R. HALE'S description of the President at work, in this number of this magazine, shows how Mr. Taft brings to his difficult task his large resources of sincerity and kindness. A naturally sunny and cheerful nature is a good equipment, and it had much to do with the extraordinary popularity that Mr. Taft won. You cannot be brought near him without liking him and you yield to his winning personality.

But the Presidency has come to be the most difficult office in all the world, and it calls for a combination of qualities that few men have; and, under our system, it seems to become more and more difficult.

As Congress comes nearer to adjournment, it becomes plainer that the President unfortunately missed an important play when he considered his party organization as trumps; for that was then distinctly the losing, and not the winning, card. The trouble was that this organization was a mere piece of machinery, and it was already creaking toward collapse. If the forces known as Aldrichism and Cannonism could have carried out the President's programme, he would have won. But these forces did not accept the party programme with Mr. Taft's sincerity, and by his reliance on them and committal to them he has not won his legislative programme and he has lost the sympathy of a large part of his party.

The party, under his leadership, has become and is becoming a smaller, not a larger, body of men. And one of his spokesmen

(Mr. Wickersham) and Speaker Cannon are doing their best in their public speeches to make it smaller still. To read men out

of a political party that is the way in which Mr. Blaine in his day and Mr. Bryan in his day lost, as they deserved to lose. If a party is to be a compactly drilled little army under leaders whom the people did not choose as leaders Senator Aldrich, Speaker Cannon, and Attorney-Ceneral Wickersham - insubordination soon becomes a virtue and the army continues to dwindle.

Something more than amiability seems to be required for successful popular leadership. Under present conditions something more is required, too, than party discipline. The people have come to regard parties as tools no longer as masters.

But, although his experience with this session of Congress leaves the President less popular than he was a year ago, there will be many chances for him to regain popular leadership. If, for instance, a tariff board be created that he will use to force the correction of some of the glaring inequalities of the tariff, he will find the public. with him. If, in dealing with corporations and railroad problems, his administration should strike the happy mean between oppression of the people and oppression of enterprise and capital, the sober judgment of the nation would heartily commend him. It is important that a Prekeep popular approval.

Copyright, 1910, by Doubleday, Page & Co. All rights reserved.

"I merely wanted three things in my house," Mark Twain once said; "a room of my own that would be quiet, a billiard-room big enough to play in without jabbing the cues into the wall, and a living-room forty by twenty feet. The only other stipulation was that the house should cost a certain sum." "Did it?" he was asked. "Well, half of it did," he admitted, smiling.

"Two days overdue, THE WORLD'S WORK has not yet reached me. Pray make a note of this. I would rath not have to resort to violence."-MARK TWAIN,