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." At the time of our visit to Raleigh I had not met Mr.Daniels, nor heard him speak.