niches-upon the shoulders of the Apostles generations of pigeons, having been born in the niches and having learned to fly, have descended out of the azure with the benediction of shimmering wings. Generations of the wind-borne seeds of wild flowers have lodged in low crevices and have sprouted and blossomed, and as seeds again have been blown on, harbingers of vines and mosses on their venerable way.

A mighty shape begins to answer back to the cathedrals of other lands and ages, bespeaking for itself admittance into the league of the world's august sanctuaries. It begins to send its annunciation onward into ages yet to be, so remote, so strange, that we know not in what sense the men of it will even be our human brothers save as they are children of the same Father.

Between this past and this future, the one of which cannot answer because it is too late, and the other of which cannot answer because it is too soon-between this past and this future the cathedral stands in a present that answers back to it more and more. For a world of living men and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs for a little space between the two eternities—a road strewn with the dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross, but with eyes turned toward the same cross.

As on some mountain-top a tall pinetree casts its lengthened shadow upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun, so the cathedral flings hither and thither athwart the whole land its spiritual shaft of light. A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it, begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form. In imagination they see its chapels bathed in the glories of the morning sun; they remember its unfinished dome gilded at the hush of sunsets. Between the roar of the eastern and of the western ocean its organ tones utter peace above the storm. Pilgrims from afar off, known only to themselves as pilgrims, being pilgrim-hearted, but not pilgrim-clad, reach at its gates the borders of Gethsemane. Bowed as penitents, they hail its lily of forgiveness and the resurrection.

Slowly it rises, in what unknown years

to stand finished! Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped of better laws. Finished and standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for the order of the land, for order in the secret places of the soul, and order throughout the world. Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country which invites all lives into it, and cuts down lives most ruthlessly-lives which it stands there to

save.

So it speaks to the distant through space and time; but it speaks also to the

near.

Although not half risen out of the earth, encumbering it rough and shapeless, already it draws into its service many who dwell around. These seek to cast their weaknesses on its strength, to join their brief day to its innumerable years, to fall into the spiritual splendor of it as out in space small darkened wanderers drop into the orbit of a sun. Anguished memories begin to bequeath their jewels to its shrine; dimmed eyes will their tears to its eyes, to its windows. Old age with one foot in the grave drags the other peacefully about its crypt. In its choir sound the voices of children herded in from the green hillside of life's April.

RACHEL TRUESDALE'S life became one of these near-by lives which it blesses, a darkened wanderer caught into the splendor of a spiritual sun. It gathered her into its service; it found useful work for her to do; and in this new life of hers it drew out of her nature the last thing that is ever born of the mother-faith that she is separated a little while from her children only because they have received the gift of eternal youth.

Many a proud, happy, jealous thought became hers as time went on. She had had her share in its glory, for it had needed him whom she had brought into the world. It had called upon him to help give breath to its message and build that ever-falling rainbow of sound over which Hope walks into the eternal.

Always as the line of white-clad choristers passed down the aisle, among them was one who brushed tenderly against her as he walked by, whom no one else saw. Rising above the actual voices, and heard by her alone, up to the dome soared a voice sweeter than the rest.

Often she was at her window, watch ing the workmen at their toil as they brought out more and more a great shape on the heights. Often she stood there looking across at the park hillside opposite. Whenever spring came back, and the slope lived again with young leaves and white blossoms, always she thought of

him. In Elysium she saw him playing in an eternal April. When autumn returned, and leaves drifted and dropped, thinking of herself.

Sometimes standing beside his piano. Always in her face the look of the immortal.

The cathedral there on its rock for

ages.

TH
Tson took as

HIRTY-FIVE days after Mr. Wilson took the oath as President of the United States he appeared in the House of Representatives and addressed Congress assembled in joint session, thus reverting to the practice of the first President. It was a startling and almost bold thing to do.

Many persons doubted its wisdom. To a people fond of novelty, as the American people is, it made its appeal.

In itself this departure from custom was less important than interesting, but it helps amazingly to understand the President's character and his purposes, and to gain an insight into a complicated and, in some respects, conflicting nature. As hisAs historian and student of the machinery of government, Mr. Wilson knew that "The President's Message" had forfeited its high estate and become almost contemptuous. Droned out by a clerk to empty benches, it was read by nobody. Intended originally as a means to convey information to Congress "of the state of the Union," it had degenerated into a rehash of the reports of the heads of the departments or platitudinous observations that Congress and the country treated with the respect they deserved.

An institution that becomes ridiculous

soon falls into decay. Mr. Wilson may have asked himself whether his predecessors, as the guardians of the high dignity of the Presidency, had not been guilty of lessening the esteem in which the public

held the Presidential office by the ridicule. many of their messages excited. And thus thinking, as perhaps he did, one can very well see that Mr. Wilson would conclude that the respect demanded of the Presidency required that when the President spoke he should be listened to with attention not merely by the few hundreds of Congress, but by the many millions of the country; and to command his audience, the President must not make himself cheap by frequent talk, or weary by excessive length, or disgust by the trivial.

Wisdom, says Carlyle, is intrinsically of silent nature. of silent nature. Of such silent nature is Woodrow Wilson, whose reticence would have delighted Carlyle, scornful of talk and intolerant of words with no meaning. But reticence is not a quality to attract in a day when mankind is vocal and a man escape listening only by talking. When Mr. Wilson came to the Presidency a year ago he was so little known that virtually he was unknown, the first American President of whom that can be said. He has done nothing to dispel that ignorance. An enigma then, an enigma he remains.

can

Nearly every public man in America has a dual personality. There is the character, largely mythical, fashioned by the country out of its own imagination; there is the man he really is as Washington, sometimes unjust, but more often fairly accurate, in its judgment, knows him from

intimate association and daily observation. The difference between the Washington view and that of the rest of the country is the difference between a photograph and a Cubist picture. The one reproduces with pitiless fidelity, even though the focus may be distorted; the other is whatever erratic fancy may choose to see. It is as easy for a Cubist to find in a meaningless collection of splotches a nude descending a staircase as it is for the country to see in a demagogue a demigod.

In the three months between Mr. Wilson's election and his inauguration it was noted by a close observer that of the scores of Democrats who turned their steps toward New Jersey as religiously as the true believer faces the east on the call of the muezzin not one brought back any report of what Mr. Wilson said. An account of a visit to Trenton or Princeton usually took this form:

"I said to Mr. Wilson that in my opinion we-"

"Yes," the impatient listener, knowing the stereotyped form from having heard it so often, would interrupt, "but what did Mr. Wilson say?"

"He did n't say anything."

Whereupon it was said that Mr. Wilson was "self-centered." It fits in with the American temperament for Americans to find a word that is all-embracing, that, like the ideograph of a shorthand writer, which expresses a sentence by a sign, can describe a man emotionally and intellectually with a mental shrug of the shoulders. Before inauguration Mr. Wilson was too "self-centered" to make a successful President; events since the fourth of March a year ago have not robbed that useful descriptive adjective of either its value or frequent application.

Nearly every President has either been a party leader in fact or has attempted to be one no less than the President; but no President has considered it to be in keeping with Presidential ethics and the constitutional limitation of his office to impress upon the public his political leadership. Mr. Wilson has gone out of his way to make the people understand that by their votes they elected him to two offices, both intimately associated, but with different functions: he was elected to the Presidency, as every one knew; and he was also elected to be the leader of his party.

In the second message that Mr. Wilson read to Congress, on June 23, he referred to himself in this language, "I have come to you, as the head of the Government and the responsible leader of the party in power." Some of Mr. Wilson's critics pointed out that while the Constitution explicitly defined the duties of the President, singularly enough its framers neglected to include political leadership among them. But this, like other things that Mr. Wilson has done, was no sudden judgment; it was simply putting into effect at the first opportunity a matured conclusion. The President, Mr. Wilson wrote, "because he is at once the choice of the party and of the nation" can escape being the leader of his party only "by incapacity or lack of personal force.' It was no new thought that the people, having voted him into the Presidency, had also voted him the party leader, because, as Mr. Wilson wrote, "he is the party nominee, and the only party nominee for whom the whole nation votes."

Much has been said about the great accomplishments of Mr. Wilson's first year of his Presidency, and repeatedly it has been asked what is the secret of the President's success. The secret, if any, which ought not to be a secret to persons who have closely followed Mr. Wilson's methods, is simply that he has asserted leadership and made his party accept it through the force of a dominating personality. He began right. From the first day he made his mastery felt. He spent no "honeymoon" weeks, hoping to win by amiability, and later, if necessary, to demand. Politicians did not quickly take his full measure, but they soon realized that here was a man who neither feared nor could be forced to favor. Other Presidents, preserving the fiction of the President not being the party leader, and yet attempting to lead, have considered that they were entitled to be "consulted" while a great party measure was in process of formation, to try to put their own impress upon it, to intimate the possibility of a veto if necessary, to coerce or conciliate the recalcitrant, to preserve at all cost that priceless jewel of the politician, "party harmony"; to compromise, even to sacrifice convictions, rather than to see the bill fail; and always being able to offer in excuse that it was necessary to yield something to Con