trength of leadership, restraining the discordant Republican
elements in the Senate from kicking over the traces. This is
journalist "copy" written for a popular imagination which finds the
truth too tepid.

Boies Penrose serves the purpose of appeasing national appetite for
what the magazine editors call "dynamic stuff."

But the real Boies Penrose is not all as he is pictured. At a
cursory glance he might appear to be a physiological, psychological,
and political anachronism. At least he is sufficiently different
from his colleagues to be, if not actually mysterious, not easily
understandable. There is something fundamental about him. He
inspires a certain awe which may not be magnetic but has the same
effect upon those who surround him; where he sits is the head of
the table.

I doubt if Lodge or Knox or Hughes could ever fathom the secret of
his power; they are not cast in the same mould. His colleagues
smile at his idiosyncracies--behind his back--but they approach him
with the respect due to a master. Many of them admire him, not a
few hate him, but all of them fear him. It is rather a singular
thing that Senator La Follette, himself at the pinnacle of his
championship of the Wisconsin progressive idea, was probably on
friendlier terms with the senior Senator from Pennsylvania than any
of the other leaders of those reactionary forces with whom he was
tilting. He knew where Penrose stood and it is not at all
improbable that behind the Penrose reticence there was a modicum of
admiration for the methods of the redoubtable little colleague, who
in his way, was a more inexorable boss than Penrose himself ever
dreamed of being. The mutual understanding was there, even if it
never became articulate.

Penrose has peculiarities which put him in a niche quite his own.
He eschews conversation as an idle affectation. He dislikes to
shake hands, preferring the Chinese fashion of holding his on his
own expansive paunch. When he finds it necessary to talk at all he
speaks the precise truth as he sees it without consideration for
the feelings of those he happens to be addressing. The results are
frequently so ludicrous, particularly when he enters a colloquy on
the Senate floor, that he is given credit for a much more
pronounced sense of humor than he actually possesses. I doubt that
he is always conscious of the element of humor and I suspect that
if he realized that his observations were to evoke laughter he
would delibe