few who watch the currents of opinion think that he will win.

If he is not opposed by Mr. Woodrow Wilson, he may have an easier task in conducting his campaign against Governor Harmon, of Ohio. Mr. Byran, the "perpetual candidate," has at last been shelved, though he may still have a good deal of influence at the Democratic Convention. Among all whose names have been canvassed, none seemed at one time more likely to receive the nomination than Judson Harmon. It is a curious illustration

of the difference between the American system and our own that, although Mr. Harmon was a member of President Cleveland's Cabinet, he has never taken a leading part in Federal politics since the Republicans have been in power. In England a politician of Cabinet rank is almost as prominent in Opposition as he is in office. In the United States he may devote himself, as Mr. Harmon has done, to State politics, and be little heard of in the Federal arena.

As Governor of Ohio he has "made good" with steady ability, and was last year elected to a second term. This was held to be the crucial moment of his career. If he had been defeated he would have dropped out as a Presidential possibility. After his re-election, until the rise of Mr. Wilson's star, he was regarded as the almost certain choice of the Democrats.

Now

his chance is more remote. He would be a good ordinary kind of President, let us say, of the McKinley type. He has never shone brilliantly, but his qualities burn with a constant glow. He is an older man than Mr. Wilson; a genial, kindly, unassuming spirit, who knows all the ins and outs of politics, but has character enough to take a line of his own when occasion calls for rapid action.

Last year in a town called Newark a spy employed by a temperance society

to discover and denounce "blind pigs," which means unlicensed drinking saloons, shot the keeper of one of these places. This did not please the citizens of Newark, so they lynched the spy. Whether the Mayor and Sheriff could have saved him is doubtful, but they failed to make any attempt to do so, and this aroused a storm of newspaper criticism. The Governor saw what there was to do, saw it and did it. He removed the Mayor and Sheriff from their offices at once. More courage than this was required to call out the National Guard in Columbus when a street-car strike was causing disorder which the town authorities did not suppress. Governor Harmon did call it out though, taking the chance of damage to his re-election prospects. It harmed them not at all; resolute action seldom does injure public men.

He is a good business man too. Some time before he was first made Governor he became Receiver of three railways which were slipping into bankruptcy. One was the Père Marquette, whose trucks are now seen all over the Continent. The others were the Cincinnati-Hamilton-Dayton and the Toledo Terminal. The first thing that struck him was the heavy arrears of wages outstanding. He took a bold step; borrowed £160,000, paid off the debt, and made the men more contented. When he was installed as Governor, he proposed to resign his Receivership. The Supreme Court asked him in the interests of the companies to complete his work. Eventually he restored the lines to the stockholders with their credit sound and their organization vastly improved, once more paying concerns.

In a Presidential campaign each candidate is expected to have a "slogan" or war-cry. A sentence of Governor Harmon's, "Guilt is always personal," has been seized on for this purpose. What he meant by it was that individuals should be prosecuted, not Corpor

He

British colonel or squire save for his loose, easy movement and the smile around the corners of his mouth. is "English," too, in his fondness for games. Every Saturday he takes half a day off to play golf, a relaxation by no means usual in American cities.

Mr. Harmon has made his own way in the world. He began life as a country Baptist minister's son, and worked on the land between his college terms. In every way this big Westerner is a type dear to the American heart, and if the "bosses" are able to "swing" the Convention, he will almost certainly be their first choice. But it happens sometimes in Conventions, as in Papal elections, that the lot falls in the end upon some second or third string. An inoffensive personality may slip through bars raised to keep out bigger fish. That may happen in this case. A man like Mr. Gaynor, Mayor of New York, might be accepted by a Convention wearied out with striving for and against more distinguished candidates. It may sound odd in English ears to say that Mr. Gaynor's chance of nomiation was greatly improved by the attempt made on his life last year. But the statement is perfectly true. A candidate for the Presidency must be known all over the United States. Until he was shot at, Mr. Gaynor was little known outside of New York. As soon as the newspapers all over the continent were filled with sympathetic columns about the assassin's "dastardly act," and while day by day the public looked for bulletins of the

shrewd observers saw that he had come into the running for the prize to be won next year.

In many ways he would be a useful President. He is extraordinarily just in all his dealings. Tammany opposed his nomination, but, as Mayor. he hands out even justice to Tammany as to all other bodies. During his campaign the New York newspapers were almost all against him. Daily he used to receive from sympathizers information reflecting upon the private characters and public records of the editors who attacked him. He made no use of these, except to sort them out and send them, after he had been elected, to those whom they chiefly concerned. Even in small matters his fairness is phenomenal. The last time I was in New York I saw the walls placarded with a letter which he wrote to a burlesque actress apologizing for some remark he had made reflecting upon her style of entertainment.

He was a judge before he was elected Mayor, but that is scarcely enough to account for this even balance of temper. He is just in grain, and with his fairness goes, as is usual, a cautious habit of mind. He is so cautious as to be uninteresting.. Above all things else he is a lawyer, seeing only so much of the truth as may suit the case in hand. If he probed more deeply, he would not have committed himself to such a statement as this:

No one, however rich, need ever be afraid of the people. The people are not revolutionary by nature. They are never dishonest. Even in the French Revolution, when they destroyed prisons and fortresses, not a bank was looted. The Bastile was torn down, but the Bank of France remained undisturbed.

That is eminently a lawyer's point, a half-truth, a flashy argument false at The "people" were honest in the

core.

particular instance quoted because their leaders were honest, and had filled them with a fiery zeal which burnt up all thoughts of personal gain. Give a mob a leader like Lord George Gordon, or leave it leaderless as the looters at Llanelly were left, and no property is safe from them.

Other Democrats who might possibly be nominated for President are Mr. David R. Francis, another old Cabinet Minister of Mr. Cleveland's, since then a progressive Mayor of St. Louis and President of the World's Fair in that city; Mr. Thomas R. Marshall, Governor of Indiana, who has wandered so far from the High Protectionist fold as to advocate tariffs for revenue only; and Mr. Joseph W. Folk, late Governor of Missouri, who has made a national reputation by his energy in that one State, energy shown in many directions from suppressing racecourses to putting down bribery among members of the local Legislature. Yet one more possibility remains to be noted. If Senator La Follette should be put into the contest by the Insurgents, the country would have the opportunity of electing a very remarkable man. But the country would not take it, and the country would be right. Apart from

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his increasing deafness, and in spite of his brilliant gifts-gifts of political insight, of tactical skill, of polished eloquence-this little man with the wide- . open, steel-gray eyes, whose upstanding crop of hair has won him the nickname Bushy Bob, would not be regarded as a "dependable" President. That is what the country needs, and has made up its mind to get.

Either Woodrow Wilson (should the wish of the people prevail) or Judson Harmon (if the "bosses" win) would take to the White House the "safe and sane" qualities which are required. Of the two. Mr. Wilson would be the more interesting election, especially to the outside world. But so far as "dependability" goes there is little to choose between them. With one or the other the nation could go about its business in quiet confidence that, if changes must be made, everything would be done decently and in order. The "safety and sanity," though, would not square with the "bosses' " interpretation of those terms, which is that nothing must be done to alienate the men with the money. That kind of "safe and sane" policy has already received notice to quit. H. Hamilton Fyfe.

That all subjects are the artist's province has been proclaimed over and over again, but there are some provinces which, not unlike Ireland, may belong to owners who cannot rule them. Medicine is such in the novelist's hand. Allowed to run its own extravagant course, the medical episode is thoroughly helpful to the story-teller; coerce that episode in the most reasonable manner, ask it to conform in its salient features to true pathology, and

often it becomes of less use to the narrative. This is the reason why so much fun has been expended over the medicine of fiction, and it is also the reason why some of this fun has been cheap. Critical persons have taken it for granted' that whatever is undisciplined is wrong-a harsh and stupid doctrine to apply to feats of imagination. The proper attitude of critical persons in respect of the treatment of medicine in fiction seems to me to be

fairly well defined. Where the author has in any way insisted on the accuracy of his science-where he writes as one having authority, and calls all men to witness, either in so many words or by his general assumptions, that he is a learned and sound expositor,—it is certainly fair that he should be reproached for any lapses from the truth; but where the author has introduced a medical episode for the mere sake of helping his story along, it is not necessarily sound criticism to blame him for faultiness of detail. Imagine calling Balzac to order because the murder of Maulincour by the terrible Ferragus is not to be explained by text-books on toxicology. The author may be true to the scheme of his story even while he is untrue to the teaching of the medical text-books. This is how it comes about that some of our very best novels contain bad medicine, while some of the silliest contain good medicine. Whether the author of the former is to be praised as an artistic writer, or the author of the latter is to be credited with valuable accuracy, depends upon the rules of criticism adopted; and these ought to be applied with appreciation of what the aim of the author has been. If the author has plumed himself upon the preciseness of his medical knowledge, he should be judged by the correctness of his display; if he has made the action of his story depend upon a chain of medical circumstances in such a way that unless the chain holds the story collapses, he invites us to test that chain link by link. But such a use of medicine in fiction is rare; as a rule it is no great contradiction of the author's pretences if a mistake in therapeutic or pathological detail occurs. And it makes small difference to the position of medicine in the public eye that signs rightly attributable to one poison are transferred by a novelist to another, that the symptoms of a tropical disease are bur

lesqued or the terrors of a fever magnified. The reader knows that the therapeutics in such matters will be in real life under the conduct of those who know, and his feelings towards the medical profession are not altered one way or another by details in respect of which accuracy can never be his practical concern. But when medicine enters in a large manner into a story, when the relations of the medical profession to the public are presumably expounded in a book, it is very important, both to the medical profession and to the public, that the author should be accurate. And he generally is nothing of the kind. The novelist never seems to have the slightest knowledge of the professional medical life. He is ready enough to credit the members of the medical profession with many shining virtues and equally ready to darken their reputation with calumny, the unfortunate result being to leave upon the public mind the impression that the average medical man is not an average member of society. The idea which the public might well derive from reading many novels is that to call in a doctor is an extraordinarily fluky proceeding, as the medical profession is divided sharply into heroes and knaves. The heroes lead a strenuous life, succoring the sick in desperate circumstances and refusing fees; operating at the briefest notice when a hair's breadth to the right or left in the making of an incision would be certain death to the patient. The knaves murder, cozen, and keep bogus sanatoriums. They vivisect for pleasure, their humanity is dead within their breasts, and they pass existences that are a standing reproach to the law of the land. Now undoubtedly either sort of description of the medical life, whether the roseate glow of eulogy or the green cast of detraction is employed, does no good to anyone. As far as the public is concerned it cannot

be useful that they should have doubts whether their doctor is a saint or a sinner, a knave or a hero. Medical men, for their part, may smile at errors in the medical details of novels, but they are uneasy under indiscriminate laudation of the nobility of their careers, and grow positively restive at some of the allegations concerning their criminal habits.

The time has surely arrived when we may expect that the novelist who aims at recording contemporary manners will take the trouble to ascertain what are the professional standards in medicine, what is the usual course of the successful man, and what the machinery, legal and ethical, which confines the medical career within certain bounds. The part which his hospital work plays in the life of the consultant physician and surgeon certainly varies, but it varies only within limits, and those could be readily ascertained by the novelist, who too frequently seems to confuse the honorary staff of the charity with the resident officers of the same institution. There are general hospitals which may have medical schools attached to them, and special hospitals which, not possessing the range of material necessary for use in clinical training, only play an ancillary rôle in medical education. These points ought to be remembered, even though the picture of the great specialist in brain disease, passing from bed to bed in his world-famous ward, surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic students, to whom he discourses with elegant brutality, has to be suppressed. Intelligent internes, again, do not reverse the treatment of their superiors, and, by saving life with brilliant unorthodoxy, succeed at once to lucrative practices in Harley Street; no great consulting position was ever won in this way. Nurses in hospitals have to do as they are told; the devoted young woman who remains by a sufferer's pillow hour

after hour and day after day till she wins a hand-to-hand fight with fate and secures by her importunity the life of her patient-she is a figment; for in the hospitals all nurses go to their meals and their beds at stated times. Heaven knows, the work of both housesurgeons and hospital nurses is hard enough: the time allotted for their meals is scant, the hours of their labor are long, and much of the routine of their work is hard-physically as well as mentally hard. "They do not deserve ridicule, and it makes them ridiculous to describe their share in the organization of a hospital so untruthfully as has been done; while the misstatements give the public a totally wrong view of institutions which, with extreme difficulty, derive their support from the public purse. The callousness of hospital nurses has more than once formed the subject of newspaper comment, and the views of the critics of hospital dispensation have been, I make no doubt, largely derived from the impressions of patients who, fooled by fiction, have thought that a broken leg or a scalp-wound would entitle the sufferer to the exclusive possession night and day of a soft-voiced ministering angel, and who have resented their particular angel going to her tea. If the harm that may be done by the burlesque descriptions of hospital life which have appeared in various popular novels is more easily realized, I am not sure that it is greater than the harm done by the perpetual suggestion that the venal or criminal doctor is easy to find. Mr. Morris Finsbury, the seal collector, who, as set out in Stevenson's best manner, took deep thought on this point, came to an opposite conclusion; yet there makes a regular appearance in fiction the doctor who is ready at a price to violate every article of the Decalogue separately or in permutation and combination. Why is this? It is because a large number