Part 2

But to maintain the reputation which his State had secured for committing its interests to master men, Mr. Reed had a hard task before him. Blaine, who had just passed from the House to the Senate, had made Maine of preeminent influence by reason of his formidable canvass for the presidential nomination. Eugene Hale and Mr. William T. Frye represented in part the State in the House. Hannibal Hamlin was a member of the Senate, and the tradition of the remarkable intellectual achievements of William Pitt Fessenden, so long a senator from Maine, was still so fresh in the minds of many members of Congress that it was common to hear Mr. Fessenden spoken of as perhaps the ablest senator since the days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. But, unlike the stories that are told of the debuts of many statesmen, Mr. Reed's first speech was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a success. A success all the more brilliant because won under trying circumstances.

A bill was under consideration to pay the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, damages for the occupancy of its buildings by United States troops during the war. It was one of an almost innumerable class of similar claims in the South, and its payment would have established a precedent that would at that time have opened the door to the appropriation of millions of dollars. It had been put forward as being the most meritorious of these southern war claims, in the hope that the sympathy which could be aroused in behalf of the venerable institution of learning making the claim (it dating back to Washington's time, and being of a religious and eleemosynary as well as educational character) would stir up a sentimental feeling by means of which the other claims could be slipped through the House.

Doctor Loring, a Republican member from Massachusetts, one of the most polished and eloquent speakers in the House, had made a strong and touching appeal, full of pathos and sentiment, in favor of the bill. At the conclusion of his speech spontaneous applause burst from all sides; Republicans and Democrats thronged to the desk of the orator to congratulate and shake him by the hand. The scene was a memorable one. Cries of "Vote," "Vote," rose from all parts of the House, and it seemed inevitable that the bill would pass by an almost unanimous vote.

At this juncture Mr. Reed arose. He has told that he would at that moment have sold his opportunity to speak for a very insignificant sum. He stood motionless for ten minutes, unable to utter a word. Knowing that his only chance was to dominate the turmoil, he at last raised his voice, and, after five minutes, he felt that he would have a hearing. Slowly the excitement and noise quieted down, and for forty minutes he was given the closest attention. The speech was so clear, forcible, and convincing that, in spite of some break in the Republican ranks, it recalled members of both parties from their temporary emotional lapse and turned the tide against these dangerous claims.

In '77 he was made a member of what was known as "The Potter Committee," appointed to investigate the operations of the returning boards in the South. Committee work was essentially congenial to Mr. Reed. He delighted in cross-examinations, and his power of sarcasm and of insinuating inquiry furnished the committee and the public with the most dramatic scenes which occurred at any of its sessions. In cross-examining a clever scoundrel, one Anderson, for instance, for two whole days, he at last compelled him to admit that he was a forger. "Who is this man Reed," every one began to ask, and the young congressman found himself, perhaps more in his legal capacity than as a legislator, famous.

It is not the purpose of this article to describe Mr. Reed's public career, further than to say that there came a day when, upon the departure of Mr. Frye from the House to the Senate, and the election of General Garfield to the presidency, Mr. Reed passed, by common agreement and without questioning, to the leadership of his party in the House, and that, in the logical course of events, he was naturally indicated as the candidate for the Speakership, when, in 1889, after six years of minority, his party became a majority. What a magnificent combination of assaults and eulogies his career as Speaker brought forth is too vividly impressed upon the popular mind to need more than mention.

During his public career Mr. Reed has manifested in a score or more of verbal hand-to-hand conflicts his ability to meet an emergency to the best advantage of his side. Always upon his feet when he scents danger, he is as quick to scent it as any politician who ever occupied a seat upon that floor. He is at all times as truly the master of all his resources as ever Mr. Blaine was in that same tempestuous arena of the House.

From the first he has shown himself that _rara avis_, a born debater--aggressive and cautious, able to strike the nail right on the head at critical moments, to condense a whole argument with epigrammatic brevity. He has shown, to my judgment, better than any parliamentarian living, how the turbulent battlings of great legislative bodies, so chaotic in appearance, are not chaos at all to one who has the capacity to think with clearness and precision upon his feet. Such a man assimilates the substance of every speech and judges its relative bearing upon the question. At the beginning it is hard to tell where a discussion will hinge, but gradually, as the debate goes on, the two or three points which are the key of the situation become clear to the true _debater_. As I understand the art of the _debater_, it is as if logs were heaped in confusion before him, and the thing to do was to single out the one log which, when removed, starts all the others flying down stream--an easier thing to conceive than to accomplish, and which demands an alliance of widely diverse qualities. I remember telling Mr. Reed once that it seemed to me as if there must be in the temperament of the debater something of the artist's nature--a little of the same instinct to inspire and guide him. And I added: "Don't you, like the artist, draw for material everywhere, from friend and foe alike, from things bearing directly upon your subject as well as from things that are apparently more removed from it? Don't you have something akin to inspiration?"

"Well, perhaps so," Mr. Reed answered, "and an anecdote occurs to my mind which you may think fits your theory. An obscure chap got up once and went for me in what was evidently a six months' laboriously prepared invective. I hardly realized what he was about, except that I had an impression of the man using words in the same frantic fashion a windmill uses its arms in a blow. All the same, when he had finished pitching into me, I could not but get up and return the compliment. I had no more idea of what I was going to say than he had, when, by a hazard, my eye caught in the sea of heads before me the face of another representative from his State--a man who was one of the leaders of his party--and instantly the answer flashed in my mind. I had begun with something like 'This is only another echo of the minority of the Fifty-first Congress, whose echoes are dying, not musically, but dying. Gentlemen,' I continued, 'it is too much glory for a State to furnish us with two such eminent representatives, the one to lead the House, the other to bring up the rear.'

"But I want to tell you, while we are on this subject of the artist and the orator," Mr. Reed continued, "that I believe there is as much of a rhythm in prose as there is in poetry, and if a man has not the intuitive feeling of that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never amount to anything as an orator. Certain books of George William Curtis--'Prue and I,' especially--have helped me as much as anything to realize how delightful a quality rhythm is."

There is a side to Mr. Reed which few people suspect. He is a lover of good novels, especially such novels as those of Balzac and Thackeray, which present human nature in a rugged, truthful manner. I should think that Mr. Reed would have about as much respect for a namby-pamby novel as he has for a wishy-washy politician.

Of the English novelists he likes Thackeray by far the best. "Pendennis," "The Adventures of Philip," and "The Virginians" he esteems as his most interesting works, though Thackeray reached high-water mark, in Mr. Reed's opinion, in "Vanity Fair." Charles Reade, too, has found in him an assiduous reader. He thinks "The Cloister and the Hearth" the finest and truest picture that has been made of life in the fifteenth century, and that Charles Reade is the best story-teller that ever wrote English.

In poetry his preference is for Tennyson, but he is a constant reader of Browning, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier also. "Would you mind," said Mr. Reed, while talking of poets, "if I descend from the great names and say that I have a great liking for the rhymes of a Kansas lawyer, Eugene F. Ware, who writes over the nom-de-plume of 'Ironquill'? They are so direct; they present a moral in so few and so strikingly well chosen words; and then they have just enough of that quality of language which is always attractive because it is language in the making. How do you like this example of Mr. Ware's sturdy popular muse?

"'Once a Kansas zephyr strayed Where a brass-eyed bull-pup played; And that foolish canine bayed At that zephyr in a gay, Semi-idiotic way. Then that zephyr in about Half a jiffy took that pup, Tipped him over wrong side up; Then it turned him wrong side out. And it calmly journeyed thence With a barn and string of fence.

MORAL.

When communities turn loose Social forces that produce The disorders of a gale, Act upon a well-known law, Face the breeze, but close your jaw; It's a rule that will not fail.

If you bay it in a gay, Self-sufficient sort of way, It will land you, without doubt, Upside down and wrong side out.'"

Mr. Reed, who learned French after he was forty years old, enjoys the masterpieces of French fiction and French verse in the original. He reads and rereads Horace, or, rather, certain parts of Horace which appeal strongly to him. But his one great admiration is Balzac. "Yes, I like to read Balzac," Mr. Reed often says. "His closeness to nature and life hold you in spite of yourself. There is hardly a book of his which is not sad beyond tears. 'Eugenie Grandet' is a most powerful delineation of the absorbing grasp which love of money has on a strong man, and the power which love has over an untutored spirit, but sadness permeates everything. That wonderful love story of the 'Duchess de Langais' is like no other love story ever written. Could anything be more sad than her life at the convent, and her lover's long search for her hiding-place? unless it be that lover's discovery, when he scaled the convent walls, that death had been stronger than love, and that, after a life of wasted devotion, nothing could be said of her beautiful form as it sank into the ocean except the mournful words, 'She was a woman; now she is nothing.' And what an extraordinary picture that is in the 'Peau de Chagrin' of the controlling power of society over a fashionable woman! And again, in 'Pere Goriot.' How sad they all are, and the sadness of a life that toils not nor spins! Verily, to be happy we must take no note of the flying hours, and live outside of ourselves. Is not the condition of joyous life to forget that we are living? Here most of the characters are so entirely selfish that one sometimes thinks there is not one single friendly heart in the entire story. All are so conscious of living--even those in the higher sphere--and so anxious to appear other than they are, that their entire lives are only ignoble struggles, with nothing of serene repose. When the strife is not for gold or position it is for love, which is thus degraded!"

I was talking the other day to that brilliant orator, Benjamin Butterworth, of Ohio, and the conversation turned to Tom Reed, as Butterworth affectionately called him. Said Butterworth: "The way Reed's constituents have stood by him is one of the most gratifying things to me in American politics. During one of his campaigns, in which I spoke for him, I met some Democrats in his district. I said, 'Gentlemen, I do not know anything about your politics, but you have a man of sterling qualities to represent you.' 'Yes,' they replied, 'he is an intense Republican and has peculiarities, but we like him because he represents the best thought of the district, and we vote for him on the sly.'"

That plain-speaking man, whose chief characteristic is to be true to his own convictions, is a pretty good specimen of the Puritan. Had he been in Cromwell's army he either would not have prayed at all or he would have prayed just as long as Cromwell did. In either case he would have fought for what he believed to be the right, all the time, and given no quarter.

Apropos of what might be called his blunt frankness, I recall an incident told me by a member who had charge of what was known as the Whiskey Bill. Mr. Reed had baffled the attempts of the whiskey men to get it up, but in his temporary absence, through the inadvertence or incapacity of a member, the bill was forced on the House. Reed ran down to the fellow, and vented his feelings in the remark, "You are too big a fool to lead, and haven't got sense enough to follow."

If his bits of speeches flung about in the heat of debate, either in retort or in attack, were gathered, they would make a mighty interesting book. No other man has like him the power to condense a whole argument in a few striking words. His epigrams are worthy of the literary artist in that they are perfect in form. Though struck out on the spur of the moment you cannot take a word from nor recast them. They have for solid basis a most profound knowledge of human nature, of life, and they exhibit to a luminous degree the possession in their author of that prime quality of a true man--horse sense. I remember this fragment of a speech of last session: "Gentlemen, everybody has an opinion about silver, except those who have talked so much about it that they have ceased to think."

There are many people who believe that Mr. Reed himself disproves one of his epigrams, that "a statesman is a successful politician who is dead." As for me, I venture to say that Mr. Reed is right, but he has there formulated a rule to which he is one of the rare exceptions.

"HUMAN DOCUMENTS."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

THOMAS BRACKETT REED was born in Portland, Me., October 18, 1839. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1860, and then commenced to study law. In 1864 he suspended his studies and joined the navy as Acting Assistant Paymaster, serving until his honorable discharge at the close of the war. Resuming his legal studies, he was admitted to the bar and began to practise in his native town. He soon took an active part in politics, and was a member of the Maine State Legislature from 1868 to 1869. In 1870 he sat in the State Senate. From that year until 1872 he was State Attorney-General, and in 1874-77 he served as solicitor for the city of Portland. He was sent to Congress in 1876 and has been continuously re-elected since. When the Republican party came into power in 1888, he was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. He is a powerful debater, an energetic politician, and a leading authority upon parliamentary procedure.

FRANCES ELIZABETH WILLARD was born in Churchville, N.Y., September 28, 1839. She graduated at Northwestern Female College, Evanston, Ill., in 1859. She became Professor of Natural Science there in 1862, and Principal of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in 1866. After two years of travel and study in Europe and the Holy Land, she became Professor of Esthetics in Northwestern University, and, as Dean of the Women's College there, developed her system of self-government, now generally adopted. In 1874 Miss Willard identified herself with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. As secretary of the Union she organized the Home Protection movement, and in 1879 was elected president. She took a leading part in the establishment of the Prohibition party, and in 1887 was elected President of the Women's Council of the United States. She also accepted the leadership of the White Cross movement, which has been successful in obtaining enactments in many States for the protection of women. Besides being a director of the Women's Temperance Publishing House, Miss Willard is chief contributor to "The Union Signal" (Chicago) and associate editor of "Our Day" (Boston). Her chief literary works are "Nineteen Beautiful Years," "Woman and Temperance," "How to Win," "Woman in the Pulpit," and "Glimpses of Fifty Years."

EDGAR WILSON NYE, who has become famous as a humorist under the pen name of "Bill Nye," was born in Shirley, Piscataqua County, Maine, August 25, 1850. His family removed to Wisconsin shortly afterwards, and the boy was educated at River Falls, in that State. Early in the seventies he went to Wyoming Territory; he there studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1876. While in Wyoming he served in several public capacities, as postmaster of Laramie and as a member of the legislature. He had early begun to furnish humorous sketches to the newspapers, and for some time was connected with the press as correspondent. He returned to Wisconsin in 1883. In 1886 he was connected with the New York "World," and since then has been a weekly contributor to numerous papers. As a lecturer and reader from his own books Mr. Nye has been very successful. In 1891 he produced a play, "The Cadi," at a New York theatre. His best-known books are "Bill Nye and the Boomerang," "The Forty Liars," "Baled Hay," and "Remarks." Mr. Nye has resided, for some time past, near Asheville, N.C.

GEORGE W. CABLE was born in New Orleans in 1844. He obtained an ordinary public-school education. His early life was spent as a clerk in a commercial office, varied by successful contributions to "The New Orleans Picayune" under the signature of "Drop-Shot." In 1863 he joined the Confederate Army, and served in the Fourth Regiment Mississippi Cavalry, until the end of the civil war. His first literary work to attract general attention was a short story, "Sieur George," published in the old "Scribner's Monthly." To that periodical he contributed numerous other sketches of creole life, which were published in book form in 1879. Other stories and articles followed, and Mr. Cable, after working up to a leading position in the mercantile world, from that of an errand boy, devoted himself to literature as a profession. "The Grandissimes," in 1880, "Madame Delphine," 1881, "The Creoles of Louisiana" and "Dr. Sevier," 1884, established him in a high place amongst modern authors. His knowledge of the South, and his studies among the creoles and negroes, made him an authority upon the questions relating to the past and future of the negro and the southern States, and involved him in numerous and heated discussions. "The Silent South," 1885, and "The Negro Question," 1890, are the most prominent of his works on this subject. As a lecturer and reader he is widely known.

THOMAS B. REED.

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

EDGAR WILSON NYE.

GEORGE W. CABLE.

THE JONESES' TELEPHONE

BY ANNIE HOWELLS FRECHETTE.

"Now, we won't be selfish with our telephone, will we, dear? We will let a few friends use it occasionally--it will be such a pleasure and a convenience," and Mrs. Jones stood off and looked admiringly at the new telephone.

"By all means. It is here and it may as well be doing some one a service as to stand idle--and I like to feel that a friend isn't afraid to ask a favor of me now and then. Yes, I suppose that telephone will save us many a car-fare during the year. You can use it to do your marketing, instead of tiring yourself out and wasting half a day three or four times a week; and days when I forget things, think how easy it will be to telephone and remind me. Why, it will entirely do away with the need for strings to tie around my fingers."

"Of course it will. I'm sure that what we'll save on strings and car-fare will pay the rent of the instrument," joyously responded Mrs. Jones, who had no great head for figures.

Thus hope and kindly intentions presided at the inauguration of the Joneses' telephone.

Three months passed, and the great invention had carried much information--useful and otherwise--not only to its owners, but to the entire neighborhood as well. There were even days when the Joneses questioned whether they were not running a public telephone, so often did the bell ring. It is true, it had not quite paid for itself in the anticipated saving of car-fares and finger strings; still, it had certainly been a great comfort, and "Well, we'll just face the music and call it a luxury," said Jones, as he put away the receipt for his first quarter's rent; "especially for our friends," he added, with just a touch of bitterness.

Scarce twenty-four hours after this philosophical stand was taken, Mrs. Jones, who was rather a light sleeper, was aroused by a violent and prolonged ringing. It was six o'clock and Sunday morning--a day and hour usually dedicated to undisturbed slumber. After a brief debate in her own mind as to whether the house was on fire or the milkman was ringing, she realized that it was the telephone bell. She hastily donned slippers and gown and ran down-stairs. In reply to her interrogative "Yes?" (Mrs. Jones could never bring herself to say "Hello!") came the following, in measured and clerical tones:

"It is Mr. Brown--Reverend Mr. Brown, speaking."

"Oh, yes?" instinctively covering her half-clad feet in the folds of her gown.

"I believe you live near the Reverend Mr. Smith, and are a member of his church."

"Yes."

"Will you be good enough to send to him, and ask if he can spare his curate to take Mr. Brown's early service for him, as he is called away. I would be glad if you would send immediately, as I must have his answer within fifteen minutes. Thank you. Please call up 1001," and snap went the telephone.

Mrs. Jones looked at her raiment and reflected that her one servant was at mass and would not be back for an hour. She went slowly up-stairs.

"Tom, Tom dear, wake up."

"What is it?"

"The Reverend Brown has telephoned to know whether the Reverend Smith can send his curate to take his early service."

"Well, what in the world have I got to do with the peddling out of early services?" snapped Jones, as he turned and shook up his pillows.

"He has to have an answer to his message within fifteen minutes."

"Well, let Susan take it," settling back comfortably.

"But Susan has gone to mass."