The clouds that gather round the setting sun do
not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch
on mortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely
sad. One walks with one's friends squarely up to the portal of
life, and bids good-bye with a smile. One has done it so often!
Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no illusions; he
was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he
talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day
expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and mortality
together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the
sense of tasks incomplete.
One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his
dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in
a butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly
every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little
or nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great
Atlantic powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed
about to be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium
based on an intelligent allotment of activities. For the first
time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman pax was in sight, and
would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him. Except for making
peace in Manchuria, he could do no more; and if the worst should
happen, setting continent against continent in arms -- the only
apparent alternative to his scheme -- he need not repine at
missing the catastrophe.
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