From New Hampshire

Geography means nothing to a New Englander. As far as he is concerned, Idaho may or may not be on the Pacific coast, and Wisconsin may be north of Michigan, or again it may not. So apparently in the choice of an Attorney General, other considerations weighed more with President Coolidge than that the man should be a Westerner and ? Progressive.

To be sure, Judge Kenyon of Iowa measured up to the specification of Westerner and Progressive. Republican Senators, with the coming campaign in mind, were not slow in urging Judge Kenyon's appointment. But the President considered. One evening he sent a telegram to Manhattan, and next morning Harlan Fiske Stone, Dean of the Columbia Law School, breakfasted at the White House. A bevy of Senators-Lodge, Borah, Watson, Curtis, Moses and others--were in attendance and talked with Dean Stone. At 10 A. M. Dean Stone's nomination was announced. At noon the nomination was before the Senate.

If the President had searched the country to find the greatest antithesis of Mr. Daugherty, he might well have discovered Mr. Stone in that way. But no such widespread search was necessary. Stone was an Amherst man. He had been born and reared at Chesterfield, in New Hampshire, right next to Vermont. From Amherst he was graduated in '94 when Cal Coolidge was a Junior. Four years later he was graduated from Columbia Law School. Thereafter he began simultaneously to practice law and to teach (at Columbia). He became a member of the firm of Satterlee, Canfield & Stone. In 1910 he became Dean of the Columbia Law School. A year ago he was given leave of absence as Dean and became a member of Sullivan & Cromwell.

Now, ripened 51 years, Dean Stone is solidly built, clean shaven, energetic, quieta business man and a scholar. At college he played centre on the football eleven.-- Now his only outdoor sport is fishing. For recreation he reads serious books. His love of work is insatiable.

In politics, or rather as a citizen, for he has never been in politics, he is a Republican. In regard to confirming his nomination, two political considerations came before the Senate. His former law partner, Herbert L. Satterlee, married a daughter of the late J. Pierpont Morgan. This consideration weighed against Dean Stone with Progressives. But against it was another consideration which weighed equally heavily: during the days of the late War, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was hot on the trail of Reds, Mr. Stone wrote a letter to a subcommittee of the Senate which was investigating those raids. In that letter he protested that the Department of Justice was acting unconstitutionally in denying "due process of law" to arrested aliens.

These were the only two political points in the career of the new Attorney General. Aside from them, his one claim to distinction was that he had performed his previous duties as Law School head, extremely well. The Judiciary Committee of the Senate considered, and approved him. Dean Stone's brother, Dr. Winthrop Ellsworth Stone, President of Purdue University, was killed three years ago by a fall while climbing in the Canadian Rockies. Dean Stone's two sons are at Harvard, one an undergraduate, the other an instructor in mathematics.

*Herbert L. Pratt, the now President of the Standard Oil Co. of New York, was quarterback on the same team.