While I was in Washington I again saw my old friend Secretary John Hay, who gave me his photograph taken in December, 1904, and consequently his last. He looked ill then, but was so keenly interested in Mexican affairs, and spoke so eulogistically of General Diaz, that on my return to England I ventured to ask him if he would write a few lines for the Biography of the Mexican President, on which I was by that time working. He had already started for Europe when the letter arrived, but he wrote the following hurried lines, penned a week after his return to Washington from his last trip in search of health, when he must have been very busy: “DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, “_June 20th, 1905_. “DEAR MRS. TWEEDIE, “I have received your letter of the 14th of March, asking me to contribute something to your _Life of Diaz_. “It would be a very great pleasure to me to have my name associated with yours in what I am sure will be a very interesting work, but I am obliged to decline all such requests, however agreeable and flattering they may be. “I am, with many thanks, “Sincerely yours, (Signed) “JOHN HAY.” The letter was delivered in London the day following his death. America has always sent us of her best in Ambassadors, but none was more popular or more respected than Colonel John Hay. The most shy and retiring of men, he abhorred ovations; public speaking was torture to him, yet he was the constant recipient of the first, and was excellent at the second. One of the most cultured of American Ambassadors, he was really a man of letters. He had not the acute legal knowledge of Mr. Choate, nor the diplomatic manner of Mr. Whitelaw Reid, but the world knew him and admired him as a man who was honest to the core. No Secretary of State ever did more to bring his country to the front than John Hay. A number of most difficult foreign questions requiring prompt decision—Cuba and the Philippines, Japan and China—came to the forefront during his term of office; and the position, maintained in the world of diplomacy by the United States, was, at the time of his death, totally different from that existing when he first entered her service in the Senate at Washington. Napoleon may have merely boasted when he declared that every French soldier carried a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack. The saying would be literally true if applied to those who march in the ranks of industry and politics in America. There is no office in the State which is not open to the man of brains and grit. If asked for a type of the go-ahead American who is making his mark, I should be inclined to name John Barrett. I have run across him in several quarters of the globe.