PROMETHEUS BOUND

In the golden ante-bellum chronicle of the G. O. P. there is one entry that will always be read with bitterness; the last minute defeat of Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. To those who watched President Wilson's actions with pale hostility the satisfaction always remained of believing that with Hughes as President matters would have been otherwise. There was no little rejoicing, therefore, when he was placed in the second highest office of the land by a new Republican administration. Great things were expected of him.

As the announcement of his resignation is made, his friends in Washington agree that Mr. Hughes has been "a great Secretary of State." He has smoothed out the internal organization of the Department; he triumphed at the Washington Limitation of Armament Conference; yet in a large sense his record has been mediocre. The treaty of peace with Germany was routine work. The liquor search treaty with Great Britain is not an astounding bit of diplomacy. The vigorous pressing of American rights and claims in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and in the Dutch oil fields was perhaps the more or less automatic result of the pressure of interested business groups. The hope that this brilliant statesman would revolutionize American diplomacy has been quite unfulfilled.

Once more the bitter truth is driver home that the American democracy has no room for intellectual giants. Idealists, geniuses; thinkers when placed in high office, are cramped and bound by an inelastic mass opinion. They may struggle, as Wilson and Hughes struggled, to escape this bond--without success. Charles Evans Hughes will be called a great Secretary of State because he stretched these chains farther than others, but as a whole his diplomatic record is a history of the mediocrity of American democracy. And who will ask why he resigned?