Mr. Dickson prints extracts from some of his speeches. Criticism, obviously, is an art not yet in practice in Mississippi, even among the literati. I used to read him in the _Congressional Record_; he was really not so bad as Dickson makes him out. His career, seen in retrospect, seems to have been mainly a vacuum. Once or twice he showed a certain fine dignity, strange in a Southern politician. He opposed the Prohibition frenzy. He voted against the bonus. But usually, despite his constant talk of independence, he ran with the party pack. For years a professional Jeffersonian, he brought his career to a climax by giving lyrical support to the Emperor Woodrow, who heaved the Jeffersonian heritage into the ash-can. During the La Follette uproar he was one of the most vociferous of the witch-burners. He passed out in silence, regretted for his rustic charm, but not much missed. I commend “An Old-Fashioned Senator” to all persons who are interested in the struggle of the South to throw off its cobwebs. Both as document and as work of art the book makes it very plain why Mississippi’s place in that struggle is in the last rank. 8 _The Father of Service_ THE LIFE STORY OF ORISON SWETT MARDEN, by Margaret Connolly. New York: _The Thomas Y. Crowell Company_. [The American Mercury, February, 1926.] If Dr. Martin had not written his first book, said Frank A. Munsey one day, he would have been a millionaire. By Munseyan standards, praise could go no higher--and Munsey knew his man, for they were fellow-waiters in a Summer hotel back in the ’70’s and kept up friendly exchange until Marden’s death in 1924. Both sprang from the hard, inhospitable soil of Northern New England, both knew dire poverty in youth, both got somewhere a yearning for literary exercises, and both cherished an immense respect for the dollar. But though fate brought them together when they were young, they chose different paths later on. Munsey, with “Afloat in a Great City,” “The Boy Broker,” and other inspirational master-works behind him, abandoned beautiful letters for the stock market, and eventually gathered in so much money that he could afford to butcher great newspapers in sheer excess of animal spirits, as lesser men butcher clay pigeons. Marden, going the other way, abandoned the hotel business, for which he seemed to have had genius, for the pen, and devoted the last thirty years of his life to composition.