What is your plan to
remedy it?"

"Have a department in my magazine, and explain your ideas," suggested
Bok.

"Haven't time for another thing. You know that," snapped back the
President. "Wish I had."

"Not to write it, perhaps, yourself," returned Bok.

"But why couldn't you find time to do this: select the writer here in
Washington in whose accuracy you have the most implicit faith; let him
talk with you for one hour each month on one of those subjects; let him
write out your views, and submit the manuscript to you; and we will have
a department stating exactly how the material is obtained and how far it
represents your own work. In that way, with only an hour's work each
month, you can get your views, correctly stated, before this vast
audience when it is not in trolleys or railroad-cars."

"But I haven't the hour," answered Roosevelt, impressed, however, as Bok
saw. "I have only half an hour, when I am awake, when I am really idle,
and that is when I am being shaved."

"Well," calmly suggested the editor, "why not two of those half-hours a
month, or perhaps one?"

"What?" answered the President, sitting upright, his teeth flashing but
his smile broadening. "You Dutchman, you'd make me work while I'm
getting shaved, too?"

"Well," was the answer, "isn't the result worth the effort?"

"Bok, you are absolutely relentless," said the President. "But you're
right. The result would be worth the effort. What writer have you in
mind? You seem to have thought this thing through."

"How about O'Brien? You think well of him?"

(Robert L. O'Brien, now editor of the Boston Herald, was then Washington
correspondent for the Boston Transcript and thoroughly in the
President's confidence.)

"Fine," said the President. "I trust O'Brien implicitly. All right, if
you can get O'Brien to add it on, I'll try it."

And so the "shaving interviews" were begun; and early in 1906 there
appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal a department called "The
President," with the subtitle: "A Department in which will be presented
the attitude of the President on those national questions which affect
the vital interests of the home, by a writer intimately acquainted and
in close touch with him."

O'Brien talked with Mr. Roosevelt once a month, wrote out the results,
the President went over the proofs carefully, and the department was
conducted with great success for a year.

But Theodore Roosevelt was again to be the editor of a departmen