"Life Is Change"

Mellow firelight flickered about the office of the Secretary of the Treasury one morning last week, dappling its black leather arm chairs, glinting on the glass doors of its bookcases and softening the chill rain that fell outside. Behind his broad mahogany desk sat Andrew William Mellon, his thin patrician face a mask to his own reflections. Around the big room were scattered Treasury newshawks attending what would probably be their last press conference with this shy little man puffing meditatively on a black cigar no bigger than a cigaret. His career as Secretary of the Treasury was over; President Hoover, calling him "one of our wisest and most experienced public serv-ants." was sending him to London as U. S. Ambassador.

President Hoover had had some trouble in finding a successor of sufficient calibre to Charles Gates Dawes at the Court of St. James's. Walter Evans Edge, U. S. Ambassador to France, it was reported, had declined promotion to this No. 1 diplomatic post because Mrs. Edge preferred Paris to London. Mr. Dawes. it was said, wanted to see his good old friend Frank Orren Lowden of Illinois given the job but somewhere a hitch had occurred. So President Hoover turned to Mr. Mellon, gently pushed his 76-year-old Secretary of the Treasury upstairs into the foreign service. How did Mr. Mellon feel about it? asked a correspondent.

"Well," replied the old gentleman in his low, pensive voice, "life is change, you know. You can't keep going on in the same channel all the time. . . . The problem of life is where you can be the most useful."

Eleven Years. When the Press had said goodby, Mr. Mellon's eyes roved reminiscently about his comfortable quarters. He had been in them eleven years-- years full of happiness and power. . . . And now he was leaving without fulfilling his ambition to serve in office longer than any other Treasury Secretary in U. S. history. Albert Gallatin (1801-14) was still two years up on him. . . . There was Alexander Hamilton (in canvas) above the fireplace. He had been fervently called the "greatest" since Hamilton. He would. he thought, rather be remembered as the man who, with impressive white public buildings, had made Washington the most beautiful capital in the world. . . . Perhaps this was as good a time as any to be leaving the Treasury, for who really knew when this Depression would end. . . .

Well might Mr. Mellon's mind, in such a reverie, travel back to that rainy day in 1920 when he journeyed to Marion, Ohio where Warren Gamaliel Harding asked him to be one of the ''best minds" in the new Cabinet. His good friend, the late Senator Philander Chase Knox of Pennsylvania, had arranged the Treasury appointment but Mr. Mellon did not relish the glare of public life, was reluctant to accept, had to be made to see his "duty." Pittsburgh knew him as very rich, very powerful, very shy but, withal, somehow qualified for the job. To the untutored electorate he was not even a name.

There were triumphs to be remembered during those years in office. In a decade he had lopped $9,000.000,000 off a $26,-000,000,000 public debt. He had rolled up nine thumping big annual surpluses in a row. On his suggestion and advice taxes had been cut four times by a total of nearly $2,000,000,000, much to the joy of the surtaxpayer. He had helped to fund $12,000,000.000 in War Debts owed by the Allies. It was, he could modestly reflect, not a bad record to look back upon.

To London Mr. Mellon would take other recollections with him. There was that hot June night in 1928 in Kansas City when William Scott Vare stampeded Pennsylvania's Republican national convention delegation to the Hoover candidacy a full twelve hours before Mr. Mellon, its leader, had decided what to do. Not altogether to be forgotten, either, was the order President Hoover issued after two weeks in the White House for publicity on all large tax refunds, contrary to Mr. Mellon's better judgment. And last year, too. there had been some badly crossed wires between the White House and the Treasury as to whether or not increased taxes were necessary.

The final flyspeck for Mr. Mellon was the impeachment charges against him brought by Congressman Wright Patman of Texas in the House. The accusations of holding office illegally because of his wealth and his old corporate connections were threadbare, Mr. Mellon knew, but it would have been nicer to have had them cleared up before his retirement. Their very pendency gave Representative Patman a chance last week to say: "Of course the impeachment charges now become an academic question. Mr. Mellon's appointment is equal to a presidential pardon while the jury still has the case under consideration and before a verdict is re-turned."

Mills for Mellon. Day after Mr. Mellon was named Ambassador to Britain, able Undersecretary Ogden Livingston Mills was, as everyone expected, appointed by President Hoover to succeed him as head of the Treasury. Mr. Mills's nomination was merely White House recognition of the fact that for the past year or so he has been practically running the Treasury over Mr. Mellon's frail shoulder. Between Mr. Mellon and Mr. Mills, 29 years his junior, there was almost a father-and-son relationship which culminated in last week's inheritance of office. Mr. Mills affectionately called his superior "the Old Man." Last year while Mr. Mellon was hopping about Europe, lining up foreign approval for the Hoover Moratorium, Ogden Mills anxiously re marked: "If this thing goes on they'll be bringing the Old Man home in a box."

In Washington, it was Undersecretary Mills on whom President Hoover leaned for his statistical data while negotiating his Moratorium. It was Undersecretary Mills who became the Treasury's voice in Congress, who framed the Administration's present tax program and, along with Governor Meyer of the Federal Reserve Board, conceived the idea of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. High-born, rich and brainy. Secretary Mills goes to the Cabinet a good man at a bad time. On him will fall a good portion of the onus for tax-upping. His will be the discouragement of keeping a Government's unbalanced books in hard times.

Nominated for the undersecretariat was Assistant Secretary Arthur Atwood Ballantine of New York City.

While the U. S. was approving the Mills advancement as a well-earned promotion for a smart young man. Britain was generally acclaiming the Mellon appointment. The new Ambassador had prestige, tact, humor, wealth. He had nothing more to learn in the matter of intergovernmental debts. His love of fine arts endeared him to a cultured aristocracy. But Ambassadors to the Court of St. James's, in the past, have usually been felicitously articulate, if not downright oratorical. Between them and all Britons is the bond of a mother tongue. Speeches were always in order--the smooth elegancies of a Davis, the high-flown outpourings of a Harvey, the salty blasts of a Dawes. But Ambassador Mellon is no public speaker. His words are bashful, stilted; his delivery, an awkward, almost inaudible mumble. Pilgrim dinners in London will probably not be so brilliant as they once were.

Before starting on what he called his "great adventure" in clammy midwinter London, Mr. Mellon last week planned a brief holiday in the South, to cure a lingering cold, rid himself of a hacking little cough and warm his old bones.

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