He
refuses the Republican nomination for President, in 1912, when
another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through
vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the
one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four
years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President,
when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to
win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected
opportunities lie ready to his hand and when the force of world
events requires little more than his intelligent acquiescence to
bring him diplomatic success.
His discovery of "interests" was no accident. It sprang from that
hard unemotional simplifying habit of his mind.
When one writes of Mr. Hughes, men ask, pardonably, "Which Mr.
Hughes? The old Mr. Hughes, or the new Mr. Hughes?" for he has had,
as the literary critics would say, his earlier and his later
manner.
But it is chiefly manner, a smile recently achieved, a different
way of wearing the beard, a little less of the stern moralist, a
little more of the man of the world. A connoisseur of Hughes, who
has studied him for nearly twenty years, after a recent
observation, pronounced judgment: "It's the same Hughes, a trifle
less cold, but just as dry." And the Secretary of State himself,
when one of the weeklies contained an article on "The New Mr.
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