Mr. Bunn of Bloomington, Illinois, has put into a book the story how in 1860 he went up to Mr. Lincoln's room in the State House of Illinois, and met Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, just coming down. Mr. Bunn said to Mr. Lincoln:

"You don't want to put that man into your cabinet."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because he thinks he is a great deal bigger than you are."

"Well, do you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am?"

"I do not know that I do. Why do you ask?"

"Because I want to put them all in my cabinet!"

Perhaps that was the principle that President Wilson went on when he invited Mr. Bryan to be secretary of state. The objection of prudent on-lookers to Mr. Bryan as a member of Mr. Wilson's cabinet was very much Mr. Bunn's objection to Chase. But Lincoln took Chase, and also Seward and Stanton to whom the same objection applied, and Wilson took Bryan.

That argued confidence in something. Maybe it was a confidence in some qualities and convictions of Mr. Bryan; in his sincerity, and his loyalty to some aims that Mr. Wilson wished his administration to express. Or it might have been a token of Mr. Wilson's confidence in himself and his political intentions. But in the case of no other cabinet officer did that sort of confidence find that sort of expression. Not one of the rest of them would be picked out as a man who thought himself a bigger man than Wilson. Except perhaps Mr. Lane, they were all fairly green hands with almost everything to learn about the business of conducting the federal government. Mr. Redfield and Mr. Burleson had been in Congress, but none of them had ever been a conspicuous figure in national politics.

They were not inexperienced men. Mr. McAdoo had had experience as a practicing lawyer and as president of the company that financed, built, and operated the first tube under the Hudson River. Mr. McReynolds had been assistant attorney-general, and had been long retained afterwards by the Department of Justice in matters relating to enforcement of the anti-trust law, especially in the prosecution of the tobacco cases. He was known and respected as a competent lawyer. Mr. Garrison had been a newspaper reporter and had held a judicial office in New Jersey. Dr. Houston was a specialist in economics, had been president of two universities, and came to Washington fresh from the work of reorganizing and developing the important Washington University of St. Louis. Mr. Daniels had once been chief clerk of the Department of the Interior, and afterwards a successful newspaper editor and publisher in North Carolina and a member of the Democratic national committee. Mr. Lane, drafted from the Interstate Commerce Commission, was a man of excellent ability, had had a very valuable experience in governmental concerns, and was probably the best equipped for his new work of any of the President's official family. And Mr. Burleson and Mr. Redfield, as said, had been members of Congress. But not one of these gentlemen was in the enjoyment of a national renown. Mr. Bryan had all of that that there was in the new cabinet. Indeed Mr. Bryan had dominated the party so long and so little to the liking of the older leaders of the Democrats, that, except in the South, few other of the abler politicians of the party had been able to keep in the public sight. Everybody knew Judge Parker, but he, though a loyal Democrat, was not conclusively consecrated to the cause of the New Freedom, and it was not expected that he would be in the Cabinet. Governor Harmon was well known and perhaps more available, but, so far as known, he was not invited. Mr. Underwood, with the work of making a new tariff law cut out for him, was indispensable in his place as leader of the House, and could not be disturbed. Mr. Clark, the speaker, was in a like case, too well off where he was, to be moved. So the new cabinet was nearly all new timber, and not only new but fairly green. The President, it seemed, new himself to the business of directing government, had assembled a group of assistants that seemed all to be in a like case, and they would all start in together to learn their new business.

It worried some observers to see such untried hands on the levers of government. "The Unfermented Cabinet" Mr. Bryan's notions of diplomatic dinners have led some of them to call it, and a great deal of space has been given up in the public prints since March to its processes of fermentation. Observers have watched them with great curiosity, also with amusement, also at times with anxiety. It has been a matter of importance to the country what sort of a council the fermentation would produce; what manner of men these councillors and assistants of the President would turn out to be, and with how much efficiency they would finally adjust themselves to their important duties. There were forecasts a-plenty; frequent prophecies in particular of the speedy separation of Mr. Bryan from the official family. There have been wild cries to the President from newspapers claiming to be influential, to discharge this or that one,—Mr. McReynolds because of an apparent error of judgment about a prosecution in California; Mr. McAdoo for something else; Mr. Bryan for official inefficiency and unofficial activity; others for other reasons. But the cabinet still holds together as it began, and is still apparently harmonious, and its fermentation still goes on.

The underlying idea about the fermentation has been that when it had accomplished its work, the novelties of method and deportment peculiar to Mr. Wilson's administration would fade out, his heads of Departments would behave more and more like their predecessors, and the business of government would gradually conform to the conventions that obtained when the new hands took hold. Now the country has been kept so busy watching its new President that it has not been able to give more than a broken attention to his secretaries, and only the more obstreperous of them have been much under scrutiny. But it has been impossible to overlook Mr. Bryan, and it cannot be said that in his case there is yet any sign that fermentation is producing the expected result. He has been all along, and continues up to latest advices to be, impressively different from anyone who ever sat before in the chief seat in the State Department. No one before him set grape juice before ambassadors at his dinner-table; no one before him went out on the lecture platform to supplement his official salary, thereby combining a particularly ostentatious form of money-getting with the duties of the leading place in the cabinet. Secretary Bryan has been very widely and enthusiastically criticised for these departures from tradition, but that does not seem to have troubled him in the least. Why should it? For nearly twenty years he has been an object of criticism for about two-thirds of his countrymen and has flourished under it because the other third liked him. To about two-thirds of the Democratic party he was acceptable as a candidate. To the other third and to the Republicans he was not acceptable and therefore he could never be elected President. But a third of the voters and the people they represent count up to thirty millions of people, and that is a good many. It is a valuable following for a politician, a very valuable collection for a lecturer. To the thirty million, ambassadors are a good deal of a joke, and they are amused to have grape juice set before these dignitaries. More than that some of them are gratified because they consider grape juice a moral beverage, and consider it exemplary to offer it to exalted personages who ought to want it, though they don't. And doubtless a great many people are delighted to welcome Mr. Bryan on the lecture platform. They like that sort of intercourse with a high officer of government. Is it not their government? Is it not their secretary? And he is a fine performer too! Clap! clap! come their echoing palms together and freely drop their dollars into the hat. Why, to be sure, should Mr. Bryan forsake the practices that please all the thirty million friends to whose favor he owes his present preferment, to please fastidious persons who never have believed in him and never will?

It is not to be denied that Mr. Bryan has nerve. There are those who complain because President Wilson has not admonished him to be more modish in his deportment. But President Wilson has been very busy, and has needed the help of Mr. Bryan and his thirty million admirers, and apparently has had it. There is concurrence of report that Mr. Bryan has been very loyal and very useful to the administration. A man with thirty million friends can be quite helpful to a President, or can be quite troublesome. To leave such a person to follow, under the law, the promptings of his own spirit in matters of taste, seems no more than a reasonable discretion.

And there is another view that may be taken of Mr. Bryan's Chautauqua orations. He likes to talk to the people. He does it very successfully. His ability to do it had been the chief source of his strength. The great newspapers of the country are pretty generally hostile to him. If he has something to say, his preference for saying it with his own voice rather than to have it filtered through more or less hostile newspapers, may be understood. Our newspapers have not, collectively, a high reputation for giving accurate reports of the public utterances of public men. Any contemporary politician who has a loud enough voice and sufficient physical energy in using it to make him in any measure independent of newspapers will have considerable, intelligent public sympathy in his reliance on his own gifts, and a desire to keep them exercised.

But there is something more than Mr. Bryan's thirty million (estimated) friends to keep the President harmonious with him. He is very considerably harmonious in spirit and political desires with the President. They have a very inclusive identity of general purpose. Mr. Bryan is as heartily in favor of the New Freedom as Mr. Wilson is. That is a kind of political religion in which both of them have profound faith. What truly religious people differ about, as a general thing, is not the controlling facts of their faith, but less essential matters; side issues, and very often errors. Catholics and Protestants have always agreed as to the main and really important facts of Christianity, but they have fought ferociously about processes, mechanisms and details. Free silver was a detail of politics. Mr. Bryan led his faction into the wilderness about that. Government ownership of railroads is another detail; state insurance of bank deposits is another. Mr. Bryan has an unsurpassed gift of getting it wrong on his details, but in his great general aim to keep the great body of people free from domination by the strong hands he is probably sound and sincere. It must be that that has saved him alive. He is a bold man with a large voice and the habit of domination. He hates bosses who are in politics for purposes of plunder; he hates all the agencies that seem to him to purpose to monopolize the people's heritage—trusts because he thinks they want to monopolize business, "Wall Street" because he thinks it wants to monopolize money, Ryan and Tammany because he thinks they want to monopolize and commercialize politics. Of course Mr. Bryan is interested in Bryan, and is heartily for that statesman, but he seems also to be quite heartily for human liberty, the rights of man, peace in the world, and the greatest happiness of the most people. It really looks as if he cared so much for these perennial enthusiasms as to be willing if they cannot come through himself, to help them come through someone else. And it looks as though he thought they might come considerably through Mr. Wilson, and was working to make them do it. Mr. Bryan's ethics are good enough. It is his economics that have made the trouble. He behaves as if at last he had found someone who could show him how to do what he wanted done. He seems to see in Mr. Wilson a man who is moving in the direction he wants to go and knows the road. He never before had leadership of that kind offered to him. All the other eminent Democratic guides whom he has been invited to support have seemed to him to be merely persons who knew the road to something he wished to avoid.

Confidence is a great harmonizer. If you think a man is going your way and knows the road better than you do, it is no great hardship to go along with him. The chief result that has come to notice of the fermentation, so far, in President Wilson's cabinet is an impression of profound confidence of the cabinet in the President. So far as heard from, they all seem to feel that he is going their way and either knows the road or can find it. It will be recalled that at Princeton Mr. Wilson was not so successful in winning the confidence of his advisers. That was because a certain proportion of them were not going his way. It has come to be recognized that he is of no use to anybody who is not going in the same general direction as he is. He will stop and talk; will persuade if he can; will wait if necessary, but he seems to have a prejudice against deviation that reminds one of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress. You may pave a road with gold bricks; grade it, smooth it, dust it; it will never look attractive to Mr. Wilson unless it leads where he wants to go. That is the impression he makes,—an impression of a stubborn man very tenacious of purposes very well thought out. One laughs to think of the heads that are still sore with trying to butt him out of his course at Princeton; of his rapid extrication of his interests from political ties the most intimate and useful, that threatened to give an impression that his feet were intangled! One laughs to think of the World a few months ago using its editorial megaphone to order him to discharge three members of his cabinet. It is doubtful if the World would be so ready with that kind of suggestion to-day.

Nine months of fermentation have left the cabinet considerably clarified. We begin to think of it less as an aggregation of individuals, and more as a team bent on putting over certain definite accomplishments in government. It seems united in spirit; a team of willing workers under a captain in whom they have not only confidence, but pride. It was expected that Mr. Wilson would be hard to work with. It was expected that his defect as an executive officer would be an inability to enlist the sympathy of his colleagues and subordinates. People said he had no magnetism, that he was over suspicious and distrustful: that he would not dare to tie up to anyone, and that no one would dare to tie up to him. But, so far, these expectations do not find much support; in fact, so far as anybody knows, his cabinet is an unusually happy family. Men are working with tireless devotion to make his administration succeed. They are doing so not so much because they like the man (though they do like him) as because they like the cause. They follow him, support him, help him, advise him, defer to his judgment, because he has impressed them with the notion that he knows what he is about, and is equal to what he undertakes and that under his leadership certain definite improvements in the social and economic apparatus of our country may be accomplished.

Soldiers love a general not because of how he parts his hair, but because he can win battles. President Wilson has produced the impression that he can win battles. It is that that interests him; not the buttons on his coat, nor to have the people holler when they see him. He cannot win any battle without plenty of help. How does he get the help? Is it by close attention to details of deportment?

Not at all. His deportment is agreeable so far as known, but it does not seem to be his chief concern.

Is it by extreme solicitude to avoid small mistakes and ingratiate all influential persons?

No. He makes his share of small mistakes and sometimes scandalizes the influential, but it does not seem to matter.

He gets help because he seems to be worth helping; because he gives his mind not to the retention of power, but to the use of it in accomplishing what he was chosen to accomplish. He has signed a tariff bill. That was one great battle won. He had to have splendid support to win it, but he got the support. Has he rested on that victory? Not a minute. Now it is the currency bill and it will be that until he signs a currency bill that will satisfy the country. Then it will be the trusts, and the Lord knows what.

But it is safe to bet that Mr. Wilson also knows what. He has thought out a great many problems of government. He will always know of things that ought to be done to improve the life of the people, and he will always have a program for doing the next thing on his list, and will always push it as hard as seems to him practicable and, probably, much harder than will seem expedient to most observers. He has shown himself to be a great driving force, and the kind of one that gains ground because of the forces that he can carry with him. What he is after will always be as clear as he can make it, and it will be important, and those that are for it will be confident that they will get it if they win, and those that are against it will know what they are against. There is a good prospect for clean political and economic issues in this country for some time to come; issues about which people will have to think, and on which they will divide. The question is going to be how much improvement the country can stand in a given time. The patient is on the operating table. No doubt he needs to have a good deal done, but if his pulse begins to sink, off he will have to come, and wait until he gets stronger. Otherwise the disposition is to make a new man of him and do it now.

And so, small matters are not going to make so much difference as they might if less important changes were imminent. It may be true that the trousers of all the cabinet bag at the knees, but nobody cares much. Mr. Bryan may talk in the Chautauqua circuit, and do lots of other unusual things, Mr. McAdoo's department may make mistakes in its income-tax circulars, Mr. Daniels may behave at times too much like Mr. Daniels, Mr. McReynolds's young men may show a too voluble zeal in prosecution, but it will be a mistake to expand occurrences of that size into evidences of administrative failure. Cromwell had a wart on his nose, but still was esteemed an efficient man. His trousers would undoubtedly have bagged at the knees if he had worn trousers, but his statue stands at last by the Parliament House in London.

President Wilson's administration is likely to win or lose on wagers of considerable size. It may be a good administration or it may be a bad one, but there is no sign or symptom that it is going to be a piker.