The Republican party has addressed itself energetically to the business of reorganization. The national committee met at St. Louis in February to choose a new chairman in place of Mr. William R. Willcox, and the contest for this important position was not without its significance. The standpatters yielded under pressure, and after a forty-eight-hour deadlock the election of Mr. Will H. Hays, of Indiana, assured a hospitable open-door policy toward all prodigals. In 1916 Mr. Hays, as chairman of the Republican State committee, carried Indiana against heavy odds and established himself as one of the ablest political managers the West has known. As the country is likely to hear a good deal of him in the next two years, I may note that he is a man of education, high-minded, resourceful, endowed with prodigious energy and trained and tested executive ability. A lawyer in a town of five thousand people, he served his political apprenticeship in all capacities from precinct committeeman to the State chairmanship. Mr. Hays organized and was the first chairman of the Indiana State Council of Defense, and made it a thoroughly effective instrument for the co-ordination of the State’s war resources and the diffusion of an ardent patriotism. Indeed the methods of the Indiana Council were so admirable that they were adopted by several other States. It is in the blood of all Hoosiers to suspect partisan motives where none exists, but it is to Mr. Hays’s credit that he directed Indiana’s war work, until he resigned to accept the national chairmanship, with the support and to the satisfaction of every loyal citizen without respect to party. Mr. Hays is essentially a Westerner, with the original Wabash tang; and his humor and a knack of coining memorable phrases are not the least important items of his equipment for politics. He is frank and outspoken, with no affectations of mystery, and as his methods are conciliatory and assimilative the chances are excellent for a Republican rejuvenation.