Under Four Administrations: From Cleveland to Taft

I am drawing these memories to a close in my log cabin in the primitive Maine woods, where my wife and I have been coming for rest and for fishing for the past twenty years. Here we renew our youth, and far from tumult and crowds, near to nature, we realize anew how little is required in order to be contented and happy. Here I am taken back to the memories of my childhood in the little town in Georgia where too our home was a log house, but for appearances had the luxurious outer and inner dressing of clap-boarding painted white. The logs of the upper story where we children played and slept had no covering, which pleased us all the more.


In a highly organized society, we are often attracted by pomp and circumstance, rather than by qualities of heart and mind, which after all are the true measure of enlightenment. Here in these woods, fair dealings and human relations are not regulated by statutes, but by the golden rule of conduct. We need not hide our possessions behind locked doors, honesty is the accepted rule of life; there are no treasures to hide and no bars to break.


It has been permitted me to do useful work and to have interesting experiences. Privileged opportunities have been afforded me for public service. Of these I write.


Perhaps in chronicling the experiences of a life which at many points touched vital affairs and the most interesting personalities, I may be able to add something to the record of men, movements, and events during those decades still absorbing to us because they are so near.


The story is one of service at home and abroad, of personal relations with six of our Presidents, with diplomats, labor leaders, foreign rulers, leaders of industry, and some plain unticketed citizens who were the salt of the earth and certainly not the least of those whom it was a pleasure to know.


To write of one's self requires a certain amount of egotism. The autobiographer usually tries to justify this vanity by explaining it as a desire to gratify his children and kinsmen, or as a yielding to the urgent request of his friends. Benjamin Franklin, whose autobiography, incomplete though it be, is one of the most human in our language, frankly conceded that he was prompted by the weakness of praise. He says: "I may as well confess it, since my denial of it will be believed by nobody, perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own vanity."


I do not wish to conceal from those who may from interest or curiosity read what I write, that I am not entirely free from that vanity, even though it be my chief aim and purpose to cast some additional light upon our country's development and upon events in which, in public and private life, I have been permitted to take part. Having held official positions at home and abroad under four administrations, and having come in close relationship with many of the statesmen and others of distinction in this and foreign countries, perhaps my narrative will serve to give more intimate knowledge and truer appreciation of their personal traits and their exceptional qualities.


I have also been influenced by a desire to bring a message of encouragement to the youth of our country, especially to those who may be conscious of handicaps in the race, not to lose heart, but to be patient, considerate, and tactful, and not to withhold the saving extra ounce of effort which often spells the difference between failure and success.


So long as our democracy remains true to its basic principles and jealously guards the highways of opportunity, the golden age will not be in the past, but ever in the future. In externals the age in which we live has changed, but the qualities of effort, of industry, and the will to succeed which were required when I was a boy, have not changed; they lead to the same goals now as then, with this difference: that the boy of to-day has greater advantages, better educational facilities, and more avenues of advanceme