almost
a century plant.

Into this Senate came Mr. Root, full stature, as he might walk into
the Supreme Court of the United States, preceded by his reputation.
On Olympus one may spring full grown like Minerva from the head of
Jove. But not in the Senate, where strong prejudice exists against
any kind of cerebral generation. A young Senator from Ohio, Mr.
Harding, arrived in the upper House early enough to see the portent
of Mr. Root there. He keeps to this day a sense of its unbecomingness.

From his desk on the floor Mr. Root talked to the country, but the
Senate did not listen. One does not speak in the Senate by the
authority of intellect or of personality. One speaks by the
authority of dead men's shoes.

Not being a big committee chairman, Mr. Root was not of counsel in
the big cases. He tried to associate himself with counsel but the
traditions of the Senate and the jealousy of Senators were against
him. He had not the passion for public service that makes Reed
Smoot and Wesley Jones miraculously patient with the endless
details of legislation. After six years he quit.

"I am tired of it," he said to Senator Fall, "the Senate is doing
such little things in such a little way." It was different from
public life under Roosevelt where one did not notice size of what
they did--one has not yet noticed the size of what they did--for
the grandeur of the way they did it.

I have said that Mr. Root's mind with its advocate's bent always
occupied itself with the justification of other men's views, his
chief's or his party's. There was one notable exception, his break
with the Republicans while he was in the Senate on the question of
discriminating in favor of American shipping through the Panama
Canal. A clever lawyer's argument can be made that when the United
States said "all nations" in its treaty with Great Britain
regarding the Canal it meant all nations except itself. But Mr.
Root declined to make it, holding that plain morality and a greater
respect for the obligations of a treaty than Bethman Hollweg
expressed when he called them scraps of paper required this country
to charge just the same tolls for American ships using the canal as
for British ships or any other ships using it.

The general Republican argument is that thus interpreted, the
Hay-Pauncefote treaty is so foolish and so inconvenient a treaty that
Mr. Hay must not have meant what he said when he wrote it, and
really did mean something that he