America has not relied exclusively upon a hereditary public service nor a "trained diplomatic corps," steeped in the hopeless cynicism of the profession, but has so often picked unspoiled men of heart and brains, wherever she has found them—a Page, a Lane, a Hoover, a Straus—and has set them to work out, with splendid "indiscretions," the salvation of the people.
The career of Mr. Straus illustrates with peculiar force the wisdom of calling many, even when few are to be chosen. In a double sense, he belongs to the Chosen People, having been set apart by birth in a race which achieved civilization so many centuries before the Russians, Germans and Anglo-Saxons emerged from barbarism that the latter even now find it difficult to "keep up." There is reason to believe that he, with his eminent brothers, began life in America with a special family inheritance of intelligence and character. His success does not prove that a fool or a knave will find every door of opportunity in America wide open. But in other respects, the demonstration of "democratic opportunity" is here as complete as can be desired, since, but for the advantages of nature, Mr. Straus started at the scratch.
Nothing in his memoirs is more charming in tone than his simple and: affectionate treatment of the beginnings of the Straus family in America, with its pictures of the father, a Bavarian immigrant of 1852, first peddling his wares among the hospitable Georgia planters, then setting up his store in Tal-
