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William E. Borah

TAKEN at its best, life, to William E. Borah, is little more than a troublesome pilgrimage to the grave.

This does not mean that he is a misanthrope or a seer of distorted vision. On the contrary his sympathies are broad and he has an elusive charm, more apparent in the early years of his political career than now. But, for some reason, probably temperamental, he is in the habit of dwelling upon the dangers that beset the republic--dangers which are sometimes very real. Nevertheless an hour in his presence is more often than not depressing; it leaves one with a sense of impending calamity. There are few bright spots on his horizon.

It is not altogether to his discredit that his more venerable colleagues look upon him as a young man--he is fifty-six; nor does it imply merely arrested political development. For all of his pessimism he maintains a certain freshness, if belligerency, of spirit which is puzzling not only to those who have long since accustomed themselves to the party yoke but to those whom experience has taught the art of compromise. For Borah hates the discipline that organization entails, in spite of his respect for organization, and he dislikes compromise however often he is driven to it. This may be accounted for by the fact that he was not obliged to fight his way laboriously upward on the lower rungs of politics--he landed in the Senate from an Idaho law office in one pyrotechnical leap when he was only forty two--and by the fact that in his make-up he is singularly unpolitical. Disassociating him from his senatorial environment it is much easier to imagine him as a devotee of academic culture, a university professor, a moral crusader, even a poet, than as a politician.