or “no.”  I lunch at my own desk and generally with my wife, who has charge of our war work in the Department.  We have over thirteen hundred men who have gone out of this Department into the Army. ...  My day is broken into by Cabinet meeting twice a week, meeting of the Council of National Defense twice a week, and latterly with long sessions every afternoon over the question of what railroad wages should be.

My office is a sort of place of last resort for those who are discouraged elsewhere, for Washington is no longer a city of set routine and fixed habit.  It is at last the center of the nation.  New York is no longer even the financial center.  The newspapers are edited from here.  Society centers here.  All the industrial chiefs of the nation spend most of their time here.  It is easier to find a great cattle king or automobile manufacturer or a railroad president or a banker at the Shoreham or the Willard Hotel than it is to find him in his own town.  The surprising thing is that these great men who have made our country do not loom so large when brought to Washington and put to work. ...  Every day I find some man of many millions who has been here for months and whose movements used to be a matter of newspaper notoriety, but I did not know, even, that he was here.  I leave my office at seven o’clock, not having been out of it during the day except for a Cabinet or Council meeting, take a wink of sleep, change my clothes and go to a dinner, for this, as you will remember, is the one form of entertainment that Washington has permitted itself in the war.  The dinners are Hooverized,—­three courses, little or no wheat, little or no meat, little or no sugar, a few serve wine.  And round the table will always be found men in foreign uniforms, or some missionary from some great power who comes begging for boats or food.  These dinners used to be places of great gossip, and chiefly anti-administration gossip, but the spirit of the people is one of unequaled loyalty.  The Republicans are as glad to have Wilson as their President as are the Democrats, I think sometimes a little more glad, because many of the Democrats are disgruntled over patronage or something else.  The women are ferocious in their hunt for spies, and their criticism is against what they think is indifference to this danger.  Boys appear at these dinners in the great houses, because of their uniforms, who would never have been permitted even to come to the front door in other days, for all are potential heroes.  Every woman carries her knitting, and it is seldom that you hear a croaker even among the most luxurious class.  Well, the dinner is over by half past ten, and I go home to an hour and a half’s work, which has been sent from the office, and fall at last into a more or less troubled sleep.  This is the daily round.