HEN Theodore Roosevelt was swim

ming hard against the swelling tide. which landed him in the Vice-Presidency, he wrote in confidence: "I doubt if the VicePresident's name ever counts appreciably in carrying the ticket, and on the other hand he is of absolutely no consequence in his office."

To-day no such letter would escape his pen. He would be the first to recognize the strength Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt bring to their respective tickets. He would approve the proposal of Senator Harding to have the Vice-President as adviser in the Cabinet.

For almost ten years I was a neighbor in Northampton of Calvin Coolidge. Daily to and from his office he passed my home along the very road down which some generations earlier Jonathan Edwards-greatest thinker of the eighteenth century-used to jog on horseback, jotting on scraps of paper his ideas for the Sunday sermon, pinning them to lapels and even coat-tails, and with them fluttering in the breeze dismounting at the parsonage not far from which Calvin Coolidge has long had his law office. From my study window I overlooked the ice-clad hill where George Bancroft and Jenny Lind once lived and up which Calvin Coolidge often trudged to woo and win the woman who with tact and wisdom has advised and supplemented him for fifteen years in his unusual career.

No one then expected the slim, sandyhaired, cautious, uncommunicative young lawyer struggling to make a living ever to attain the distinction he to-day enjoys. Even his proud father thought the chip of the old block would probably settle "right here in Plymouth," Vermont, where he was brought up and last July helped get in the hay. If in early manhood he made, as now, few enemies he also seemed, as now, to have few intimates. However, when he was nominated at Chicago his stanch friend, Frank W. Stearns, promptly notified him over the longdistance telephone, and Coolidge answered, "Well, I guess it's another duty to per

form"; and when his boyhood friend, Newt Turgeon, wrote him in congratulation of his coourse in the Boston police strike, the Governor replied:

DEAR NEWT:

Glad you are pleased; thought you would be.
Yours,
CAL.

One might live a lifetime in the other half of that $32-a-month twin house to which Calvin Coolidge brought his bride in 1904 without passing from friendliness into intimacy. Yet it has not been unusual for him to drop in at a neighbor's; though sometimes after a word or two he has buried himself in a book.

In the little Economic Club, of which George W. Cable was the gracious and the graceful head, for years we read our "papers" to one another on the problems of the day. But even in the give-and-take of club life, Calvin Coolidge was habitually sparing of his words. In our occasional merriment, always decorous, he was never conspicuous. He has dry humor in abundance; it is often "extra-dry." The smile I saw at close range on his face at the notification ceremony, July 27, was never kindled in the Economic Club.

It is in recent years that assiduous thought, carefully pruned and deliberately expressed, has made him the most felicitous phrase-maker in our public life. Cleveland coined two phrases men could quote. In his "cross-of-gold" oration back in 1896, Bryan struck twelve. McKinley and Taft were no phrase-makers. By sheer thrust of irresistible personality, Roosevelt forced many an immortal sentence into head and heart. Some of Wilson's speeches in their entirety will doubtless lodge at last in our school readers. Calvin Coolidge has already given us more sentences that promise to stick than any American since Lincoln, and from first to last his notification address matches Wilson's best from every point of view.

When last autumn the American public was on the verge of panic at the sinister situation up in Boston a new Declaration of In

dependence rang out from Beacon Hill: "There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, at any time." Coal-bins were low and under-production everywhere a menace when the reassurance came: "Our great need now is for more of everything for everybody. It is not money that the nation or the world needs to-day, but the products of labor. These products are to be secured only by the united efforts of an entire people.' The last of hose who may have thought that "Calvin" was nothing after all except a clever politician have lately sought for cover in the face of such Sinaitic words as: "Laws rest on the eternal foundations of righteousness." Some inclined to think him as cold as he sometimes looks have their hearts warmed by the multiplying sentences of late like this: "There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother."

Out of the mist of misunderstanding the myth arises here and there that Calvin Coolidge is a mystery. Even an associate of twenty-five years solemnly pronounces him "inscrutable." People forget that he is simply himself: Shy and reticent as his fathers were before him on the Vermont hills; original and unhurried in an age almost criminally breathless; laborious and home-loving at a time when most families which do things as a family do them far from home; accustomed to much and solid reading and to quiet and straightforward thinking untempted by the many tabloid substitutes now urged on every side; with quiet dignity conserving his New

England rootage while he comes to fruitage recognizable from Boston Common to Honolulu and perhaps-who knows-yet to be for the healing of the nations; studying people with the same exhaustless objectivity and tenacious thoroughness with which he studies measures brought to the gubernatorial desk for approval or veto, and so inflexibly consecrated to official duty that after the strenuous notification day of July 27 at Northampton he told me in the evening he must get up next morning at 5.30 to be off to Boston.

Mystery! I suspect all mystery would quickly vanish if one were to take Calvin Coolidge as he is and seems to be, sit with him in silence or in talk as he may lead the way before the fireplace in his garageless house on Massasoit street, and read above the mantelpiece the framed legend which has looked down upon him ever since Grace Goodhue, called irresistibly away from her vocation to become his bride, lighted the home fire:

From every friend and each experience he is always learning. In his boyhood on the isolated Vermont farm, where he remarked the other day, "it is not necessary to have great riches to be successful," he learned much-the golden worth of silence, the uses of loneliness, the educational value of doing those chores boys hate, the physical, mental, and moral upbuilding of an outdoor life under a constituted authority which has to be obeyed.

After preparation at the Black River Academy, with pants tucked in his boots, he

slipped unobtrusively into Amherst College, and after profiting richly there for four years without attracting much attention, he slipped as quietly away, carrying with him when he graduated in 1895-though he forgot to tell his father-the medal offered for competition to students in all colleges for the best essay on "The Principles of the War for American Independence." Then followed twenty months of law study in an excellent Northampton office.

Scarcely had he entered on his practise when the Meadow City developed a habit of

GOVERNOR AND MRS. COOLIDGE READING TELEGRAMS OF CONGRATULATION AFTER THE NOMINATION AT CHICAGO

calling him to public office. He has been successively City Clerk, City Councilor, City Solicitor, Mayor, Assemblyman, State Senator, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. Never once has he tasted the bitterness of defeat. Often he has known the sweets of reëlection. The whole nation recalls how Massachusetts, with a majority almost bewildering, last autumn put him back into the

Governor's chair that the whole world might know of its approval of his course in the police strike, that so far as Massachusetts was responsible law and order should not perish from our cities, and that all America might once again take heart, deeply depressed by the turbulence and insolence of too many who were then behaving as though you can make straw without bricks, eat your cake and have it too.

From Tocqueville's time European travelers who have come to "write us up" have generally observed that in New England towns can usually be found a higher degree than elsewhere of physical comfort, dignified thoughtfulness, trained intelligence, ingrained love of books, political liberty, and real power democratic in its origin and its expression. For two and a half centuries Northampton, now with 22,000 people, has been conspicuous for such virtues. To hold practically every political position a highgrade city can bestow is in itself a liberal education. But there have been besides for Calvin Coolidge the significant contributing elements of an exquisitely beautiful physical environment, a rich and edifying religious life, an endowed theater sometimes with a stock company of its own and for a generation past visited by many of the best actors and best actresses of the time, a model public library in range of interest, efficiency of

management, and per capita circulation, and at the city's heart the biggest woman's college in the world.

Governor Coolidge was still early in the thirties when he was sent to the State Legislature. Returned again and again, then promoted to the Senate, in due season presiding over each, nothing has robbed him of simplicity or tempted him to put money in his purse. All through the years he lived in a hotel room for which he paid a dollar a day, coming home for the week-ends; and when after he was elected Governor it was intimated that the time had come to maintain an establishment in keeping with his high position, without explanation he compromised by engaging two rooms at the hotel.

No one has been known to make him talk-no one can-against his will. He is as silent as Grant, who at Hartford, repeatedly implored by a big audience to say at least two words, grimly answered: "I won't." At personal attack Coolidge does not even blink. His notification address-perhaps the most inclusive speech he yet has made-is absolutely free from personalities. In finished literary form he states convictions. He is always studying people. In finding out what people think Lincoln often talked much, Roosevelt always more. Coolidge listens intently, semi-occasionally asks a question, looks out the window, estimates his man and is on record in respect to the importance of knowing human nature in the phrase: "Only the man of broad sympathy and deep understanding can meet with much success."

To his credit as lawmaker and executive he has such representative achievements as the anti-monopoly law, the anti-discrimination bill in the interest of the small trader, and the law limiting the scope of injunctions against striking employees. He fought the good fight for woman's suffrage and for the direct election of United States Senators. He is the first Massachusetts Governor to submit a budget to the Legislature and to procure the enactment of a law for the scientific reorganization of State government. Though once reported to be under some obligation to "Big Business," he is believed to deserve special credit for the bill establishing a forty-eight hour working week for women and minors, for the proper dealing with the street railway problem, and for obtaining a wage increase of from 5 per cent. to 25 per cent. in the mills throughout the State. His settlement of the Boston police strike was a

Sept.-4

challenge clearly understood to organized labor to mend one of its ways. Yet to-day Calvin Coolidge is acceptable alike to Labor, Capital, and the Public. The obvious reason is that everybody knows that he is just, and as the Democratic Mayor of Northampton said at the notification: "Whatever our politics, we all believe in his sincerity."

For the first time, the Vice-Presidential nominee summed up practically his whole philosophy of public life in one address. From every point of view he satisfied the most exacting. Even his presence was prccisely what one would desire. Consciousness of great responsibility blended with personal humility. Though not heavy, his voice pleases, carries, and is adequate to campaigning outdoors as well as in.

The address was first of all a sober study of the essentials of good government as he understands them and honestly believes his party represents them. Uniquely symbolical in the public mind of the supremacy of law it was appropriate for him to say:

The observance of the law is the greatest solvent of public ills. Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge anyone to show where in nature any rights ever existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.

But he is no abstruse reasoner. Though his head is always with the stars, his feet are always on the ground. With "adequate brevity" he approved his party platform, commenting on its items one by one, admitting frankly the grave difficulty we shall have in solving the many problems of the time, and deepening confidence in his common sense by the laconic comment: "All easy to say, but difficult of accomplishment."

But the strength of easily the best speech any man in all our history has ever made in accepting the high office to which Calvin Coolidge has been nominated lies in the closing words, which touch home hearts everywhere, regardless of all party lines:

The destiny, the greatness of America lies around the hearthstone. If thrift and industry are taught there, and the example of self-sacrifice oft appears; if honor abide there, and high ideals; if there the building of fortune be subordinate to the building of character, America will live in security, rejoicing in an abundant prosperity and good government at home, and in peace, respect, and confidence abroad. If these virtues be absent there is no power that can supply these blessings. Look well then to the hearthstone; therein all hope for America lies.