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Another aspect of the grand manner as it is found in Secretary Mellon is his instinct for beautiful things. There is a richness about the sombre furniture and dark blue upholstery in his office which nothing in official Washington approaches, not even the redecorated White House. His apartment on Massachusetts Avenue is hung, not with an Art Collection, but with pictures of lovely women, unmistakable gentlemen, young girls, old ladies, painted because they were fit subjects for fine art by Vermeer, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence, Hals, Rembrandt, and bought by Andrew Mellon because life is a fine art and such things belong to it naturally when you can afford them. Something of the same instinct that acquired the Mellon paintings is also seen in the Mellon motor car, which was specially designed and constructed entirely of aluminum, not because Mr. Mellon was a power in the aluminum industry but because it seemed a perfect thing to do, and perhaps useful to others.
The Mellon theories of economics and government are neither original in conception nor brilliant in exposition, yet there is a trait of the Mellon mentality which reflects again that fineness of breeding which people have sensed in the lean, grey, little patrician of the Treasury Department. It is in the grand manner intellectually not to worry, not to cross bridges before rivers are reached. This Andrew Mellon never does. To his ability to put off until tomorrow that which is not today's concern, his intimates attribute his unimpaired vigor at an age when most of his business contemporaries are dead or retired after lives which in few cases approached his for fullness or success. "There's luck in leisure," he said last autumn when newsgatherers importuned him for a political utterance. As a political sidestep, it was a neat phrase, but it was more than that. It summed up a good deal of the philosophy of a man who understands that the wisdom of power is in its judicious application, and that politics and votes are like finance and dollars in this: the longer you can delay shifting from an investment to a speculation, the more interest you will accumulate.
* Candidate Lowden's hopes for a G. O. P. Campaign plank favoring the equalization-fee type of farm relief were further submerged last week by the announcement that Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, anti-McNary-Haugen man, is to be chairman of the Platform Committee at Kansas City.
* Name: Maggie. Breed: Holstein. Sex: Heifer.