Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

ISSUES GREAT AND LITTLE

337

Wiswell of the Supreme Court of Maine, who in his turn
is adhering closely to a human skeleton enthroned upon
a bass drum. It happens, likewise, that another Bowdoin
jurist, Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller of the Supreme
Court of the United States, was celebrated in youth for
his songs of revelry and particularly for his achievement
in making "Phyrne" rhyme with "divinely" in a certain
masterpiece of Anacreontic verse; just as the Honorable
Edward J. Phelps of Vermont, professor of law in Yale
University and Minister to Great Britain by one of President Cleveland's most admirable selections for office,
had won early fame by addressing to a perplexing nodus
in the New England railway system a poem each stanza
of which ended with the somewhat profane adjuration:
"I hope in hell
His soul may dwell
Who first invented Essex Junction!"
But this is wandering from the original purpose of the
foregoing paragraph, which was merely to say that at
different times I have had the fortune to meet a good
many of Mr. Godkin's "missionaries' sons," with the
invariable conclusion that the pedigree was desirable.
A picture of the complex in Hawaii before the mistake
of the "policy of infamy" had been finally redeemed and
the islands tied firmly to the American flag was afforded
in Minister Sewall's letters to me during the period of
doubt and strain. Japan's intervention by protest and by
scarcely disguised threats of "extreme measures" produced a situation that could not at that time be discussed
in the fullness of its significance. Some of the American
sugar interests were apprehensive that a break with Tokio

might result in the withdrawal of Japanese labor altogether; others actually feared the capture of the islands
by warships and soldiers. The delay at Washington in
the ratification of the treaty and the looming of the Cuban