,” was the reply, “if a big creature were jumping at you, and you knew the exact length and strength of his chain, and were quite sure of the weapon you had in your hands.”

This conversation gives a clear insight into the character of Thomas B. Reed. It shows his chief characteristics: manly aggressiveness, an iron will—qualities which friend and foe alike have recognized in him—with a certain serenity of temper, a broadness, a bigness of horizon which only the men who have been brought into personal contact with him fully appreciate.

Standing, as he does, in the foremost rank of public men, one of the leaders of his party, the public has certainly a right to know something of the man. First of all, one thing about him has to be emphasized; he lacks one of the traits that popular leaders too often possess. He cannot be all things to all men. He is bound to be true to his personal convictions, and he is not the man to vote for a measure he detests, because his constituents clamor for it. Every one knows how public men have at times voted against their earnest convictions, and then gone into the cloak room and apologized for it; but it would be difficult to imagine a man of Mr. Reed’s composition in this rôle.

To judge a man well, to know his best side, it is necessary to see him at home, and I cull from notes made several weeks ago, during a visit to Mr. Reed in Portland.

I found Mr. Reed in a three-story corner brick house, on one of the most sightly spots in town. Over the western walls of that modern, substantial New England home there clambers a mass of Japanese ivy, which, relieving the straightness of the architectural lines, gives a pleasing something, an artistic touch, to the ensemble. Its owner having shown his pride in that beautiful ivy, straightway took me to the roof of the house, to admire the superb view of Casco Bay and the picturesque expanse of country around Portland.

The stamp of the man’s character is plain everywhere in that house. The rooms are large, airy, and unpretentiously furnished, yet with solidity and that certain winning grace of domestic appointments in old New England. Much of Mr. Reed’s work is done at his desk in a wee bit of a room on the second floor, where crowded book-shelves reach to the ceiling. His library long ago overflowed the confines of his den, and books are scattered through the rooms on every floor; books, bought not for binding nor editions, but for the contents, ranging from miscellaneous novels to the dryest historical treatises, from poetry to philosophy.

The library,[1] on the ground floor, where callers are usually received, has among the inevitable book-shelves a few photographs of masterpieces. Over the mantelpiece a painting of Weeks’s shows that the sympathies of the owner extend beyond that sphere to which the great public is inclined to confine him.

[1]

The picture which forms the frontispiece of the Magazine represents him in this room, at his favorite seat by the window.

Of the favorite haunts of Mr. Reed, the place of all to study his social side is at his club, The Cumberland.

“You see,” said Mr. Reed, “a club of this kind is only possible in a conservative town like Portland, a staid, old place which grows slowly, at the rate of about five or six hundred a year, where the one hundred club members, while belonging to opposite political parties, unite to a man in celebrating the victory of any of their fellow-members. Most of them, friends from boyhood, have gone to school together, and are known to one another but by 377 their Christian names.” There the ex-Czar is always called “Tom,” or “Thomas, old boy,” and there reigns supreme a fine spirit of equality, or unpretentious “give and take” sort of intercourse, which is really the ideal object of a club.

“Indeed, there is no place like it,” said Reed. “It is the most home-like club one can imagine; too small to have coteries, and with lots of bright, sensible boys, quick at repartee. People talk of my wit, but, I tell you, it’s hard work to hold my own there; and then no one can try to pose among us, or attempt to make a fool of himself, but he is properly sat upon. Intercourse with your fellow-men in such a milieu is the best discipline I know of for a man—except that of political life,” he added, with his droll smile.

Of course Mr. Reed is interested in the welfare of Portland, and he cherishes the idea that some day the city of his birth will become one of the great cities of the continent. “Portland harbor is one of the finest on the Atlantic coast. It is at least two days nearer Europe than New York, and one day nearer Europe than Boston. The annexation of Canada to the United States, or the union of the two countries, one of which is bound to come in the course of time, will surely bring to Portland the great prosperity that should be hers by reason of her admirable harbor and her geographical position. And,” he added, “while I like the life in Washington, especially when the session is active and there is plenty of work to do, it has never yet been the case that I have left Portland without regret, or gone back to it without pleasure.”

MR. REED’S HOME IN PORTLAND.

The frame house in which he was born still stands, shaded by two elms of obvious age. Henry W. Longfellow was born just around the corner from it, in a dwelling that marks the spot where, in 1632, one George Cleeve built the first white man’s habitation ever erected in the territory now included in Portland’s boundaries. The settlement was called, in tender remembrance of an English field, “Stogumnor,” and its founder’s life was one of almost ceaseless conflict, now with the redskins and now with the white neighbors of other settlements, so that Cleeve left behind him the impress of a bold, vigorous fellow. His daughter married Michael Mitten, whose two daughters in turn married two brothers named Brackett. One of the Brackett 378 daughters married a fisherman named Reed, whose descendant, Thomas Brackett Reed, has exhibited, in a different way and under vastly different circumstances, much of the nerve and daring that animated his stern old fighting settler-ancestor, George Cleeve.

VIEW FROM THE ROOF OF MR. REED’S HOUSE.

At nine Mr. Reed entered the grammar school, at eleven the high school. He was sixteen years old when he completed his course in the latter. His boyhood friends say he was fond of fun, though the amount of knowledge he absorbed would indicate that he was also fond of books; yet Mr. Reed himself confesses that literature in general, and old romances in particular, attracted him more than text-books. He still remembers his first schoolmaster, a spare young man, “the best disciplinarian I ever knew,” who had the art of holding a turbulent school by finding out what was the particular spring he could touch to control every one of his lawless boys.

“He had the pull on me,” says Mr. Reed, “by simply holding over me in critical moments the penalty of dismissal. You know, I had a sort of inborn idea that the school was a great thing for me, and I knew that my parents were too poor to afford to send me anywhere else, so I kept straight along, doing my duty. It was the master’s custom to allow each boy who had no demerits to ring his bell before leaving the class, and once for three days in succession I did not ring that bell. I can see now the master coming to me, and saying: ‘Tom, is it an inadvertence?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Did you break the rules?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they were too hard.’ ‘Well, boy, you know what you can do if the rules are too hard; you can leave school.’ I hung my head, and he went away, after a few moments of, to me, terrible silence, saying: ‘Never let me hear of this again, Tom.’ And I replied: ‘No, sir.’ And meant it.”

On entering Bowdoin College in 1856, young Reed had a half-formed desire of becoming a minister, which he relinquished, however, long before his graduation. His life struggle began in earnest with that first year at college, 379 for he had to earn enough to pay his way as he went along. His attendance at class recitations during the first term of his freshman year was regular, but he found it necessary to drop out the next two terms and earn some money by teaching. He kept up his studies, however, without an instructor. All through the first part of his college course young Reed devoted a great deal of time to literature, to the neglect of his studies. While in the high school, a garret in the house of one of his mother’s relations had become his Mecca. It was packed full of books, especially novels, and there he was wont to journey twice a week, loading himself with volumes, over which he spent his days and the best part of his nights. Mr. Reed says that it was mostly trashy, imaginative stuff, but that it also was full of delight, and in some ways full of information for him. To that omnivorous reading he attributes in large part his knowledge of words, and it was also, no doubt, an apprenticeship from which he naturally stepped into higher literature.

Graduation was but little more than a year off, when, the contents of the garret being exhausted, the young man realized to his consternation that his class standing was very low. His place at the end of the college course depended on his average class standing all through. He had received none of the sixteen junior parts which were given out during the junior year, and to his dismay the English orations, corresponding to the junior parts at the end of the course, were reduced to twelve. There was but one course open to the ambitious, spirited boy—to offset the low average of his earlier terms by an exceptionally high average during his last. Romances and poems were laid aside, and from that time forward until Commencement he was up at five in the morning, and by nine o’clock every night he was in bed, and tired enough to drop asleep at once. Mr. Reed says very frankly that he did not relish this regimen, for by nature he is indolent. Apropos of this, it was a common saying among his comrades that Reed would be somebody some day, if he were not so lazy.

The consequences of his three years of novel-reading were such a serious matter to him that he was afraid to go and hear the result of the final examinations but remained in his room until a friend came to tell him that he was one of the first five in his class in his average for the entire course. This is the other side of Reed, “the lazy.”

Besides this success, his oration on “The Fear of Death” won the first prize for English composition. It was in delivering it that Mr. Reed felt the first emotions of the orator, when every eye in the audience was riveted upon him, and when the profound silence that prevailed told the deep interest which his words aroused. Of the year’s work which won for him the privilege of delivering it on that Commencement Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr. Reed says that it was the hardest of his life, and the only time he has forced himself up to his full limit for so long a period.

Graduation from college was not by any means the end of the struggle for the young man. Money was still lacking, and to get it he engaged in school-teaching, an occupation which he had already followed during two terms, and in vacation times. He taught at first for twenty dollars a month, “boarding round,” and the highest pay he ever received as a teacher was forty-five dollars a month. His old comrades delight in telling an incident of his school-teaching days. He once found it necessary to chastise a boy who was about his own age, although he had been cautioned against whipping, by the members of the committee of the district, unless he first referred the case to them. But Reed was Reed even in those days. The committee having failed to sustain him in the past, in this instance he decided that some one must be master at school, and that he would be that some one. Accordingly, the refractory young man was thrashed, after an exciting quarter of an hour—a close victory, which one pound more avoirdupois might have decided against the teacher.

Mr. Reed soon gave up school-teaching, 380 and, thinking that a young man would have a better chance out West, he went to California. Judge Wallace, afterwards Chief Justice of California, examined Reed for admission to the bar. It was in ’63, during the civil war, when the Legal Tender Act was much discussed in California, where a gold basis was still maintained, that Wallace, whose office adjoined the one where Reed was studying, happened in one day and said, “Mr. Reed, I understand you want to be admitted to the bar. Have you studied law?” “Yes, sir, I studied law in Maine while teaching.” “Well,” said Wallace, “I have one question to ask. Is the Legal Tender Act constitutional?” “Yes,” said Reed. “You shall be admitted to the bar,” said Wallace. “Tom Bodley

MR. REED IN HIS LIBRARY.

Reed’s sojourn on the Pacific coast was short. In ’64 he was made Assistant Paymaster in the United States Navy, and served in that capacity until his honorable discharge a year or so after. His admission to practise before the Supreme Court of the State of Maine followed on his return to the East. Cases came to the young lawyer slowly. The first ones were in the minor municipal courts. Gradually he secured a certain run of commercial and admiralty cases which began to yield something tangible in the shape of fees. Yet the goal of success seemed a long way off, when it happened that in one of those minor cases he cross-examined a refractory witness in such a manner as to completely overturn the testimony given, and 381 thereby won the case for his client. The unexpected result was that the witness who had been upset by the young lawyer’s skill conceived a great admiration for him, and became influential in sending him many cases.

That he made his mark in his modest position is shown by the fact that after two years, in 1867, Mr. Reed was nominated for the State Legislature. Judge Nathan Webb, then County Attorney, who had known Reed simply as his opponent in a number of cases, had proposed his name, and, after six ballots, had succeeded in nominating him. The first thing Reed knew about it was when reading the papers the next morning, and his first impulse was to decline. When Webb came in he urged him to accept, saying that a winter’s legislative experience would broaden and be in every respect valuable to him. Mr. Reed accepted, and after serving two terms in the House he was elected to the State Senate. Then he was made Attorney-General and afterwards City Solicitor of Portland, and in 1876 he was for the first time nominated to represent his district in the House of Representatives in Washington.

A CORNER OF THE LIBRARY.

At the very moment when Reed, escorted by one of his colleagues, took a seat at the first convenient desk, on the day when he began his life as a congressman, Mr. Reed’s massive figure, suggestive of physical strength; the easy and yet not offensive assurance with which he took his seat and glanced with quizzical eye about the chamber; the unaffected way with which he accepted congratulations from the New England members who knew him, and the reputation he had already won as a master of wit and the possessor of a tongue which could be eloquent with sarcasm, all of these things so impressed Mr. S. S. Cox that he turned to Mr. William T. Frye, then a member for Maine, and said: “Well, Frye, I see your State has sent another intellectual and physical giant who is a youngster here.” “Whom do you mean?” asked Frye. “This man Reed, who must be even now cracking a joke, for I see they are all laughing about him.”

But to maintain the reputation which his State had secured for committing its interests to master men, Mr. Reed had a hard task before him. Blaine, who had just passed from the House to the Senate, had made Maine of preëminent influence by reason of his formidable canvass for the presidential nomination. Eugene Hale and Mr. William T. Frye represented in part the State in the House. Hannibal Hamlin was a member of the Senate, and the tradition of the remarkable intellectual achievements of William Pitt Fessenden, so long a senator from Maine, was still so fresh in the minds of many members of Congress that it was common to hear Mr. Fessenden spoken of as perhaps the ablest senator since the days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. But, unlike the stories that are 382 told of the débuts of many statesmen, Mr. Reed’s first speech was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a success. A success all the more brilliant because won under trying circumstances.

A bill was under consideration to pay the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, damages for the occupancy of its buildings by United States troops during the war. It was one of an almost innumerable class of similar claims in the South, and its payment would have established a precedent that would at that time have opened the door to the appropriation of millions of dollars. It had been put forward as being the most meritorious of these southern war claims, in the hope that the sympathy which could be aroused in behalf of the venerable institution of learning making the claim (it dating back to Washington’s time, and being of a religious and eleemosynary as well as educational character) would stir up a sentimental feeling by means of which the other claims could be slipped through the House.

MR. REED’S BIRTHPLACE IN PORTLAND.

Doctor Loring, a Republican member from Massachusetts, one of the most polished and eloquent speakers in the House, had made a strong and touching appeal, full of pathos and sentiment, in favor of the bill. At the conclusion of his speech spontaneous applause burst from all sides; Republicans and Democrats thronged to the desk of the orator to congratulate and shake him by the hand. The scene was a memorable one. Cries of “Vote,” “Vote,” rose from all parts of the House, and it seemed inevitable that the bill would pass by an almost unanimous vote.

At this juncture Mr. Reed arose. He has told that he would at that moment have sold his opportunity to speak for a very insignificant sum. He stood motionless for ten minutes, unable to utter a word. Knowing that his only chance was to dominate the 383 turmoil, he at last raised his voice, and, after five minutes, he felt that he would have a hearing. Slowly the excitement and noise quieted down, and for forty minutes he was given the closest attention. The speech was so clear, forcible, and convincing that, in spite of some break in the Republican ranks, it recalled members of both parties from their temporary emotional lapse and turned the tide against these dangerous claims.

THE MEMBERS OF THE PENTAGON CLUB OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE. (MR. REED IN THE CENTRE.)

In ’77 he was made a member of what was known as “The Potter Committee,” appointed to investigate the operations of the returning boards in the South. Committee work was essentially congenial to Mr. Reed. He delighted in cross-examinations, and his power of sarcasm and of insinuating inquiry furnished the committee and the public with the most dramatic scenes which occurred at any of its sessions. In cross-examining a clever scoundrel, one Anderson, for instance, for two whole days, he at last compelled him to admit that he was a forger. “Who is this man Reed,” every one began to ask, and the young congressman found himself, perhaps more in his legal capacity than as a legislator, famous.

It is not the purpose of this article to describe Mr. Reed’s public career, further than to say that there came a day when, upon the departure of Mr. Frye from the House to the Senate, and the election of General Garfield to the presidency, Mr. Reed passed, by common agreement and without questioning, to the leadership of his party in the House, and that, in the logical course of events, he was naturally indicated as the candidate for the Speakership, when, in 1889, after six years of minority, his party became a majority. What a magnificent combination of assaults and eulogies his career as Speaker brought forth is too vividly impressed upon the popular mind to need more than mention.

During his public career Mr. Reed has manifested in a score or more of verbal hand-to-hand conflicts his ability to meet an emergency to the best advantage of his side. Always upon his feet when he scents danger, he is as quick to scent it as any politician who ever occupied a seat upon that floor. He is at all times as truly the master of all his resources as ever Mr. Blaine was in that same tempestuous arena of the House.

From the first he has shown himself 384 that rara avis, a born debater—aggressive and cautious, able to strike the nail right on the head at critical moments, to condense a whole argument with epigrammatic brevity. He has shown, to my judgment, better than any parliamentarian living, how the turbulent battlings of great legislative bodies, so chaotic in appearance, are not chaos at all to one who has the capacity to think with clearness and precision upon his feet. Such a man assimilates the substance of every speech and judges its relative bearing upon the question. At the beginning it is hard to tell where a discussion will hinge, but gradually, as the debate goes on, the two or three points which are the key of the situation become clear to the true debater. As I understand the art of the debater, it is as if logs were heaped in confusion before him, and the thing to do was to single out the one log which, when removed, starts all the others flying down stream—an easier thing to conceive than to accomplish, and which demands an alliance of widely diverse qualities. I remember telling Mr. Reed once that it seemed to me as if there must be in the temperament of the debater something of the artist’s nature—a little of the same instinct to inspire and guide him. And I added: “Don’t you, like the artist, draw for material everywhere, from friend and foe alike, from things bearing directly upon your subject as well as from things that are apparently more removed from it? Don’t you have something akin to inspiration?”

“Well, perhaps so,” Mr. Reed answered, “and an anecdote occurs to my mind which you may think fits your theory. An obscure chap got up once and went for me in what was evidently a six months’ laboriously prepared invective. I hardly realized what he was about, except that I had an impression of the man using words in the same frantic fashion a windmill uses its arms in a blow. All the same, when he had finished pitching into me, I could not but get up and return the compliment. I had no more idea of what I was going to say than he had, when, by a hazard, my eye caught in the sea of heads before me the face of another representative from his State—a man who was one of the leaders of his party—and instantly the answer flashed in my mind. I had begun with something like ‘This is only another echo of the minority of the Fifty-first Congress, whose echoes are dying, not musically, but dying. Gentlemen,’ I continued, ‘it is too much glory for a State to furnish us with two such eminent representatives, the one to lead the House, the other to bring up the rear.’

“But I want to tell you, while we are on this subject of the artist and the orator,” Mr. Reed continued, “that I believe there is as much of a rhythm in prose as there is in poetry, and if a man has not the intuitive feeling of that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never amount to anything as an orator. Certain books of George William Curtis—‘Prue and I,’ especially—have helped me as much as anything to realize how delightful a quality rhythm is.”

There is a side to Mr. Reed which few people suspect. He is a lover of good novels, especially such novels as those of Balzac and Thackeray, which present human nature in a rugged, truthful manner. I should think that Mr. Reed would have about as much respect for a namby-pamby novel as he has for a wishy-washy politician.

Of the English novelists he likes Thackeray by far the best. “Pendennis,” “The Adventures of Philip,” and “The Virginians” he esteems as his most interesting works, though Thackeray reached high-water mark, in Mr. Reed’s opinion, in “Vanity Fair.” Charles Reade, too, has found in him an assiduous reader. He thinks “The Cloister and the Hearth” the finest and truest picture that has been made of life in the fifteenth century, and that Charles Reade is the best story-teller that ever wrote English.

In poetry his preference is for Tennyson, but he is a constant reader of Browning, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier also. “Would you mind,” said Mr. Reed, while talking of poets, “if I descend from the great names and say that I have a great liking for the rhymes of a Kansas lawyer, Eugene F. Ware, who writes over the nom-de-plume of ‘Ironquill’? They are so 385 direct; they present a moral in so few and so strikingly well chosen words; and then they have just enough of that quality of language which is always attractive because it is language in the making. How do you like this example of Mr. Ware’s sturdy popular muse?

“‘Once a Kansas zephyr strayed

Where a brass-eyed bull-pup played;

And that foolish canine bayed

At that zephyr in a gay,

Semi-idiotic way.

Then that zephyr in about

Half a jiffy took that pup,

Tipped him over wrong side up;

Then it turned him wrong side out.

And it calmly journeyed thence

With a barn and string of fence.

Moral.

When communities turn loose

Social forces that produce

The disorders of a gale,

Act upon a well-known law,

Face the breeze, but close your jaw;

It’s a rule that will not fail.

If you bay it in a gay,

Self-sufficient sort of way,

It will land you, without doubt,

Upside down and wrong side out.’”

Mr. Reed, who learned French after he was forty years old, enjoys the masterpieces of French fiction and French verse in the original. He reads and rereads Horace, or, rather, certain parts of Horace which appeal strongly to him. But his one great admiration is Balzac. “Yes, I like to read Balzac,” Mr. Reed often says. “His closeness to nature and life hold you in spite of yourself. There is hardly a book of his which is not sad beyond tears. ‘Eugénie Grandet’ is a most powerful delineation of the absorbing grasp which love of money has on a strong man, and the power which love has over an untutored spirit, but sadness permeates everything. That wonderful love story of the ‘Duchess de Langais’ is like no other love story ever written. Could anything be more sad than her life at the convent, and her lover’s long search for her hiding-place? unless it be that lover’s discovery, when he scaled the convent walls, that death had been stronger than love, and that, after a life of wasted devotion, nothing could be said of her beautiful form as it sank into the ocean except the mournful words, ‘She was a woman; now she is nothing.’ And what an extraordinary picture that is in the ‘Peau de Chagrin’ of the controlling power of society over a fashionable woman! And again, in ‘Père Goriot.’ How sad they all are, and the sadness of a life that toils not nor spins! Verily, to be happy we must take no note of the flying hours, and live outside of ourselves. Is not the condition of joyous life to forget that we are living? Here most of the characters are so entirely selfish that one sometimes thinks there is not one single friendly heart in the entire story. All are so conscious of living—even those in the higher sphere—and so anxious to appear other than they are, that their entire lives are only ignoble struggles, with nothing of serene repose. When the strife is not for gold or position it is for love, which is thus degraded!”

I was talking the other day to that brilliant orator, Benjamin Butterworth, of Ohio, and the conversation turned to Tom Reed, as Butterworth affectionately called him. Said Butterworth: “The way Reed’s constituents have stood by him is one of the most gratifying things to me in American politics. During one of his campaigns, in which I spoke for him, I met some Democrats in his district. I said, ‘Gentlemen, I do not know anything about your politics, but you have a man of sterling qualities to represent you.’ ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘he is an intense Republican and has peculiarities, but we like him because he represents the best thought of the district, and we vote for him on the sly.’”

That plain-speaking man, whose chief characteristic is to be true to his own convictions, is a pretty good specimen of the Puritan. Had he been in Cromwell’s army he either would not have prayed at all or he would have prayed just as long as Cromwell did. In either case he would have fought for what he believed to be the right, all the time, and given no quarter.

Apropos of what might be called his blunt frankness, I recall an incident 386 told me by a member who had charge of what was known as the Whiskey Bill. Mr. Reed had baffled the attempts of the whiskey men to get it up, but in his temporary absence, through the inadvertence or incapacity of a member, the bill was forced on the House. Reed ran down to the fellow, and vented his feelings in the remark, “You are too big a fool to lead, and haven’t got sense enough to follow.”

MR. REED’S PORTLAND LAW OFFICE.

If his bits of speeches flung about in the heat of debate, either in retort or in attack, were gathered, they would make a mighty interesting book. No other man has like him the power to condense a whole argument in a few striking words. His epigrams are worthy of the literary artist in that they are perfect in form. Though struck out on the spur of the moment you cannot take a word from nor recast them. They have for solid basis a most profound knowledge of human nature, of life, and they exhibit to a luminous degree the possession in their author of that prime quality of a true man—horse sense. I remember this fragment of a speech of last session: “Gentlemen, everybody has an opinion about silver, except those who have talked so much about it that they have ceased to think.”

There are many people who believe that Mr. Reed himself disproves one of his epigrams, that “a statesman is a successful politician who is dead.” As for me, I venture to say that Mr. Reed is right, but he has there formulated a rule to which he is one of the rare exceptions.

387

“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

Thomas Brackett Reed was born in Portland, Me., October 18, 1839. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1860, and then commenced to study law. In 1864 he suspended his studies and joined the navy as Acting Assistant Paymaster, serving until his honorable discharge at the close of the war. Resuming his legal studies, he was admitted to the bar and began to practise in his native town. He soon took an active part in politics, and was a member of the Maine State Legislature from 1868 to 1869. In 1870 he sat in the State Senate. From that year until 1872 he was State Attorney-General, and in 1874-77 he served as solicitor for the city of Portland. He was sent to Congress in 1876 and has been continuously re-elected since. When the Republican party came into power in 1888, he was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. He is a powerful debater, an energetic politician, and a leading authority upon parliamentary procedure.

Frances Elizabeth Willard was born in Churchville, N.Y., September 28, 1839. She graduated at Northwestern Female College, Evanston, Ill., in 1859. She became Professor of Natural Science there in 1862, and Principal of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in 1866. After two years of travel and study in Europe and the Holy Land, she became Professor of Esthetics in Northwestern University, and, as Dean of the Women’s College there, developed her system of self-government, now generally adopted. In 1874 Miss Willard identified herself with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. As secretary of the Union she organized the Home Protection movement, and in 1879 was elected president. She took a leading part in the establishment of the Prohibition party, and in 1887 was elected President of the Women’s Council of the United States. She also accepted the leadership of the White Cross movement, which has been successful in obtaining enactments in many States for the protection of women. Besides being a director of the Women’s Temperance Publishing House, Miss Willard is chief contributor to “The Union Signal” (Chicago) and associate editor of “Our Day” (Boston). Her chief literary works are “Nineteen Beautiful Years,” “Woman and Temperance,” “How to Win,” “Woman in the Pulpit,” and “Glimpses of Fifty Years.”

Edgar Wilson Nye, who has become famous as a humorist under the pen name of “Bill Nye,” was born in Shirley, Piscataqua County, Maine, August 25, 1850. His family removed to Wisconsin shortly afterwards, and the boy was educated at River Falls, in that State. Early in the seventies he went to Wyoming Territory; he there studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1876. While in Wyoming he served in several public capacities, as postmaster of Laramie and as a member of the legislature. He had early begun to furnish humorous sketches to the newspapers, and for some time was connected with the press as correspondent. He returned to Wisconsin in 1883. In 1886 he was connected with the New York “World,” and since then has been a weekly contributor to numerous papers. As a lecturer and reader from his own books Mr. Nye has been very successful. In 1891 he produced a play, “The Cadi,” at a New York theatre. His best-known books are “Bill Nye and the Boomerang,” “The Forty Liars,” “Baled Hay,” and “Remarks.” Mr. Nye has resided, for some time past, near Asheville, N.C.

George W. Cable was born in New Orleans in 1844. He obtained an ordinary public-school education. His early life was spent as a clerk in a commercial office, varied by successful contributions to “The New Orleans Picayune” under the signature of “Drop-Shot.” In 1863 he joined the Confederate Army, and served in the Fourth Regiment Mississippi Cavalry, until the end of the civil war. His first literary work to attract general attention was a short story, “Sieur George,” published in the old “Scribner’s Monthly.” To that periodical he contributed numerous other sketches of creole life, which were published in book form in 1879. Other stories and articles followed, and Mr. Cable, after working up to a leading position in the mercantile world, from that of an errand boy, devoted himself to literature as a profession. “The Grandissimes,” in 1880, “Madame Delphine,” 1881, “The Creoles of Louisiana” and “Dr. Sevier,” 1884, established him in a high place amongst modern authors. His knowledge of the South, and his studies among the creoles and negroes, made him an authority upon the questions relating to the past and future of the negro and the southern States, and involved him in numerous and heated discussions. “The Silent South,” 1885, and “The Negro Question,” 1890, are the most prominent of his works on this subject. As a lecturer and reader he is widely known.

THOMAS B. REED.

1860. AT GRADUATION.

1864. ON ENTERING THE NAVY.

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FRANCES E. WILLARD.

FROM AN EARLY PICTURE.

AGE 20. 1859.

AGE 37. 1876.

MISS WILLARD AT THE PRESENT DAY.

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EDGAR WILSON NYE.

AGE 20. 1870.

AGE 28. 1878.

“BILL NYE” AT THE PRESENT DAY.

“BILL NYE” AT THE PRESENT DAY.

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GEORGE W. CABLE.

AGE 9. 1853.

1874. FIRST SKETCHES OF CREOLE LIFE.

AGE 19. 1863.

1882. “DOCTOR SEVIER.”

AGE 24. 1868.

AGE 40. 1884. “BONAVENTURE.”

MR. CABLE IN 1892.

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THE JONESES’ TELEPHONE
By Annie Howells Fréchette.

“Now, we won’t be selfish with our telephone, will we, dear? We will let a few friends use it occasionally—it will be such a pleasure and a convenience,” and Mrs. Jones stood off and looked admiringly at the new telephone.

“By all means. It is here and it may as well be doing some one a service as to stand idle—and I like to feel that a friend isn’t afraid to ask a favor of me now and then. Yes, I suppose that telephone will save us many a car-fare during the year. You can use it to do your marketing, instead of tiring yourself out and wasting half a day three or four times a week; and days when I forget things, think how easy it will be to telephone and remind me. Why, it will entirely do away with the need for strings to tie around my fingers.”

“Of course it will. I’m sure that what we’ll save on strings and car-fare will pay the rent of the instrument,” joyously responded Mrs. Jones, who had no great head for figures.

Thus hope and kindly intentions presided at the inauguration of the Joneses’ telephone.

Three months passed, and the great invention had carried much information—useful and otherwise—not only to its owners, but to the entire neighborhood as well. There were even days when the Joneses questioned whether they were not running a public telephone, so often did the bell ring. It is true, it had not quite paid for itself in the anticipated saving of car-fares and finger strings; still, it had certainly been a great comfort, and “Well, we’ll just face the music and call it a luxury,” said Jones, as he put away the receipt for his first quarter’s rent; “especially for our friends,” he added, with just a touch of bitterness.

Scarce twenty-four hours after this philosophical stand was taken, Mrs. Jones, who was rather a light sleeper, was aroused by a violent and prolonged ringing. It was six o’clock and Sunday morning—a day and hour usually dedicated to undisturbed slumber. After a brief debate in her own mind as to whether the house was on fire or the milkman was ringing, she realized that it was the telephone bell. She hastily donned slippers and gown and ran down-stairs. In reply to her interrogative “Yes?” (Mrs. Jones could never bring herself to say “Hello!”) came the following, in measured and clerical tones:

“It is Mr. Brown—Reverend Mr. Brown, speaking.”

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“Oh, yes?” instinctively covering her half-clad feet in the folds of her gown.

“I believe you live near the Reverend Mr. Smith, and are a member of his church.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be good enough to send to him, and ask if he can spare his curate to take Mr. Brown’s early service for him, as he is called away. I would be glad if you would send immediately, as I must have his answer within fifteen minutes. Thank you. Please call up 1001,” and snap went the telephone.

Mrs. Jones looked at her raiment and reflected that her one servant was at mass and would not be back for an hour. She went slowly up-stairs.

“Tom, Tom dear, wake up.”

“What is it?”

“The Reverend Brown has telephoned to know whether the Reverend Smith can send his curate to take his early service.”

“Well, what in the world have I got to do with the peddling out of early services?” snapped Jones, as he turned and shook up his pillows.

“He has to have an answer to his message within fifteen minutes.”

“Well, let Susan take it,” settling back comfortably.

“But Susan has gone to mass.”

“And I suppose that means that I am to be turned out of my bed at daybreak, and canter half a mile!” cried Jones, in a high and excited voice, as he bounced from his bed and began to grope sleepily for his clothes. His toilet was made amidst grumblings of “Confound their early services, why can’t they stay in bed like Christians, instead of prowling about, and sending men out in the chilly morning air,” etc., etc.

Jones’s temper was soured for the day, and that night, as he was winding his watch, he said severely, “Jane, I’m going to draw the line at delivering messages. Tom, Dick, and Harry can come here and bellow into the telephone until they are hoarse, but I’ll be switched if I’ll be messenger boy any longer.”

But messages continued to come and go, increasing rather than decreasing in frequency. People in the neighborhood fell into the habit of saying to friends in distant parts of the city, when leaving a question open: “Just telephone me when you make up your mind. I haven’t a telephone myself, but the Joneses have, and they are very obliging about letting me use it.”

So the fact that a telephone was owned by an obliging family circulated almost as rapidly as if it had been a lie.

There were times when Mrs. Jones hadn’t the face to ask Susan to stop her work and carry these messages, so she carried them herself—trying to keep up her self-respect by combining an errand of her own in the same direction. There were a few messages, however, which remained forever indignantly shut within the telephone; as, for instance, that of the little girl, which came in a shrill, piping voice:

“Mrs. Jones, will you send your servant over to Mrs. Graham’s to ask Milly where she got that perfectly delicious delight she gave me the other day, and tell her to be quick about it, please, for I’m waiting.”

And another which came in chuffy, distorted, conversational English—regular 396 “chappie” English, very hard to understand, but which she finally straightened out into: “I say there—aw—oh—is that you, Mrs. Jones? Sorry to trouble you, but would you be so awfully good as to send word to Mrs. Bruce—aw—that I’m awfully cut up about it, but I won’t be able to dine there to-night. Aw—I wouldn’t trouble you, but it’s so awfully hot I can’t go round to explain to her—you know. Thanks, awfully.” The telephone was closed, and the awfully-cut-up young man, whose sole claim on Mrs. Jones was that they had once met at a party, was left to be healed by time.

He had for company in his fate the enthusiastic tennis-player, who, in the midst of “a little summer shower,” summoned Mrs. Jones.

“I want to speak to Flannigan, the gardener.”

“This is not Flannigan’s telephone.”

“And who is speaking?”

“Mrs. Jones.”

“Oh, well, Mrs. Jones, I can give my message to you just as well. I want you to tell Flannigan to come and roll the tennis ground at once. He will understand. Tell him right away, please.”

“Flannigan does not live here.”

“Well, you can send him word, I suppose,” in a surprised and offended voice, “to oblige a lady. It is Miss Mortimer who is speaking,” and there was an impressive silence. Mrs. Jones remembered Miss Mortimer as a high-stepping young woman whom she had met at a friend’s house, and who had given her the impression of taking an inventory of her. So Mrs. Jones took pleasure in replying, “Miss Mortimer probably does not know that she is addressing a private telephone. Good day.”

But it was Jones, the luckless Jones, who seemed set aside for the cruel buffeting of the telephoning public. One night, which he will ever point to as the wildest and wettest night he has known, he had settled himself into his most comfortable chair, with a pile of new magazines beside him, when he was disturbed by a summons from the telephone. He responded with readiness, for he was rather expecting a call from his partner, and to his cheerful “Hello, old fellow, I’m here,” came, in a sputtering and wind-tossed voice, “Will you please tell Mrs. Goodson that as it is so stormy her daughter will not go home to-night?”

Jones turned and confronted his wife, and for a time words refused to come.

“Well, this is a little too much! Now think of an unknown voice barking at me to go out into a storm like this and tell the Goodsons that their daughter will not be at home to-night!”

The Goodsons lived just six squares away.

“And what will you do, dear? Why didn’t you say plainly that you would not and could not go out into a storm like this—that they must send a messenger?”

“They shut me off without giving me time to answer.”

“Well, call them up. Call them up at once.”

“Jane, please have some sense. How do I know where Miss Goodson has gadded off to? How do I know what number to call up?”

“Well, I just wouldn’t go.”

“Oh, I’ll have to. They are friends, and if they are expecting that girl of theirs home to-night and she doesn’t come Mrs. Goodson will go out of her mind.”

So Jones drove himself forth, clad in righteous indignation and a waterproof coat. The cold rain lashed him and the wind belabored his umbrella, and he was more than once obliged to pause under friendly porches to get his breath. At last the home of the Goodsons was reached, and spent and weary he staggered up the steps. Goodson himself opened the door.

“Hello, Jones, you’re no fair weather friend indeed. Come in, come in.”

“No, I’m too wet,” he answered, pointedly (and he felt like adding “and too mad”). “I only came to tell you that Miss Goodson won’t be at home to-night.”

“My daughter! She is at home. Don’t you hear her playing on the piano now? Come into the vestibule, anyway.”

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Jones walked in, with the rain streaming from his coat.

“Katey!” called Mr. Goodson to his wife. “Here is Jones come to say that Julia won’t be home to-night.”

“What?” demanded Mrs. Goodson, appearing in the hall and regarding Jones as if he were a mild sort of lunatic; “Julia is at home.”

“Well, I don’t understand it,” said Jones, plaintively. “I was rung up half an hour ago, and asked to come and tell you that your daughter wouldn’t be at home on account of the storm.”

“And do you mean to say that you stand ready to turn out at all hours and deliver messages free of cost?” cried Goodson.

“It looks that way.”

“Well, you are an ass!”

“Don’t compliment me too freely, Goodson, I can’t take in much more; I’m soaked as it is.”

Mrs. Goodson stood thinking. “Who could have been meant? Oh, I’ve just thought! It must be that Mrs. Goodson who sews for Mrs. Jones and me. And she has a daughter—a typewriter down town—and she has friends living in the suburbs. She has doubtless gone there to dinner and concluded to stay all night. But she lives just around the corner from you.”

Goodson laughed loudly and brutally. “A bonny sort of a night for a respectable family man like you, Jones, to be skylarking around carrying messages for typewriting maidens!”

“Oh, come now, that’s a little too much!”

“Well, old man, I’ll show my gratitude for your friendly intentions toward me by going round to the telephone people the first thing in the morning, and complaining of you. You’ve no right to be running opposition to the public telephones in this way.”

“If you only would!” and Jones wrung his friend’s hand while tears of thankfulness welled up to his eyes.

Once in the street, he longed for a contemptuous enemy to kick him briskly to the door of the Widow Goodson. The latter was evidently about to retire, as it was a long time before she responded to his ring. When, finally, she did come, she heard him calmly through and then answered languidly: “Yes, I didn’t much expect Bella home to-night, for she said if it come on to rain she thought she’d stay with her cousins. Good night. Quite drizzly, isn’t it?” peering out into the darkness.

Full of bitterness, Jones turned homeward. It seemed to him that his cup was full; and so it was, for it refused to hold more. As he entered his home, chilled without but hot within, he was greeted by an unfamiliar voice coming from the regions of the telephone.

“Give me Blair’s,” it said. “Is that Blair’s? Is that—Blair’s—B-l-a-i-r-’s, do you understand? Oh, yes, it is you, is it, Mrs. Blair? Well, say I want to speak to Miss McCrea—Oh—pshaw! you must know her—she’s the young lady that works for you. Oh, she’s out, is she? Well, when she comes in, tell her Miss Doolan told you to say that 398 Mr. Brennan has broke his leg—she’ll know, he drives Judson’s horses—and me and Mrs. Judson want to know whether he’s to go to the hospital or to his friends. You can send your answer to No. 999. They’ll let me know. Give Miss McCrea my love and tell her not to worry about Mr. Brennan. Good-by.”

Jones confronted a stately creature as she stepped into the hall.

“Look here, young woman, who are you?”

“I’m Miss Doolan, and I’m stopping at Judson’s—as housemaid,” she answered, so taken aback that for the moment her self-possession failed her.

“And to whom have you been telephoning?”

“To Blair’s—Judge Blair’s, over on the avenue—a friend of mine stops there.”

“And are you in the habit of calling up ladies in that fashion?”

“It’s a very good fashion, for all I can see,” she retorted impudently.

“And what business have you to order an answer sent here for me to carry on a night like this?”

“Mrs. Judson and me took you for a gentleman, sor, and we thought you wouldn’t mind obliging ladies.”

“Nor do I, but I don’t know either Mrs. Judson or you, and I don’t propose running errands for you.”

“Oh, then don’t bother yourself, sor—we can hire a boy,” she flung back with a scornful laugh as she bounced out.

“Now, Jane, I want you to distinctly understand that the last message has been carried from this house. I have probably to-night sown the seeds of pleurisy and pneumonia broadcast in my system; I have walked twelve squares to deliver a message to the wrong person; we have had a baggage here using our telephone as if it were her own, and we have been at the beck and call of the unpaying public for the last six months. Now, if the telephone people are not here by noon to-morrow, to threaten legal proceedings against me (Goodson has promised to complain of me) for undermining their business, I shall have that wretched instrument dragged away, body and soul, and we will try some other form of economy in the future.”

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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT HARVARD.
By Herbert Nichols, Ph.D.,
Instructor in Psychology, Harvard University.

Editor’s Note.—The illustrations of this article are from photographs, specially taken for the Harvard University Exhibit at the World’s Fair.

What do they do there?

What do they expect to come out of it?

The notion of a mental laboratory is still a mystery to most persons. They ask themselves the above questions, and many feel as they do so an uncanny shiver. They cannot realize that the study of the mind is already an established natural science, here, at sober Harvard, in all the leading universities, and free of spooks and mediums.

Yet a psychological laboratory looks much like any other modern laboratory. Around the rooms run glass-cases filled with fine instruments. Shelves line up, row after row, of specimen-jars and bottles. Charts cover the remainder of the walls. The tables and floors are crowded with working apparatus. Two large rooms and one small one are now occupied at Harvard. Four more rooms will be added to these this summer.

Also, the spirit that reigns in these rooms is the same that is found in other laboratories of exact science. This is the important thing. The minds of these workers are not wandering in dialectics and vagrant hypotheses. Reverence has opened her eyes. Hypotheses they have, and must have. Often they hold conflicting opinions. But the referee is always present—Nature herself. To experiment, to show the 400 fact, is always the method of debate. This is the great advantage of the modern way of studying psychology over the old.

The American public is so practical that I feel I can alone satisfy its “whats and wherefores” by explicitly describing some of the investigations being carried on here.

EFFECT OF ELEMENTARY SENSATIONS ON ONE ANOTHER.

Here is a lantern throwing a steady light through a large tube. (See illustration below, the right hand group.) By transparent slides of colored glass or gelatine, the light may be made of any color. At the end of the tube is a box, like a camera. The operator covers his head with a cloth, and observes the color of the light as it shines from the tube through, or on, a tiny hole in the dark box. The size of the hole can be varied by moving slides, worked by micrometer screws so fine that they measure the dimensions of the hole to the four-hundredth of an inch.

STUDYING THE EFFECTS OF SOUND AND OF ATTENTION ON COLORS.

The first step is to discover the “threshold” of each separate color. That means the smallest-sized hole through which each color can be distinguished. This varies for different colors. But now comes the interesting point. The size of the hole, for any given color seen, varies according to the nature of any sound heard at the same time. For instance, in order to distinguish a given red, the hole must be larger or smaller, in proportion as the pitch of a musical tone is lower or higher, fainter or stronger.

STUDYING THE EFFECTS OF COLORS ON JUDGMENTS OF TIME.

The above experiment is one in a system of investigations, intended to discover the laws by which the simplest sensations modify each other under the simplest conditions. These are laws as fixed as the laws of gravity, and, once determined, we may move on to study the combination of these elements into the higher thought processes.

EFFECTS OF ATTENTION.

Another experiment will further illustrate this method of study. An apparatus is so contrived that a colored disk can be made darker or brighter by the operator, and a measure of the change be recorded. (See illustration on opposite page, rear group.) The persons operated on do not know what change is made, or whether any will be made or not. They first look at the disk for ten seconds, taking good note of its color. Next, the operator changes the shade (or not) as he sees fit. Then for another ten seconds the subject judges the shade of color, but this time performs meanwhile a sum in addition as the operator calls to him simple numbers.

The experiment is to determine how the appearance of the color changes, by reason of dividing the attention between observing the disk and performing the addition. Do the colors of a rival’s bonnet really grow more glaring the harder they are looked at? To explain this is to touch on a social as well as an esthetic problem.

Diversion of attention changes the appearance of distances as well as of colors. A large frame covered with black cloth stands vertical. Two tiny white disks are held in place on the cloth by invisible threads manipulated behind the frame by the operator. When the disks are set a given distance apart they rest close upon the smooth black ground. The eye sees but two white spots in a free field, and may judge the distance between them without complication. This is done for ten seconds, as with the color disks. Then the spots are covered, and their distance apart slightly changed (or not) by the operator. Again they are shown, and now judged for ten seconds while adding figures. The mental process of addition changes the judgment of the distance.

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You will say it is a familiar experience that the road seems longer or shorter as the mind is busy or not. But it is not a familiar thing to determine the law of such lengthening and shortening for definite distances, and under precise mental condition, as in the above experiment.

JUDGMENTS OF TIME.

Every woman knows that color has an effect on the apparent size of objects; that of her dress on her figure.[2] It is not as well known that color affects our judgments of time. Our next experiment examines this matter.

[2]

In the diagram on the preceding page the white squares show plainly larger than the black squares.

REVOLVING CHAIR FOR STUDYING LOCALIZATIONS OF SOUNDS.