And Mr. Root's
next experience, in the United States Senate, was disillusioning.
The Senate is a body in which you grow old, ungracefully waiting
for dead men's shoes. The infinite capacity for taking pains which
Senators have is not genius. If the gods have been good to you, as
they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter the upper house young, a
scholar and idealist, with the hope of the Presidency as the reward
of generous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay aside
your winged gifts one by one and your ambition centers finally not
on the Presidency but on some committee chairmanship clung to by a
pertinacious octogenarian.
Hope deferred makes you avaricious of little favors, until when a
British journalist writes of you as one did of Henry Cabot Lodge,
making his speech before the last Republican national convention at
Chicago, that you "looked like an elderly peer addressing a labor
gathering," your cup of happiness, is full to the brim, as Henry
Cabot Lodge's was,--whether because you are compared to a lord or
because other people, lesser than Senators, are put into their
proper inferior place. Mr. Lodge is the perfect flower of the
Senate. It is a flower that does not bloom in a night. It is almost
a century plant.
Into this Senate came Mr. Root, full stature, as he might walk into
the Supreme Court of the United States, preceded by his reputation.
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