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Y personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland did not go back of his Princeton days. I went to Princeton from New York one late afternoon in 1900 to hear his first lecture on the Independence of the Executive. It proved a It proved a fateful night for me, for not only did I hear this historic lecture, which will always be included in the literature on that subject; something happened which led to a friendship with Mr. Cleveland of far more influence upon my life than his views as to the functions of the executive. I received a message from the Professor of Jurisprudence who, learning that I was in town, asked me to meet him after the lecture. This professor was none other than Woodrow Wilson, under whom I had sat when he was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. I was told by him that what then seemed to me a very large fund had been given to Princeton University for the establishment of a Chair of Politics, that he had been asked to recommend some one as the first incumbent, that he had a list of a half-dozen names, and, to my utter amazement, that my name was at the head of the list. So began a chapter in my own life, in which Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson became the two outstanding figures.

It was in the following autumn after I had found the only available house for the year in Princeton, about a block from "Westland," that I was invited with Mrs. Finley to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland, he wishing to share with his neighbors (Doctor Henry van Dyke, Laurence Hutton, and Professor Sloane among them) some venison which a brother

hunter had sent him. I arrived first among the guests, and found Mr. Cleveland alone. He remembered that we had met before, which greatly surprised and complimented me. Some years earlier I had come from Knox College, of which I was then president, to invite him to make an address at the celebration of the anniversary of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate, which had been held in the shadow of the walls of this college. I had brought a letter from some one, he seemed to remember. I said that I could hardly have ventured to call without an introduction. But from whom? I mentioned the names of one or two men of his administration whom I knew.

"No," at last he said. "You brought a card of introduction from Woodrow Wilson."

I speak of this to illustrate his unusually retentive memory (of which I had many proofs later) and to show how again these two men became associated with my own fortunes.

But that night of the venison dinner was a memorable one for me and my family, for before the evening was over Mr. Cleveland had proposed to build a house for me in one corner of the spacious grounds of "Westland"-in what was once the orchard; for professors' houses were hard to find in that end of town at that time, and I had no prospect of one for another year. I thought at first that he was speaking in jest. But in due time the house was built. When it was nearing completion it was discovered that there was just one defect; the cellar was not quite dry; in fact, there was some water

in it, and I felt obliged to speak to him about it. So finding him alone in his library one day, I expressed our great pleasure in having for a home such a beautiful and comfortable house and then at last, after considerable hesitancy, I referred to the water in the cellar. Without a moment's hesitation and with a sober face he said: "Well, my dear fellow, what did you expect, champagne?"

And no one ever had a kindlier neighbor. Nor have I ever known a man who was more considerate and less demanding in his relationships or more tender in his treatment of those near to him or more chivalrous. I remember particularly his gentle ways with the children and especially his own. One day in an illness which kept him in his room, I found him in play with his boy Richard, for whom he had made a boat out of a cucumber with matches for masts, and was sailing it in a foot-bath. On another day during the same illness he had himself made a waterwheel for the boy, which he had rigged up so that it was spinning under a stream of running water. Another memory is of his patient, gentle treatment of the same boy when, on the way home in the twilight of a summer's day of fishing up in New Hampshire, the lad had in sleepy carelessness lost a valuable reel of still more valued associations, for it was one that some old friend of Mr. Cleveland's had given him. These are petty incidents, but they tell more of the real inward man than the public deeds and utterances in which he did not permit his own feelings to enter. He was incapable of any brutal or cruel thing, however brusque his manner in the presence of injustice or deceit and however unyielding he was in the maintenance of a position once he had reached a conclusion.

So deep in his nature was kindliness that his resolution and courage in not permitting this disposition to control his public decisions are the more to be praised. He was "firm with the powerful" and "gentle with the weak," but he was inexorable with the dishonest, the perverse, the self-seeking. He was like Lincoln in the processes by which he arrived at decisions, for Lincoln said of himself that in "handling a thought" he was never easy "till he had bounded it

North and bounded it South and bounded it East and bounded it West." Mr. Cleveland bounded a subject on all sides before he reached a conclusion; then he was immovable, whatever the effect might be upon his personal or political fortunes. To be true to his conclusion was a moral obligation which was to him unescapable. In fact, he would never think of abandoning it even if there were opportunities for escape. He had been intrusted with an idea, which was as sacred to him as a financial trust. The office was nothing to him. Fidelity to what he conceived to be the right course for his country was everything. What seemed to many to be pure obstinacy was but honesty-trueness to himself, which forbade his being false to any man. And his honesty was not a cloistered virtue. It was an aggressive honesty that evaded no responsibility, asked no quarter, sought no shelter of dubiety in the minds of the public. All who knew him would say with one who knew him intimately through all his years of political stress and strain: "He was the honestest man I ever knew."

This, I know, did not get for him a better fame than Aristides had for all his justness. He had, like Aristides, his period of political banishment and, like Aristides, he hoped that no crisis would ever overtake the people that should compel them to remember him; but he was called back, as was the ancient Greek statesman (who deemed it right that the good citizen should base his confidence on serviceable and just conduct, but for the sake of general safety was willing to make his chiefest foe the most famous of men), and finally he resembled Aristides in that he was free of ambition—a freedom which "is no slight requisite," as Plutarch said in comparing him with Cato Major, "for the gentleness which should mark a statesman." His famous Hawaiian message, which in face of a "manifest destiny" doctrine insisted that there was such a thing as international morality, that there should not be one law for the strong nation and another for the weak, and that even by indirection a strong power may not with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory, was but a mature expression of an innate sense of honesty and justice which showed itself in

one law of the world," and he built on the deep basis of democratic humanity.

Modest as he was about his own abilities and attainments, he yet would have stood unabashed in the presence of the greatest of all history. He was often puzzled by the subtleties of those who used words profusely or vaguely, but he was never confused by real issues. He was not, as one has said, either a demigod or a demagogue, but he had the qualities out of which the ancients did create their Titans and demigods. And he was as far from being a demagogue as noonday is from midnight.

He is best characterized by those who were his political opponents. It was Mr. Taft, then President, now Chief Justice,

portance of emphasizing the rule of the people can never become so great, that we can afford to forget those principles that are illustrated in the life-work of Grover Cleveland as Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York better than in any other public servant this State has ever had." It was Elihu Root, then United States Senator, who said that, whether one agreed with his views or not, it was "impossible not to find inspiration in the example of a man who could not wait for a safe re-election to do what he believed to be right," and added: "To honor him is to be lifted in spirit; to remember him is to be grateful for our country's happy fortune and to be possessed of a cheerful hope for the future of a people that can