It is a pleasure to bear witness to the affectionate solicitude, the patience, and the good will with which they met the exacting demands of their father.  They realized, of course, as every one who worked for J. P. realized it, that the weight of the burden he placed upon you and the strictness of the account to which you were called were the truest measure of his regard.

Next to politics there was nothing which interested J. P. more than molding and developing the people around him; and what was no more than a strong interest when it concerned his employees became a passion when it concerned his sons.  His activities in this direction ministered alike to his love of power and to his horror of wasted talents; they gratified his ever-present desire to discover the boundaries of human character and intellect, to explore the mazes of human temperament and emotion.

What you knew and what you were able to do, once you had reached a certain standard, became secondary in his interest to what you could be made to know and what you could be taught to do.  He was never content that a man should stand upon his record; growth and development were the chief aims of his discipline.

His method was well illustrated in my own case.  One of his earliest injunctions to me was that I should never introduce any subject of conversation connected, in however remote a degree, with my travels or with my studies in relation to the government of tropical dependencies.  When, for instance, he happened to need some information about India or the West Indies, he always directed one of the other men to find it for him.  This arrangement had, from his standpoint, the double advantage of making the other man learn something of which he was ignorant, and of leaving me free to work at something of which I was ignorant.  Thus J. P. killed two intellectual birds with one stone.

It was not only in regard to mental accomplishments, however, that J. P. pursued his plan of educating everybody around him.  He insisted, among other things, that I should learn to ride, not because there was any lack of people who could ride with him, but because by means of application I could add a new item to the list of things I could do.  After a dozen lessons from a groom I progressed so far that, having acquired the ability to stay more or less in the saddle while the horse trotted, Mr. Pulitzer frequently took me riding with him.

We always rode three abreast—­a groom on J. P.’s right and myself on his left; and conversation had to be kept up the whole time.  This presented no peculiar difficulties when the horses were walking, but when they trotted I found it no easy task to keep my seat, to preserve the precise distance from J. P. which saved me from touching his stirrup and yet allowed me to speak without raising my voice, and to leave enough of my mind unoccupied to remember my material and to present it without betraying the discomfort of my position.