HOW VISITORS ARE RECEIVED. "Mr. Roosevelt comes into his audience-room alert, earnest, with the air of a man who has something to do. There's a spring in his step. There is candor in his manner and a natural cordiality, but his quickness of motion and of mind gives a new sensation. Begin to make to him the little speech that you had thought out beforehand, and you soon see that he is outrunning you. While you are still in your preface, he has jumped into the middle of what you mean to say, and he answers you before you have spoken it. During a three-minute interview he has time to rush you forward with your story, to take in and digest all that you meant to say, to laugh, to look you in the face squarely, to give you an answer, to shake your hand cordially; and you are gone with your speech undelivered, but he has perfectly understood you and your errand. Before you are done thanking him he smiles and waves recognition to an acquaintance at the other side of the room,-swift, earnest, cheerful, no such interviews have been held with any other man that ever gave audience in the White House. As unconventional as Lincoln, as natural as Grant, as earnest as Cleveland, and swifter than any of them by an immeasurable difference, Mr. Roosevelt does graceful but fatal violence to the Presidential manner.' "For there was a Presidential manner, -the manner that most men who have held the office naturally acquired by the unnatural experience of spending half their lives in giving audience to political petitioners and to the makers of formal speeches. The great man came in, stood impassively, heard you till you were done, spoke as if by formula, and said little; he had a look of cheerful resignation rather than of alert interest. To the infrequent visitor to the White House, an audience with most Presidents has been a disappointing experience. The visitor felt as if he had done all the talking. He had been graciously received, but he had brought nothing away with him. The memory of an official shake of the hand and of a dignified smile lacked something of the human touch. He had talked with the President, not with the man. A DEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE. "Under this consulship, the two are one. You see the President, but you also see Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, with a dignity really the greater and the more impressive because it is not official, but the natural manner of the man. He does not seem weary. He is busy, very busy; earnest, very earnest; but he has the manner of a man who likes his work. You recall the campaign story that was told of him when a sympathetic soul expressed deep regret that he had been obliged to get up from his bed in his car and make his fourteenth speech of that day's journey and to shake hands with another crowd. No,' said he, don't feel sorry for me. I like it.' The calling of the President's home The White House' instead of The Executive Mansion,' and the omission, at the reception at Yale Univer sity, of the old custom of shaking hands with the whole crowd, are significant evidences of his direct common sense applied to the Presidential office. "Born of a distinguished family, but the most democratic of men by habit of mind and by versatility of action, youthful, physically alert, rapid in thought, earnest, and in love with life and work, these characteristics of the President have already made a cheerful impression on the public mind. The moral and mental effect of such a man in the White House is stimulating. The highest public business is done with zest. It has long been efficiently and cleanly done. touch of enjoyment is now added to the manner of its doing. When lunch-time comes, the President takes to his table, when he is free, any friends that happen to be within reach. the White House is full of children-full of the most robust enjoyment of life, with a deep seriousness underlying it, but with a contagious cheerfulness pervading it." IN THOMAS C. PLATT, OF NEW YORK. But a And N the December Mc Clure's there is an elaborate character sketch of Senator Thomas C. Platt, by William Allen White, who has previ ously, in McClure's, given remarkably excellent accounts of the careers and personalities of Mr. Bryan, Mr. Hanna, Mr. Croker, and President Roosevelt. In the candid and vivid picture of the man and the politician, the sketch of Mr. Platt is the best of the series. SENATOR PLATT AS A BOY EDITOR. Senator Platt's father was a country lawyer in the town of Owego, N. Y., and T. C. Platt was He went to born there sixty-seven years ago. Yale, but delicate health interrupted his college course, and he came to Owego and started a literary publication, the St. Nicholas Magazine. Platt conducted the joke department, and wrote verse, and Mr. White gives samples of his productions in both humor and poetry which reinforce one's belief that the author made no mistake in turning to politics. MUSIC MAKES HIM A POLITICIAN. But it was another weakness-for music-that really led Mr. Platt into politics. In his younger days he could play-by ear-several instruments, and there is a myth in Owego that Tom Platt was handy with the melodeon. Being a rhymer, the inevitable followed. In the campaign of 1856-an emotional campaign if there ever was one-the Abolitionists had Tom Platt get up the Owego Campaign Glee Club and organize the Republican party in Tioga County. Old men and women in Owego will tell you that they still hold in their memories the picture of Tom Platt, a gaunt, loose-skinned youth, rangey and uncertain in the joints, standing at the head of a drove of wild-eyed human long-horns, as if to keep them from a stampede, waving his joistlike arms in rhythm to down-left-right-up-downleft-right-up s-i-n-g!' And when they began to sing, the choirmen would huddle together like cold sheep, and almost bump heads, so that the harmony should be close and effective. And all the time Tom Platt would hover over the group, keeping time with a foot or a finger, and chopping out the words of the song with his long, square flail of a jaw, full of delight at his handiwork. For the words of the song were his. Here is one 6 It stanza of a song called The Greeley Pill,' set "Call us drunkards, liars, knaves, Call us cowards, traitors, slaves, Call us murderers, as you will, As But music was a weakness with Platt, and he was essentially a worker. He was elected county clerk of Tioga in 1859; afterward he engaged in the lumber business, successfully, and in Ohio railroads. "He worked with Cornell and Conkling and Louis F. Payn to give Grant the New York delegation in 1868 and 1872. a result, he got the Albany habit, and became known to the men about the political hotels of the capital. . . . In 1872 he refused a Congressional nomination, but two years later he took it, and was elected. In the meantime, he was watching his business. He was a prominent figure at the banker's convention, wearing a Prince Albert coat and side whiskers. Life began to be a serious business with Platt, and it was a great concession to the amenities of friendship when he relaxed himself to make a pun, a mental tipple of which he is exceedingly fond even now, but which he guards lest it lead to the inebriety of geniality. His business grew. In the course of things he became interested in an express company, and was elected its president. Platt, who must dominate whatever he touches, found in Congress neither comfort nor profit. So he left it, and snuggled up to Conkling and Cornell and Payn, keeping his clutches on his district and gripping another. In 1877 it was that he pushed himself into the king-row, and was elected chairman of the Republican State convention. At that time he was a pleasant-looking, smoothshaven, delicately built man, restless, nervous, acquisitive. He had a hard, shifty eye, with a sort of left-over twinkle in it, and his long, broad jaw was the only thing in his face to prophesy his career. He seems to have had a double ambition,—to be a rich man and a great politician.' THE METHODS OF THE BOSS. Mr. White is extremely and amusingly out spoken in his account of Mr. Platt's famous political dealings with Conkling, Blaine, Garfield, Harrison, Roosevelt, and Odell. The working of the Republican State machine and its engineer Mr. White describes as follows: "From controlling the majority party in the Legislature, Platt has wormed his way into the administrative branch of the government. During the last ten years he has tried to own the governor and the State officers as well as the Legislature. Occasionally he has succeeded, though the proposition is difficult, for the type of man named for gov. ernor is often a higher type than Platt; and governors have been frequently hard to curry. But governors were mere incidents. It is the control of the State Central Committee that chiefly concerns Platt. That is his firm fortress. Through the State Central Committee, Platt reaches legislatures before they are elected. method is simple. As a rule, a man running for the Legislature has no money to spend on his campaign. Platt furnishes the candidate with money for election expenses through the agency of the State Central Committee. How Platt gets that money is another story, to be told later. But the candidate for the Legislature who believes in the integrity of his party sees no harm in accepting one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand or more dollars from the State Central Committee. And, be it said to the credit of the candidates, generally this money is spent honestly -considering the standard of the times." AS UNITED STATES SENATOR. His In the United States Senate, where Platt has served since 1897, he cuts a small figure. He is not a powerful man on the floor of He the Senate, nor in the Republican caucus. is, for the most part, the logroller, willing to vote for this man's measure if the man will help Platt with some patronage scheme. He takes no active interest in the large trend of national events. The social life of the Senate bores him, and he is miserable until the tedious business of the session is done and he is back at his express office, or sitting at his desk in the Fifth Avenue, gloating over his power. He is closing his life with few warm personal friendships. His closest allies are his new friends. For he is quarrelsome, petulant, and suspicious, and those who are nearest to him to-day will tell you they owe him nothing. He holds men by fear rather than by fealty. He has a tactless, repellent manner to strangers whom he does not trust, and he requires absolute subservience from his adherents. He is not an 6 easy boss.' ܙܙ ܙ PLATT'S CLEAN RECORD IN MONEY MATTERS. "He is a good judge of human weakness, but he cannot comprehend strength. He underestimated Roosevelt, Root, and Odell, because he has no sort of conception of that part of a man which is called the moral nature. And yet in money matters Platt is honest. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars pass through his hands annually for political purposes, and I don't be lieve that one penny ever sticks to his fingers. He has never made money out of politics. His tastes are simple. He has never lived extravagantly. He is proud of the implicit trust the great corporations and their agents put in his financial integrity, and he would not part with that pride, which is the foundation of his selfrespect, for all the money in Wall Street. former friends may say, perhaps, that he has betrayed them, but no man who has contributed a dollar to buy oil for Platt's machine ever has found fault with Platt's investment. His Magazine, Mr. Frederick E. Saward states that the first full cargo of anthracite ever shipped to Germany was sent in the British steamer Ormesby from Port Richmond, Philadelphia, on October 5, 1901. He also states that the freight rates which can now be secured admit of successful competition with Welsh coal of the same character at Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Bordeaux. MINING BY MACHINERY. In discussing some of the advantages possessed by the American operators, Mr. Saward says: "The industrial supremacy of the United States is being increased in many of the products of mine, forest, and workshop, and in none more earnestly than in the matter of coal; this will no doubt be handled in many of the foreign ports by English houses, already established for so many years, and having all the facilities for doing business in the Continental and other ports, and this will give the opportunity for the conservation of British coal, which is produced at greater cost than American because of the depths to which it is now necessary to extend the workings and the greater cost of labor per ton, there being little other than manual labor employed in the extrac tion of the coal at British pits. On the contrary, a large tonnage in the United States is mined by machinery; the great increase in machine-mined product in the United States-i.e., 168 per cent. in the last five years is the best evidence obtainable of the economic advantages thereby se cured in raising coal, and there is no doubt that British collieries would derive great benefit by following the American example in the more general adoption of coal-getting by electric or by compressed-air driven machines. The number of mechanical coal-cutters employed in the United Kingdom during 1900 was only 311, of which 240 were driven by compressed air and 71 by electricity, the quantity of coal so so obtained amounting only to 3,312,000 tons; while in the bituminous coal districts of the United States there were 3,125 mechanical cutters used at collieries employing above 100,000 persons, which yielded an output of about 45,000,000 gross tors. It is this cutting by machinery that enables the American producer to put his coal on cars in Pennsylvania at 95 cents a ton, and in West Virginia at 80 cents a ton. "The striking feature of this development is the evidence it seems to afford that the ability of the workers in the United States is greater, and the product per man and machine in excess of any thing abroad; the output per employee, in softcoal mining, was 579 tons in 1900, while the product of each mining machine in use is put at 13,000 tons for the same year. There have been many causes for this, but none equal to the intelligent labor coupled with the disposition to make use of the most advanced appliances in every line." IMMIGRATION AND THE CENSUS. INTERESTING deductions from the returns of the last census relative to the nativity of the people of the United States are presented in the National Geographic Magazine for November. Of every 1,000 persons living in this country in 1900, it appears that 863 were born in the United States and only 137 outside the borders of the country. In 1890, on the other hand, of every 1,000 persons, 852 were native and 148 foreign born. During the ten years, the native-born increased at nearly double the rate of increase of the foreign-born, the former increasing 22.5 per cent. and the latter only 12.4 per cent. If we exclude the foreign-born counted in Hawaii, Alaska, and at military and naval stations abroad, in the United States itself the foreign element increased by only 1,091,729, or 11.8 per cent., whereas during the preceding decade it increased by 2,569,604, or 38.5 per cent.; that is, during the last ten years the foreign element increased at less than one-third of its rate of increase dur ing the preceding decade. In absolute numbers, there was an addition to our native-born population of 12,081,637, and to our foreign-born of 1,151,994." WHERE THE IMMIGRANTS SETTLE. The next inquiry relates to the distribution of foreign born inhabitants throughout the sections and States, and under this head the following facts have been ascertained: "Four-fifths of the increase in the number of foreigners in the United States during the past decade are found in the States constituting the North Atlantic division. Of the total increase of 1,091,729, as large a proportion as 874,619 occur in this section, while the increase in the South Atlantic division is only 7,505; in the North Central division, 98,360; in the South Central division, 35,834, and in the Western division, 75,411. These States then showed 44.5 per cent., and the North Atlantic States 41.8 per cent., of the increase in foreign-born during the ten years. "In every section of the country the percentage of increase of the foreign-born for the decade has greatly diminished. Even in the North Atlantic division there has been a considerable loss in this respect, the percentage of increase for the foreign-born for the ten years being only 22.5 per cent., as against 38.5 per cent. for the preceding decade. The decrease was especially noticeable in the North Central and the Western divisions, in which the rate of increase for the foreign-born fell from 39.2 and 54.2 per cent. to 2.4 and 9.8 per cent., respectively. "In each section, also, excepting in the North Atlantic division, the rate of increase of the foreign-born was less than the rate of increase of the native-born. In the New England States, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsyl vania, however, the foreign-born have increased a little faster than the native-born-22.5 per cent., as against 20.5 per cent. THE CHANGING CHARACTER OF OUR IMMIGRATION. "The remarkable change that has taken place in the character of the immigration of late years largely accounts for the recent concentration in the North Atlantic division. During 18911900, 3,687,564 immigrants entered the United States, one and one-half million less than in the ten years preceding. Of German immigrants during the past decade there were 505,152, whereas during the preceding ten years there were as many as 1,452,970. Norway and Sweden's contribution during 1891-1900 was 321,281, as against 568,362 during 1881-90. The figures for Great Britain and Ireland show a similar decrease. On the other hand, AustriaHungary, Italy, and Russia and Poland, during the past decade, sent over 1,846,616 immigrants, about double the number contributed by them during 1881-90. "Thirty years ago, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Norway and Sweden sent 90.4 per cent. of all the immigrants entering the United States, and Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia and Poland a scanty 1.1 per cent. In 1880, the first group were contributing 81.7 per cent. and the second group 6.4 per cent.; in 1890, the first, 73.9 per cent., while the second had grown to 17.6 per cent. During the decade just ended, the former group supplied only 40.4 per cent., while the latter furnished fully onehalf, or 50.1 per cent. This new element of Poles, Italians, and Hungarians have settled in the mining districts of Pennsylvania and in the manufacturing towns of New York, New Jersey, and New England. They now form the bulk of laborers in these States, having superseded the Irish in the heavy work of digging trenches for railways or sewers and in the making and repairing of roads. No better example could be cited than the present work of digging a way for the underground system of New York City. The majority of the laborers are Italians and Poles, whereas fifteen or twenty years ago such work would have been mainly done by Irishmen. The Census Bureau has not yet published the relative components of our foreign population, but it is interesting to note the nationalities that make up our total immigration, amounting to 19,115,221 in 80 years. Germany has contributed over one-fourth, 5,009,280; Ireland slightly more than one-fifth, 3,869,268; Great Britain one-fifth, 3,026,207; Norway and Sweden nearly one-fifteenth, 1,246,312; Canada and Newfoundland, 1,049,939; Italy, 1,040,457; Austria-Hungary, 1,027,195, and all other countries about onetenth, 1,919,661. NE of the best articles in the magazines this month is Mr. Shaw-Lefevre's account of his visit to the Argentine Republic, in the Nineteenth Century. He gives a very interesting account of the condition of that great cosmopolitan state in which, until recently, the British held the foremost place. Much of the difficulty, says Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, which Englishmen have met with has arisen from want of courtesy to the local authorities, and from the egotism and assumption of authority which too many of them exhibit in their relations to other races. The young men who come over display absolute belief in the supremacy of everything British, a certain contempt for the ideas and practices of other people, and the most absolute confidence that whatever Englishmen do is and must be the best; and that what they want others must want. ENGLISH CAPITAL. All the railways in the country are practically owned by British capitalists and managed by English companies. The same is generally true of tramway, telephone, and electric-lighting com panies. The principal banks and loan and trust companies, and very many industrial concerns, are worked with British capital and managed by Englishmen and Scotchmen. In Buenos Ayres alone there are 160 miles of tramways under 10 different companies, all of which are financed from England. The railway companies under British management can raise money at 4 per cent., while the government of the Argentine has to pay six. There is an English colony of 25,000 persons in Buenos Ayres, and a great many are scattered all over the country. Mr. Shaw-Lefevre says that it is estimated that nearly £250,000,000 ($1,250,000,000) of English capital is invested in the country. The laborers are mostly Italians, the English being men of business,-managers, engineers, clerks, and bailiffs. Mr. Shaw Lefevre describes a visit to one estate as large as an English county managed by an Argentine of American descent, who employs about 60 Englishmen and 250 employees of other nationalities, including Italians, Basques, Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians. The latter appear to be Stundists. ENGLAND LOSING GROUND TO GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES. A few years ago the foreign commerce of Argentina was in the hands of old, well-established, and wealthy English firms. This state of things has almost wholly disappeared. They were obstinately conservative-they persisted in sticking to the old grooves. German competitors entered the field, studied the wants of the people, offered a greater variety, and provided cheaper goods, better suited to the wants and means of the people. They issued circulars in Spanish, with local prices and weights. The English firms continued to use English circulars. result, the Germans succeeded in driving out of existence nearly all the British firms. As a The United States is supplanting England in steel rails, locomotives, and cars. The money invested in the railways is British, but the orders go to the United States. Wire fencing, of which millions of miles are used in the country, is almost wholly supplied from the United States. Mr. Shaw-Lefevre says that when he made inquiries as to the cause of the falling off in the demand for British goods he was always told the same thing. It was due, first, to the hidebound self-complacency of British manufacturers and merchants, and, secondly, to the grave defects in the commercial education of the young Englishmen sent out to the Argentine. Young men educated at universities and public schools came out thinking that life was largely to be devoted to cricket, football, golf, and polo, Mr. Lefevre |