Personages

POLITICAL NOTES

Bears. The U. S. Senate nearly lost its entire farmer-labor bloc lately. So the country learned when Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota, lone farmer-laborite showed his friends some cinema films last week, taken by him on his vacation in the Canadian Rockies near Banff, Alberta. Upon the screen came three dark, fuzzy objects, moving about in undergrowth many rods away. The largest object struck an attitude of attention and started to approach the camera. Rushing rapidly, it soon proved to be a mother grizzly, charging to defend her whimpering cubs. She charged far enough for Senator Shipstead's friends to see how an angry she-bear looks at 10 paces. Senator Shipstead's friends wondered how Senator Shipstead looked at the other end of those 10 paces.

Good Press? Dwight Whitney Morrow, U. S. Ambassador-designate to Mexico, spent busy hours severing connections, settling his affairs, emptying desks and files in J. P. Morgan & Co.'s Manhattan office, whence he had resigned. Then he went to dinner at the Lotus Club as chief guest of Herbert Bayard Swope, energetic executive editor of the Independent Democratic New York World. Other guests, whose presence seemed to promise Mr. Morrow "a good press" in the U. S. after he reaches Mexico City, included Publishers Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, Ralph Pulitzer of the New York World, Roy W. Howard of the New York Telegram and 25 other Scripps-Howard newspapers, W. T. Dewart of the New York Sun, also General Manager Kent Cooper of the Associated Press; also Editor Carr Van Anda of the New York Times, Julian Starkweather Mason of the New York Evening Post, H. S. Pollard and John H. Tennant of the New York Evening World and Marc Rose of the Buffalo News; also Editorial Writers Walter Lippmann (World) and Rollo Ogden (Times); also Vice President Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun. Among notable absentees was Editor Arthur Brisbane of the New York American, chief of the Hearst press. Mr. Brisbane was in Albuquerque, N. M., that evening. But Mr. Morrow seemed assured of a good Hearst press when Arthur Brisbane wrote: "Mr. Morrow . . . is well fitted for the work that the President gives him. He understands finance, international relationship. . ."

"Suicide." Commenting on complaints by Globe-flyers William S. Brock and Edward F. Schlee that the U. S. Navy had refused to help them, Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur last week said: "As long as I have anything to do with the Navy it will do nothing to aid and abet men to commit suicide."

Seat. Governor Ralph O. Brewster of Maine told a convention of the W. C. T. U. in his state last week that "a Senate seat is now worth a million dollars to some men and interests." The Governor's phrasing made people think of seats on the N. Y. Stock Exchange, for which the latest price is $235,000 each (TiME, Oct. 3).

Father. "The meaning of a loss from a family of a youth in the prime of his life, with his high hopes and those of his parents centred upon his future cannot be understood except by those who have experienced it. When that loss comes the sun is darkened, and from brightness the future turns to gloom. The map of life is changed in the twinkling of an eye. To a mother it seems hardly worth the living."

So said the principal speaker at the sixth national convention of the American War Mothers, last week in Milwaukee. Though-he in no way referred to the fact, everyone realized that the speaker, Vice President Charles Gates Dawes, knew whereof he spoke. His son, Rufus Fearing Dawes, Princetonian, drowned in 1912, aged 22 in Lake Geneva, Wis.*

Vice President Dawes also said: "In the public life of the American people, women have a unique power for good, because of what President Wilson called the 'moral advantage of disinterestedness.'"

The War Mothers resolved in favor of national defense, military preparedness.

* An entry (1910) in the journal of Rufus Fearing Dawes: "The hardest thing about death, and it is the only hard thing, is that those left behind me have to suffer."