In this state of enforced idleness he browsed through newspapers and journals more than he had before or than he ever did again, and so his letters contained more comments on daily events. It will be clear that what was happening did not always please him. He was an individualist and a liberal, both by temperament and by reason of having grown up with the generation which accepted the doctrines of the _laissez-faire_ school in a thoroughgoing way. The Philippine policy of the McKinley administration seemed to him a humiliating desertion of the principles that America had fought for in the Revolution and the War of Emancipation. The military occupation of the Philippines, described by the President as "benevolent assimilation," and what he once called the "cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence" filled him with loathing. He saw the Republican Party in the light in which Mr. Dooley portrayed it when he represented its leaders as praying "that Providence might remain under the benevolent influence of the present administration." When McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated by the Republicans in 1900, he called them "a combination of slime and grit, soap and sand, that ought to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country." He was ready to vote for Bryan if there were no other way of turning out the administration responsible for the history of our first years in the Philippines, "although it would doubtless have been a premature victory of a very mongrel kind of reform." In the same way, the cant with which many of the supporters of England's program in South Africa extolled the Boer War in the British press provoked his irony. The uproar over the Dreyfus case was at its height. The "intellectuels," as they were called in France, the "Little Englanders" as they were nicknamed in England, and the Anti-Imperialists in his own country had his entire sympathy. The state of mind of a member of the liberal minority, observing the phase of history that was disclosing itself at the end of the century, is admirably indicated in his correspondence. * * * * * Miss Pauline Goldmark, next addressed, and her family were in the habit of spending their summers in Keene Valley, where they had a cottage that was not far from the Putnam Shanty. James had often joined forces with them for a day's climb when he was staying at the Shanty. The reader will recall that it was their party that he had joined on Mt. Marcy the year before. _To Miss Pauline Goldmark._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 12, 1899_.