A man with a passion for peace is one thing. A man with the tact to get the Sultan of Turkey, Sulu chiefs and. Theodore Roosevelt working together for a solution of their problems without resort to brandished lance, shaken fist or shining armor possesses, as I have said, an instinct for civility. The spirit of this incident was curiously reproduced at a later period, when Mr. Straus, then devoting himself with full heart to his great work for industrial peace, found a basis upon which capitalists and laboring men could confer face to face at the White House, and Andrew Carnegie agreed to meet the leaders of the Homestead strike at the ex-Ambassador's dinner table. As one of the four United States members of the Court of Arbitration at The Hague, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor, as vice-president of the National Civic Federation and the International Law Association, as chairman of the overseas committee of the League to Enforce Peace and in all the various capacities in which he served during the late war and through the protracted ordeal of the so-called peace conference, Mr. Straus has wrought diligently and consistently at his lifelong purpose: to be useful to a nation whose higher spirit this memoir proves that he understands—a spirit which his entire activity as an author has been devoted to explaining. His life work has been crowned with as much success as can be sagely hoped for by a man who attempts to make the ideal of civility effective in a world which is still more than half barbaric.
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