SENATOR HOAR'S TASTES by Francis E. Leupp

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 18, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 11.

SENATOR HOAR'S TASTES.

By Francis E. Leupp

NO OTHER senator of Mr. Hoar's standing lives so simply as he. In Washington he does not keep house. Hence, of course, he does no entertaining, and takes small part in the social life of the capital. Indeed, his tastes lead him very little in the direction of companionship with his fellows. His leisure usually finds him in the diminutive study, for which he contrives to find space in his quiet lodgings, where he will read a good book far into the night, while other men generally are sleeping or making merry. His favorite subject is history, and he reads it not as so many do, for the sake of amassing a knowledge of unrelated facts, but in the spirit and with the zest of a philosopher tracing through the stories of the written page the motives of the men who have shaped events in all ages, the influence of these events on national character, and the logic of the effects which have flowed from divers causes. The records of the past he thus utilizes for purposes of prophecy and the guidance of his own generation. He is a firm believer in the theory that history moves in cycles, not by accident, but because the same conditions in all ages lead up to the same or corresponding consummations.

This will explain, for instance, his attitude on the question of imperialism from the moment its outcroppings were first discernible in the sequel of our war with Spain. It cost him sincere grief to part company with his party on this issue. It grieved him yet more, however, that the conduct of his party had been such as to force the separation upon him. To stand comparatively, or even quite alone, was not strange to him—it was, in a sense, an inheritance with his blood. A descendant of men who took in hand their little all and bade farewell to their country and its precious associations to come as pilgrims to a strange and forbidding shore, for the sake of maintaining their right to worship God in their own fashion; who hewed and ploughed and fought their way to independence against powerful odds; who, tho bred in the cold and calculating atmosphere of the north, stood shoulder to shoulder with their blood kindred of the South in one war, but shot them down in another, both for a principle of human liberty; how could he have faltered at the thought of isolation as a penalty for following his conscience? It was his party that went astray when it proposed the most startling and dangerous innovation ever conceived in republican statecraft—not he, who stood on the same ground with the authors of the constitution. —Francis E. Leupp, in the Pilgrim for March.