the children found themselves on congenial ground.

President Roosevelt was the most considerate of friends. He never forgot the slightest detail of one's family life, and one's children seemed to take a great place in his heart. When my son Gerald, now in France, was presented to him, by his request, he was only prevented, he said, by the presence of older and more formal people from trying a bout at jiu-jitsu with him on the floor of the Cabinet room. "The only game that I can't play,' said the President, ‘is baseball. I must wear glasses, and I think I am afraid of only one thing a baseball coming at me in the dark.'

'What a pity,' said the very young Freshman; 'you don't know what you miss, Mr. President. I will not believe,' this artless youth added, to Mrs. Roosevelt, 'that the President is the kind of man that keeps a valet.'

"There's always Alice,' the President said; 'she's the best valet I know.'

In all our long intercourse, during which there were some hot arguments, the President was really irritated with me only once, and that was when I deliberately, while he was talking, cut the pages of a new book which he had not yet read. I could not resist the temptation. I saw fire in his eyes, and I sympathized with him. The book was, I think, Eckstein's Relations of Literature and History.

In May, 1910, Mr. Roosevelt came to Copenhagen. Scandinavia had not at first been included in his itinerary, but I explained to him that the Nobel Prize people would be greatly offended, and probably refuse to give the prize to another American, if he did not make the required speech at Christiania. This brought him, as I knew it would. Denmark was aflame with enthusiasm; to the Scandinavians, he was the one great figure in the world. King Frederick

VIII was obliged to be away from his palace; but he arranged that every honor should be shown to the ex-President. The fact that Mrs. Roosevelt and the two young people, Ethel and Kermit, were to be in the party, added to everybody's pleasure.

But how was he to be ranked? The papers called him 'Colonel.' Now a colonel in the army, at an official dinner at the Danish Court, might rank somewhere near the end of the table. The Marshal of the Court, most anxious to carry out the wishes of the King and Crown Prince, was puzzled. I had to solve the problem quickly. I do not know what Colonel Roosevelt would have done if he had known my method, because, while carefully guarding all reasonable forms and ceremonies, he was intensely democratic. When the Foreign Office asked me how an exPresident ranked at home, I answered simply that in Denmark I expected that he, his wife and children, would be ranked as royal highnesses, and that he would have the same honors that might have been given the late Prince Consort of Great Britain and Ireland, or the present Prince Consort of the Queen of Holland. It worked.

On going away, Colonel Roosevelt said, "The monarchs treated me well everywhere, but I seemed to be in wrong with the court people; but here everything went as smooth as glass. If we had been royalties ourselves, the formalities could not have gone more smoothly; I love these Danes.'

I found it safer to be silent as to my methods.

The difficulties with Cardinal Merry del Val as to Mr. Roosevelt's presentation to the Pope had somewhat puzzled him. Pius X had expressed an ardent desire to see him; but Colonel Roosevelt had evidently forgotten the rather artificial point of view of courts in arranging for his visit to the Vatican.

The matter might have been easily arranged without unnecessary fracas, if etiquette had been carefully observed, and the Papal Secretary of State had been willing to stretch a point in favor of the ex-President of a Republic. Colonel Roosevelt was consoled by the assurance that a mere lapse in etiquette would not seriously injure him in the opinion of people whose respect and affection he had gained; and nobody regretted the incident more sincerely than the Pope himself.

On the day of Mr. Roosevelt's arrival at Copenhagen, the extreme Radicals and the Socialists were on the qui vive. Colonel Roosevelt had fought capitalism; he was one of them. And when, as the Crown Prince in uniform, with his chamberlains and equerries, waited solemnly, Colonel Roosevelt suddenly descended from the train, he wore a wide-brimmed hat and old army overcoat, and carried a red book under his arm. He saluted my wife, clasped my hand very warmly, and said, ‘Old chap, I have lost my luggage.'

'All right,' I said; 'we'll find it. — Your Royal Highness, I have the honor to present to you His Excellency the late President of the United States of America.'

'Delighted, Prince,' Roosevelt said. 'Now,' the Crown Prince said, laughing, 'you must let me help you find your luggage.' And he took Colonel Roosevelt's arm.

It was the beginning of a warm friendship.

The luggage did not arrive in time for the Court dinner that evening; but Mrs. Roosevelt earned the regard of everybody at Court by appearing very simply, and without apology, in her traveling gown.

When Colonel Roosevelt made his speech at the City Hall, the ultraRadicals and the Socialists were deeply disappointed. He was more conservative than the Danish Conservatives, they said; but his speech resulted in making the advanced theories of some of these people seem very unreasonable, and for this he received the enthusiastic applause of the Danes who stood for law and order, liberty and not license.

After we had said good-bye at the station, in 1910, I saw him only once until May, 1918, when we lunched at the Harvard Club, and I heard his speech to the 'Blue Devils,' who sang their favorite songs for him. After that I was too ill to see him, but our exchange of notes was rapid.

He is gone. We cannot recall him; the thought of his loss is to those who knew him a gnawing pain. To try to console one's self by the remembrance of the great things he did, is useless. Other men have done great things, but there was only one Roosevelt. 'He is a Man,' the young King of Denmark said, and I can say no more. May eternal Light shine upon him!

THE farmers of North Dakota have embarked upon an experiment in public ownership and control more radical than any yet attempted by any American state. Organized as members of the National Non-Partisan League, and controlling the legislative machinery of the state, they have amended their constitution and passed a long programme of bills.

This legislation permits the state to engage in any kind of business. It provides for state-owned terminal elevators and flour-mills; a state bank, to finance these and other enterprises; an industrial commission, to organize and direct such businesses, consisting of the Governor, the Attorney-General, and the Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor.

The state is to build homes and buy farms, within certain price-limits, for groups of citizens who put up twenty per cent of the cost and engage to pay the remainder, at a low rate of interest, within a period of twenty years. There is provision for state hail-insurance, for reducing discriminatory freight-rates, for various revenue measures intended to put the burden of taxation on those best able in the opinion of the farmto bear it. In other words, the citizens of a purely agricultural community, about eighty-five per cent of the population of North Dakota is 'rural,'-using political weapons found effective elsewhere, have set about remoulding their neighborhood according to what they fancy is their heart's desire.

ers

There are two opinions of this phe

nomenon.

(1) The farmers themselves feel that they are fighting a battle for the people; and in the enthusiasm which accompanies any such movement in its beginnings, they look on themselves as skirmishers in a sort of holy war.

(2) Their opponents, who include not only those whose immediate interests may be affected, but also a considerable portion, probably the majority, of the substantial non-farming citizens, both within and without the state, honestly opposed to what they regard as a 'menace,' attack the Leaguers furiously as 'Socialists,' 'Anarchists,' and 'Bolsheviki.'

In North Dakota itself, in St. Paul and Minneapolis and the neighborhood, the fight has reached a bitterness which entirely obscures the essential issues in a cloud of abuse and recrimination. If the Leaguers authorize the governor to investigate the feasibility of establishing a state publishing-plant, to supply school-books, the opposition promptly roars that the 'Red Fingers of Socialism are Closing on the Entire School System of North Dakota.' The Leaguers, on the other hand, refer to their critics as 'relics of the Stone Age,' slaves of 'Big Biz,' the 'Kept Press,' in their calmer moments; or, more whole-heartedly, as 'liars,' 'assassins,' 'journalistic harlots,' and 'black-hearted skunks.'

Having dodged through this bombardment, and been to North Dakota and back again; having read some thousands of words of propaganda on both

sides; having seen the North Dakota Legislature at work, and observed and talked with Non-Partisan leaders, and the rank and file, I propose to set down here a statement of some of the more essential facts; and, with the indulgence of those to whom it is an old story, to tell how the North Dakota Idea originated, what it has done, and where it seems to be going.

I

North Dakota is a big open place, with tiny specks of houses, like period marks on a blank sheet of paper, punctuating its endless plains. It is as large as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut put together, and has only some 700,000 peoplemore than Buffalo, New York, but less than Brooklyn.

The largest town, Fargo, which is very citified for its size, like the great majority of such Western towns, has only about 20,000. Fargo is almost on the eastern state-line. Five hours westward, across the prairie, is the capital, Bismarck, from any corner in which you can see the open country at the end of the street.

Nearly all these people are farmers, not gentlemen farmers,' but regular frontier farmers (there is still plenty of unploughed land in North Dakota), fighting drought, hail, cold, loneliness, and all the diseases crops are heir to, and, more often than not, a mortgage held by some more gentleman-like person farther east. You or I get a Western loan, and are charmed with our six per cent. The agent who finds us the loan takes his commission, the local Dakota agent takes his, and the man who needs the money most, takes the real risk, and stakes everything on his season's crop, pays, perhaps, ten, or even twelve, per cent. One of the bills passed by the North Dakota Legislature makes an

interest rate higher than nine per cent usurious.

It is a great wheat-country so flat sometimes, that you could plough a straight furrow a mile long, and turn water into it at one end, and the water would run right down the furrow to the other end, without spreading. In a good year North Dakota rolls up a hundred million bushels of wheat and another hundred million bushels of other grain several hundred million dollars' worth of the realest sort of wealth, out of this so-called 'debtor state.' There is, perhaps, no state in the Union which produces, per man, so much real wealth.

The wheat goes out of the state at wholesale prices, and everything the farmer needs comes in at retail prices even the flour made out of his own wheat. And although his farm may be only a few hundred miles away from the mill, the local price for flour is often higher than the price somebody in Norfolk, Virginia, more than a thousand miles away, is paying for the same flour. The reason for this, of course, is that the big millers, making vastly more flour than they can sell in any one neighborhood, get as good a price as they can close by; and they meet distant competition and sell the rest, at a lower profit, perhaps, but still a profit, in neighborhoods farther away. In the same way American steel rails have been sold cheaper in Europe than at home.

Inequalities of this sort are not peculiar to North Dakota, but they stand out more clearly in the empty prairie air. The New York City equivalent of the Dakota farmer, jammed in his subway train with thousands like himself, is so enmeshed in a complex economic machine that it is not easy for him to tell who really pays his weekly salary, and to whom, really, the money goes which he gives the clerk in the grocery

or department store. He growls a little, and goes right on hanging to his strap. Anyhow, he says, 'What's the use?' Or he goes to a show. Or a sort of neighborhood feeling, made up of countless indefinable human elements, gathers round him rather pleasantly, like a sort of warm mist, and he says, 'After all, little old New York is good enough for me.'

It is different in North Dakota. There are no storied urns in sight. The prairie is bare of all those warm accumulated humanities which make city folks forget. Life is almost as simple and understandable as it was for Robinson Crusoe.

The bank that the city man goes to is a great stone pile which seems embedded in the general scheme of things. He pays his money to or gets it from a clerk as little and unimportant as himself, and goes his way. When the Dakota farmer drives in from the prairie to the station or the water-tank, and a little group of weatherbeaten shacks which make the town, he finds, perhaps, a general store, and, across from it, a little building labeled 'Bank.' And whatever contrasts there may be, favorable or otherwise, between the wheatgrower in the sheep-lined overcoat, who drives in through the twenty-belowzero weather, and the man in a white collar who sits in the warm bank, will be clearly felt. His relations with the banker and the store-keeper and the elevator-man and the freight-agent will be as concrete and simple almost as if he were an Indian bringing in a lot of beaver-skins, to trade for the white man's jack-knives and fire-water.

II

Now, recalling these things about the farmer himself, imagine yourself a farmer-legislator in Bismarck, on one of those crystal-clear, dry, cold North

Dakota days, when the smoke rises straight from the little white frame houses, and you can see in any direction any number of miles.

The Capitol, an ugly, square brick structure at the top of the slope on the edge of town, is the last thing between the city and a prairie which is almost as it was when buffalo roamed over it. The little town below, with its one- and two-story houses, seems, in the immensity around it, less like a city, in the smoky Eastern sense of the word, than like a sort of moss or lichen, wistfully spreading over the prairie grass. Turning away from it, you look out across rolling billows of country as over a sort of ocean - you might be on the Arctic or the Russian steppes.

I went up there by the water-tank, after a long afternoon in the legislature, just as a red sun was going down behind the low, gaunt hills that mark the course of the Missouri. That sun had swung across the sky, as unobstructed as the sun at sea. In the still, dry, crystal-clear air one could see any number of miles. A light snow had dusted the short prairie grass, until it looked as if covered with alkali, and had given to this empty world a curious air of austerity and almost of desolation. Far in the distance one saw a lonely silo or windmill; and once an automobile drew a dot across the white, miles away, with the look of some curious bit of stagemanagement.

The long deep-sea prairie swells, not a stone to break the soft grass carpet, seemed made for the unshod feet of Indian ponies. One felt like jumping on a pony and streaking over them, westward, to catch the sun. It was beautiful to anyone who had grown up in prairie country, with that austere, yet lifting beauty of the desert, and the ocean, and cities, and all that goes with them seemed far away, trifling, and

tame.