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PUBLIC LIBRARY

ABTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

THE LIVING AGE:

3 Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literature and Thought.

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According to all trustworthy accounts the recent Presidential election in the United States was the dullest that has been witnessed for some decades. All the recognized mechanical incentives to popular enthusiasm were employed; but the public declined to "enthuse," despite the parades, the fireworks, the advertisements, the professional oratory, and the desperate efforts of the journalists to work their readers into the customary quadrennial paroxysm. Outside the Southern States the great majority of respectable Americans had made up their minds that Mr. Roosevelt was going to be elected, and the minority were not seriously disturbed at the prospect. As a show, the campaign, on either side, was a failure; it filled the newspapers, but the people turned aside from the close-printed columns, and were more interested in the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the singular conjunction of the Church and the World, as illustrated by the hobnobbing of his Grace with Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Yet this "apathy," as

we call it in our politics, disappeared at the polling-booths. The electors did not fail to exercise their suffrage, and they gave a record vote. The majority for President Roosevelt is the largest in the history of the Union; no man, so far as we know, has ever been appointed to any place or office by the choice of so overwhelming a multitude of his fellow-citizens. Perhaps, then, the Presidential electors did not regard the event with indifference. they knew that the result was a foregone conclusion and they saw no reason for making a fuss over it in advance. The Americans are a sentimental, but at the same time a practical people.

But

From the practical point of view, they must know that it is not a light thing they have done. The re-election of Mr. Roosevelt to power, with this tremendous national "mandate" behind him, may have important consequences for the United States, and for other countries as well. For the next four years, and perhaps for the next eight, the executive of the largest

homogeneous civilized population in the world will be controlled by the foremost representative of American self-assertion in international politics. Imperialism was the most vital of the issues involved in the electoral campaign. Most of the other differences between the parties were blurred or shadowy. The Tariff was introduced pro forma, but no one really believes that there is any substantial divergence of principle on that point. High Protection has probably reached its zenith, and may begin to slope very slowly downwards, no matter which party is in power; neither of them could, or would, venture on any substantial advance towards genuine Free Trade. The defeat of the Bryanite Democrats at St. Louis has taken the currency out of party politics. On the Trusts, both say a good deal, and say it with equal obscurity.

In all these matters the elector might easily feel that there was little to choose between Judge Parker and Mr. Roosevelt. But in temperament, in character, and in their outlook on affairs, there is a good deal to choose. The personality of the President was the real electoral asset of the Republicans, just as it was the strongest "plank" in the platform of the Democrats. Mr. Roosevelt was denounced as a kind of prancing Proconsul, an American Boulanger, who might perhaps use his 60,000 soldiers to subvert the Constitution, and would in any case be sure to plunge the Union into the welter of world-politics, and hurry it upon every sort of aggressive adventure. Mr. Bryan says that the President's "big stick" policy, his "physical enthusiasm and love for war," are a direct menace to constitutional government, and a cause of justifiable alarm. The majority of American voters were, however, not alarmed. They do not believe in Mr. Bryan's phantasmal Cæsarism; they know well

enough that the liberties of eighty millions of people are in no danger from an army smaller than that of Belgium. They prefer the big stick to the painted reed. "The subject of Imperialism," says Mr. Bryan, "is, all things considered, the most important of the questions at issue between the parties." If that is true, the Imperialists have won a striking victory. The policy of Mr. Roosevelt in China, in Central America, in South America, towards Germany, towards Turkey, towards Russia, has been endorsed by the constituencies. The President and the Secretary of State are enabled, they are indeed encouraged, to carry it further.

And carried further it probably will be. On the very morrow of the elections two important pieces of information were cabled from America. The one was the announcement that the State Department had proposed to confer with the British Government on the subject of an Anglo-American Treaty of Arbitration; the other, that the Navy Construction Board had propounded a ship-building scheme, which, if accepted by Congress, will make the United States the third, if not the second, maritime Power in the two hemispheres, within a very few years. We must take these two items together, and put them side by side with the intelligence that the President's invitation to the Powers to enter upon another Peace Conference had taken definite shape. They are parts of a scheme which seems to have been forming in the ambitious and comprehensive intellect of the American statesman. It is the big stick in a different form from that in which it presents itself to the indignant Democratic imagination-the truncheon of the policeman, not the bludgeon of the swashbuckler.

American opinion is undergoing a gradual evolution on these subjects, of which a stage is marked by the voting

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