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

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

Harold Anderson, Louis Springer, Henry E. Armstrong,
Lawrence Reamer, Albert G. Robinson, Richard Weightman, Huneker; later, Grant Overton and others of professional repute. Simonds had yet to win a forefront place
among American narrators and critics of military history.
His appetite for international complications and the resulting activities of conflict was phenomenal. He would breakfast on a strained situation, lunch on a disputed frontier,
with topographical maps on the side, and dine gloriously
upon a real casus belli. When the Maine was blown up at
Havana he was a boy of frail physique, but the pull of natural inclination and the sentiment of ancestry-three or four
generations before him had served in the successive wars
of the republic-were so strong that he took down the
family gun, metaphorically speaking, from over the fireplace in his Concord home and carried it to the Caribbean.
Laffan's apprehensions would have subsided could he have
foreseen the career of the author of " They Shall Not Pass"
and the five-volume "History of the World War." But
Frank Simonds is still at it for all he is worth (which is
saying much) and therefore I must let him go his
way, between wars, merely remarking that one of the
pleasantest of my own memories is to have watched
from near by the development of so remarkable a special
talent.
There was that other case of Henry R. Chamberlain,
our London correspondent for many years. Chamberlain
was a most diligent and intelligent student of underlying
causes beneath diplomatic pretences in world politics.
He had the confidence of the chancelleries. Almost as
long ago as John Fiske was declaring that the moral evolution of mankind had reached a stage that rendered another

great conflict on this planet impossible, Harry Chamberlain was registering month after month and year after
year in his able dispatches and letters to The Sun his invincible conviction that a world war was at hand. It