To me the Gerards, apart from their personal charm, unaffected dignity and joyous Americanism, always were psychologically interesting because they typified so splendidly that greatest of our national traits--adaptability. To be dropped into the vortex of European political life, with its gaping pitfalls and brilliant opportunities for mistakes, is not child’s play even for the most experienced of men and women. France, for example, regarded no name in its diplomatic register less eminent than that of a Cambon fit to head its mission to Berlin. England kept at the Hohenzollern court the most gifted ambassador on the Foreign Office’s active list--Sir Edward Goschen. Unthinking Americans, by which I mean those who underestimate our inherent capacity to land on our feet, may have had their misgivings when a mere Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the daughter of a Montana copper king were sent to represent America among professional diplomats of the highest European rank. But "Jimmy" and "Molly" Gerard made good. It is the American way, and because it is that, it is their way. As for the Ambassador, he has demonstrated, to my way of thinking, that a graduate course in the university of American politics is ideal training for diplomacy. Intelligence, tact, resourcefulness and courage, the rudiments of the diplomatic career, are qualities which surely nothing can develop in a man more thoroughly than the hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of an American electioneering campaign. It is amid its storms and tribulations that a man learns to be something more than an inhabited dress-suit. It is there he acquires the art of being human. It is there that he comes to appreciate the priceless value of loyalty. United States Presidents do not err seriously when they hunt for ambassadors among men who have been through the preparatory school from which "Jimmy" Gerard holds a _magnum cum laude_. My personal observations of Judge Gerard’s ambassadorial methods are based for the most part on his career before the war. But he has not departed from them during the war. Bismarck laid it down as a maxim that an ambassador should not be "too popular" at the court to which he was accredited. From all one can gather, "Jimmy" Gerard has not laid himself open to that charge in Berlin since August, 1914. Nobody who knows him ever suspected for a moment that he would. Toadying is not in his lexicon, and aggressively pro-American ambassadors are condemned in advance to be disliked in Germany. They do not fit into the Teutonic diplomatic scheme. If they are inspired by such unconventional aspirations as those to which Judge Gerard gave utterance in his "keynote speech" to the American Luncheon Club of Berlin, it is morally certain that their usefulness--to Germany--is limited. [Illustration: Mrs. Gerard.]