With his paper he has done much good in the State, notably by fighting consistently for prohibition and for greater public educational advantages.  The strong educational movement in North Carolina began with a group of men chief among whom were the late Governor Charles B. Aycock, called “the educational governor”; Dr. E.A.  Alderman, who, though president of the University of Virginia, is a North Carolinian and was formerly president of the University of that State; Dr. Charles D. McKeever who committed the State to the principle of higher education for women, and other men of similar high purpose.  A gentleman who was far from an unqualified admirer of Mr. Daniels, told me that without his aid the great educational advance which the state has certainly made of recent years could hardly have been accomplished, and that the same thing applies in the case of prohibition—­which has been adopted in North Carolina.

“What sort of man is he?” I asked this gentleman.

“He is the old type of Methodist,” he said.  “He is the kind of man who believes that the whale swallowed Jonah.  He has the same concept of religion that he had as a child.  I differ with his policies, his politics, his mental methods, but I don’t think anybody here doubts that he is trying, not only to do the moral thing himself, but to force others to adopt, as rules for public conduct, the exact code in which he personally believes, and which he certainly follows.  His mental processes are often crude, yet he has much native shrewdness and the ability to grasp situations as they arise.

“He does not come of the aristocratic class, which probably accounts for his failure, when he first became secretary, to perceive the necessity for discipline in the navy, and the benefits of naval tradition.

“He was an ardent follower—­I might say swallower—­of Bryan, gobbling whole all of the “Great Commoner’s” vagaries.  It has been said, more or less humorously, but doubtless with a foundation of fact, that he was “Secretary of War in all of Bryan’s cabinets.”  That shows where Bryan placed him.  Yet when Bryan broke with Wilson and made his exit from the Cabinet, Daniels found it perfectly simple, apparently, to drop the Bryanism which had, hitherto, been the very essence of his life, and become a no less ardent supporter of the President.

“When he was first taken into the cabinet he evidently regarded the finer social amenities as matters of no consequence, or even as effeminacies.  He had but little sense of the fitness of things, and was, in consequence, continually making faux pas; but he is observant; he has learned a great deal in the course of his life as a cabinet member, both as to his work in the Department, and as to the niceties of formal social life.”