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LIFE AND SAYINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt 
 
THE 
 
 LIFE AND SAYINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt 
 
 TWENTY-SIXTH PRESIDENT 
 OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 THOMAS HANDFORD 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 CHARLES WALTER BROWN, A. M. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ETHAN ALLEN," "JOHN PAUL 
 JONES," "NATHAN HALE," "LAFAYETTE," 
 "PULASKI," "KOSCIUSZKO," ETC., ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 CHICAGO'' 
 
 M. A. DONOHUE & CO. 
 
 407-429 Deaborn Street 
 
arrs 
 
 • Hi 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF 
 CONGRfeSS, 
 
 T//0 Copies ReceiveO 
 
 AUG 21 1903 
 
 Copynght cr.ttj 
 
 CUSS^ "^ XXc. No 
 
 COPY S. 
 
 Copyright 1903. 
 M. A. DONOHUE & Co, 
 
.J-AjU^^^btrrJ^ /^-cr^C^^-^'^r^ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter I, Birth and Boj^hood 21 
 
 Chapter II, College Days— Days of Travel . . 33 
 
 Chapter III, Life in Earnest 41 
 
 Chapter IV, History of the Naval War of 1812 . 52 
 Chapter V, In the "World of Politics .... 67 
 Chapter VI, Chimney Butte Ranch— The Sports- 
 man on the Plains 77 
 
 Chapter VII, Three Great OfHces— Civil Service, 
 Police Commissioner, Under Secretary of 
 
 the Navy 90 
 
 Chapter VIII, Romance of the Rough Riders- 
 Gathering of the Clans 104 
 
 Chapter IX, On to Santiago, Las Guasimas and 
 
 San Juan . 120 
 
 Chapter X Grand Rally of Rough Riders- 
 Roosevelt's Ovation 127 
 
 Chapter XI, Candidate for Governor of New York 140 
 
 Chapter XII, Elected Governor of New York . 157 
 Chapter XIII, Elected Vice-President of the 
 
 United States 178 
 
 Chapter XIV, Succeeds to the Presidency . . 195 
 
 Chapter XV, Latest Public Utterances . . . 225 
 
 Chapter XVI, The Study of the Home ... 238 
 
 5 
 
6 INDEX TO SYMPOSIUM. 
 
 A Nation's Greatness 268 
 
 A Nation of Mere Hucksters 265 
 
 Alien Elements 248 
 
 An American or Nothing 289 
 
 Echoes of Glory and a Legacy of Honor . . . 243 
 
 England's History Rich in Splendid Names . . 269 
 
 Gems 293 
 
 General Wood in Santiago 261 
 
 Honest but Harmful 244 
 
 If We Were Remiss Cuba Will Have a Grievance 267 
 
 Impracticable Doctrinaires 260 
 
 Know-nothingism Is Un-American .... 280 
 
 Labor Unions 292 
 
 Machine Politicians 283 
 
 Men to Whom We Owe Most 264 
 
 On Receiving the Degree ofLL.D 203 
 
 Our Chief Americans 276 
 
 Our Duty to the State 277 
 
 Our Immediate Duty 255 
 
 Own Brothers to Short-sighted Men .... 254 
 
 Physical and Moral Courage . - 258 
 
 Politics as Practical as Business 279 
 
 Practical Politics 275 
 
 Quack Remedies 277 
 
 Roosevelt's Tribute to Admiral Dewey . . . 295 
 
 Roosevelt's Tribute to General Wood ... 253 
 
 Roosevelt's Fellow Workers 286 
 
 The Age Has Great Tasks 246 
 
 The Best Service is not by the Critic .... 283 
 
 The Emotional and the Practical in Morals . . 250 
 
 The Grand Secret of Permanent Success . . . 281 
 
 The Ideal Citizen 281 
 
INDEX TO SYMPOSIUM. 7 
 
 The Ideal of the Federalist 245 
 
 The Man of Worth to the Comniouwealth . . . 25S 
 
 The Men Who Harm Us 278 
 
 The Monroe Doctrine 209 
 
 The Most Ignoble Character 263 
 
 The Nation's Debt to Washington and Liiicohi . 273 
 
 The Preachers of Discontent ....... 259 
 
 The Peril of the Lawless Classes . . ... . . 250 
 
 The Right to be Optimists— But! 276 
 
 The Worthless Leave no Lasting Impress ... 270 
 
 The Worst Foes of America 252 
 
 The University Man Should Play Iiis Part . . 251 
 We Hold in Our Hands the Fate of the Coming 
 
 Years 272 
 
 We Must Not Shirk ! 257 
 
 We Want Good Ships and Good Men .... 291 
 
 What Can and What Cannot Be Done By Law . 285 
 
 What Nations Owe to Their Great Men ... 261 
 
 Young Men Need Enthusiasm 271 
 
 Young Reformers Reform too Much .... 290 
 
 Roosevelt on Expansion 299 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Though primarily intended as a "Life of 
 Theodore Roosevelt," this work has a far 
 greater value to the youth of our country, in 
 that instead of portraying the character of 
 America's foremost citizen in a lengthy sketch 
 as he appears to his contemporaries, Mr. 
 Roosevelt is permitted to enter freely into the 
 discussion by frequent quotation from his oral 
 and written utterances on questions of vital 
 concern to the American public. 
 
 There are millions of young men and women 
 in America today, between the ages of seven- 
 teen and twenty-five— in the homes and on the 
 farms, in schools and colleges, in stores, offices 
 and factories, in country and in town, who are 
 in the formative period of their years. They 
 are in a malleable condition; they are as clay 
 in the hands of whatsoever potter may chance 
 along to undertake their moulding. The early 
 years of that "golden age" at whose portals 
 we are standing, will be very much what these 
 young men and women make them. We have 
 entered into an inheritance of opportunity, the 
 9 
 
10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 extent and magnitude of which we have but a 
 vague conception. Life never gave so much, 
 and never asked so much as it does today. The 
 old heresy that hfe is "a chapter of accidents" 
 died long ago, and was buried without benefit 
 of clergy or hope of resurrection. No man 
 who has achieved fame came by it through 
 accident. In the world of successful men, and 
 women too, there is no such thing as luck. 
 The possession of great wealth which many 
 seem to crave does not bring fame; if wealth 
 comes through inheritance, it is more often a 
 curse sent in disguise and the curse rests equal- 
 ly upon the ancestor who unwisely bestows 
 as well as upon him who unwittingly receives. 
 The reason why there are so few successful men 
 is because the great mass of humanity waits 
 for riches or fame to be thrust upon them. 
 When one discovers that it is only in fairy 
 books that wealth and greatness come without 
 labor, the sooner he will take off his coat and 
 go to work. Some men discover this fact 
 quite early in life and lay their plans prepara- 
 tory for the summons that is to bear them on 
 to victory. Others waste their strength and 
 years in the endeavor to build up a showy 
 exterior while the inner self is false and rotten. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 11 
 
 In after years they awaken to find how true is 
 
 the adage, 
 
 "There is a tide in the affairs of men 
 
 That taken at the flood leads on to fortune." 
 
 They find too that the flood passed their way, 
 but they were off chasing the shadows of 
 hope — ever following whither the will-o'-the- 
 wisp that sheds its fitful glimmer about the 
 slough of speculation leads them on. But 
 sooner or later they despair of success, and 
 sick at heart, as one by one the visions that 
 flit across life's pathway chsappear, they lay 
 down the burden of life. 
 
 "There arc always in life," says Mr. Roose- 
 velt, "countless tendencies for good and for 
 evil, and each succeeding generation sees some 
 of these tendencies strengthened and some 
 weakened; nor is it by any means always, 
 alas! that the tendencies for evil are weakened 
 and those for good strengthened." Every- 
 thing that can be brought to bear as a health- 
 ful influence on our youth is of the highest im- 
 portance. Patriotism — love of home and of 
 country should be made a branch of study in 
 our common schools for it is the direct business 
 of education to fit the young for the duties of 
 citizenship and for the conflicts of life. There 
 
12 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 is nothing in this world that is or should be 
 stronger than the love of home and country. 
 Fidelity should begin in the family, for when 
 once the home is destroyed, the love of one's 
 country is dissipated through indifference and 
 mistrust. We in America, may sit idly by and 
 condemn much that we do not approve in the 
 morals and government of the people of France, 
 Spain, Turkey, Russia or even of England — 
 rejoicing that we are not adrift on the same 
 sea of immorality and inhumanity, but wise 
 council bids us not to be|too boastful of our own 
 security and eternal righteousness. Observ- 
 ing men and women, whose love of home and 
 country cannot be questioned, and scientists 
 amply versed in sociology are calling attention 
 to the dangers to which our young people are 
 exposed, chiefly in the tenement and the more 
 densely populated sections of our great cities. 
 The pernicious habits and practices of a few un- 
 principled creatures, encouraged by our own 
 indifference, if not checked, will surely unfit 
 the minds and bodies of our youth for the 
 stern reaUties of a responsible citizenship. The 
 only kind of education that can counteract the 
 evils with which we are threatened is the 
 cultivation of active, industrious, moral habits 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 —habits which \vill make our people ashamed 
 to be seen idle — ashamed to do a wrong. It is 
 not culture of mind alone that will save us; the 
 hand and heart must be educated— educated 
 to know and to do the right. "Boys or men of 
 foul Ufe," says Mr. Roosevelt, "cannot become 
 good citizens— good Americans, until they 
 change; and even after the change scars will be 
 left on their souls." 
 
 There are lessons in the lives of men much 
 more potent, however, than all the teaching of 
 the best books and the wisest teachers. As Mr. 
 Gladstone said in the House of Commons, "One 
 example is worth many arguments," it some- 
 times becomes the privilege of a man to stand 
 forth as an example, and to become an inspira- 
 tion to the young men of his generation. Such 
 a man is Theodore Roosevelt, who, in the very 
 prime of his early manhood has reached the 
 highest station possible in all the world— that 
 of president of the great American Republic. 
 
 President Roosevelt is one of the brightest and 
 brainest, men of his generation, a man in whom 
 all the qualities of true manliness are linked, 
 with indomitable perseverance and crowned 
 with a royal sincerity. Because of this he is 
 worthy to be an object lesson to the young 
 
14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 men of America, and will j^rove an inspiration 
 to the noble ideal of American citizenship and 
 through his able leadership we may confidently 
 look forward to the realization of all the writer 
 predicts in this brief introduction. Mr. Roose- 
 velt has used his varied and remarkable j^owers 
 to the uttermost, for the noblest ends. He 
 loves his home — his country and her people 
 with the ardor of a faultless patriotism and a 
 zeal and devotion that never tires. No man 
 has ever doubted his sincerity. His political 
 opponents believe in him, and often wish his 
 sword and shield hung in their camp. He is 
 pure in politics, faithful in friendship, the pride 
 of his companions in arms — in all, an ideal 
 American. For these reasons alone, the career 
 and character of Theodore Roosevelt is heartily 
 commended to the youth of America. 
 
 We cannot all be Roosevelts. It may not 
 be ours to do great things, but the poorest and 
 the lowliest of us can do common things well. 
 We may not be called upon to drive a chariot 
 in triumph from the wars; it may be our 
 destiny to drive a poor, plain wagon along 
 life's rough winding ways. But we can follow 
 Emerson's advice; we can "hitch our wagon to 
 a star," and so, through fallow field and rough 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 highway, we may drive on; our pathway il- 
 lumined by the Hglit of that star now guiding 
 this people on to that era of peace and perfect 
 happiness when all men shall be equal and the 
 eternal principles of equity shall reign supreme. 
 There is an element in the work President 
 Roosevelt has done that is not given the atten- 
 tion it deserves. His contributions to the 
 political and social literature of the time, mark 
 him out as one who would have made a dis- 
 tinguished place for himself in the world of 
 literature, had he not sought and received the 
 highest office within the gift of the American 
 people. He who puts a good book on the 
 bookshelf of the world does the world a good 
 service. In this respect, as well as in many 
 others. President Roosevelt has made his 
 country and his age his debtors. His biogra- 
 phies of "Thomas Hart Benton," "Oliver 
 Cromwell," "Gouverneur Morris"; his "Naval 
 War of 1812 "; his "Strenuous Life, Essays and 
 Addresses "; his "Winning of the West, " in four 
 large volumes; his " Hunting and Ranch Life "; 
 and the charming little volume in which he 
 has dealt with the romantic expedition of the 
 Rough Riders, not to mention the several books 
 of which he is the joint author; all these are 
 
16 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 books of more than common interest. But 
 the book which should prove of more practical 
 value than all the rest is the volume entitled 
 "American Ideals and Other Essays," This 
 volume is made up of essays and addresses on 
 living questions, dealt with in a frank, honest, 
 intelligible manner, and with a vigor that sends 
 directly home to the judgment and the con- 
 science the great principles of pure American- 
 ism. This volume would serve as an excellent 
 text book for political campaigns, and it de- 
 serves a place in every university and college, 
 in every public and private library; and more 
 than this, it is worthy of the careful perusal of 
 every young man and woman in America. 
 
 In the preface of this book Mr. Roosevelt 
 strikes the keynote of his philosophy of true 
 Americanism when he says: 
 
 "These essays are written on behalf of 
 the many men who do take an actual part 
 in trying practically to bring about the con- 
 ditions for which we somewhat vaguely hope; 
 on behalf of the under-officers in that army 
 which, with much stumbling, halting, and 
 slipping, many mistakes and shortcomings, 
 and many painful failures, does, nevertheless, 
 through weary strife, accomplish something 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 toward raising the standard of public life, 
 No one quality or one virtue is enough to 
 insure success; vigor, honesty, common sense- 
 all are needed. The practical man is merely 
 rendered more anxious by his practical ability 
 if he employs it wrongly, whether from ignor- 
 ance or from lack of ability ; while the doctrinaire, 
 the man of theories, whether written or spoken^ 
 is useless if he cannot also act." 
 
 Young men of America, there is a destiny 
 before you that makes life well worth the 
 living. There is work for your hands that 
 kmgs might envy. The night of oppression 
 and fraud, of superstition and insincerity 
 is^ past. The tears of anguish, mingled 
 with the nation's blood, have washed the 
 stains of our country's follies down into the 
 sepulchers of earth. The rainbow of peace 
 now illumines the land, from sea to sea, and 
 from gulf to lakes. We have made mistakes 
 and have been punished severely for our 
 short-sightedness, but in spite of our folly 
 and the mistakes of our fathers, we have 
 builded well, for there has arisen, phoenix-like 
 as Chicago arose from her ashes, a political 
 and social structure, the grandeur of which 
 this world has never known. A new epoch 
 
18 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in man's career has begun. The fusion of 
 all the races settled on the American conti- 
 nent are producing and will continue to produce 
 results seemingly miraculous. A' thousand 
 mysteries, which once seemed inexphcablc, 
 have, under the rational impulse of Ameri- 
 canism, developed into simple and beautiful 
 truths. The age of soul and mind and reason, 
 is dawning and the natural forces which once 
 so mystified and filled the soul with terror, 
 have become the ready instrument in the solu- 
 tion of that most sublime question of our 
 race — the problem of human life. 
 
 And now looking forward with an eye of 
 faith, down through the vista of years to that 
 era of electricity, chemical affinities, and a 
 thousand possibilities, which are yet to be 
 developed, when the laws of evolution, hygiene, 
 pathology and longevity and the principles 
 of sociology and physchology shall be applied 
 to the perfection of the human family, we 
 see a race of people in the land we call America, 
 happy in their innocence and wisdom, and 
 joyous in the peace their minds have wrought. 
 
 Oh, what a prospect for the lover of his 
 country! What rapture in the thought that 
 the stains of the nation's follies have been 
 
INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 cleansed in the people's blood — that their 
 tears of anguish have been dried in the sun- 
 shine of prosperity, and that our country, 
 under the able leadership of a Roosevelt, a 
 ]\IcKinlcy, a Blaine, a Hayes, and a Lincoln, 
 has become the elysium of men and women 
 purified and exalted in the crucible of right- 
 eousness. Here the eternal principles of 
 equity shall yet reign supreme; here human 
 existence will reach its perfection. The watch- 
 man on the mountain height proclaims the 
 dawn of the world's better day, God speed 
 that day, no matter what the cost in blood 
 and treasure be. 
 
 Charles Walter Brown. 
 Chicago, June 1st, 1903. 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 BIRTH AND BOYHOOD. 
 
 For two hundred and fifty years, the 
 name of Roosevelt has been a name to 
 charm with in the best social, commer- 
 cial and political life of New York. The 
 Roosevelts have been among the builders 
 of the nation, and, like many of their 
 compatriots, they "builded better than 
 they knew." They have taken their full 
 share in the business and government of 
 the country; they have presented a bold 
 front in the presence of her foes and have 
 done valiant and heroic service in every 
 war in which she has been engaged from 
 the War of the Revolution to the last 
 conflict with Spain, when Theodore 
 Roosevelt and his gallant Rough Riders 
 
 21 
 
22 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 stormed the bloody heights of Santiago. 
 One of the earliest of our colonists was 
 the sturdy Claas Martensen Van Koose- 
 yelt, who came from Holland to New 
 Amsterdam with his wife, Januetje 
 Thomas, in the year 1G51, thirty years 
 after the Mayflower sailed from Delft 
 Haven. Theodore Roosevelt, the subject 
 of this biographical sketch, comes in a 
 direct line from this pioneer of the sev- 
 enteenth century. We are not disposed 
 to set much store by rank and ancestry. 
 A man may have, as Dryden says: 
 
 "A successive title long and dark 
 Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah's ark." 
 
 And yet be not one whit the better or the 
 worse. This at least is true: our hero's 
 ancestors were men of sterling worth and 
 distinguished ability. One of them, 
 Nicholas Roosevelt, was a member of the 
 Provincial Congress in 1775, a member 
 of the Senate in 1786, and during the 
 same year he was president of the Bank 
 of New York. Another Roosevelt, Nich- 
 olas J, by name, was a rival of Robert 
 
BOOSEVELT. 23 
 
 Fulton in the matter of steamboat inven- 
 tion, lie was the inventor of the vertical 
 paddle-wheel. He surveyed the* Ohio and 
 Mississippi rivers, he had a ship yard in 
 Pittsburg and built the "New Orleans," 
 the first steamboat that plowed its way 
 through "the Father of Waters." One 
 writer with a touch of generous admira- 
 tion seems to think that Mr. Roosevelt 
 absorbed all the excellencies of all his 
 ancestors. lie says: 
 
 "But though Theodore Roosevelt's 
 name is a Holland one, he is almost in 
 equal parts Dutch, French, Irish and 
 Scotch. These commingled streams of 
 blood show in his character, for as occa- 
 sion calls for it, he manifests the Dutch 
 phlegm, the Scotch pertinacity, the 
 French chivalry, and the true Irish wit." 
 
 This is all very pretty, but we prefer 
 to think of him as from head to foot, in 
 heart and brain and hand, in thought and 
 plan and purpose, in hope and impulse 
 and emotion, over all, and above all, a 
 thorough ideal American. 
 
24 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt was born in the 
 family mansion of the Roosevelts, 28 
 East Twentieth street, New York, on the 
 27th of October, 1858. Speaking of his 
 infancy and early years, one who knew 
 the family well says: 
 
 "As a young boy he was thin-shanked, 
 pale, and delicate, giving little promise 
 of the amazing vigor of his later life. To 
 avoid the rough treatment of the public 
 school, he was tutored at home, also at- 
 tending a private school for a time — 
 Cutler's, one of the most famous of its 
 day. Most of his summers, and in fact 
 two-thirds of the year, he spent at the 
 Roosevelt farm hear Oyster Bay, then 
 almost as distant in time from New York 
 as the Adirondacks now are. For many 
 years he was slow to learn and not strong 
 enough to join in the play of other boys; 
 but as he grew older he saw that if he 
 ever amounted to anything he must ac- 
 quire vigor of body. With characteristic 
 energy he set about developing himself. 
 He swam, he rode, he ran ; he tramped the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 25 
 
 hills back of the bay, for pastime study- 
 ing and cataloguing the birds native to 
 his neighborhood; and thus he laid the 
 foundation of that incomparable phys- 
 ical vigor from which rose his future 
 prowess as a ranchman and hunter." 
 
 The delicate boy was brought up in an 
 atmosphere of activity. There were two 
 boys and two girls in the family, and 
 they were all taught to recognize the 
 dignity of labor, and to hold loafing and 
 idleness in contempt. The father of the 
 household was an eminently practical 
 man. If he held theories they were work- 
 able theories, just as good in practice as 
 on paper. He held that men were re- 
 sponsible for every particle of power they 
 possessed. He did not under-value 
 wealth, but he believed and taught his 
 children, that every man being "king of 
 two hands" should use them well in hon- 
 orable toil. There is a fine stanza, writ- 
 ten by some obscure poet on this very 
 theme that would have expressed his 
 sentiments perfectly: 
 
26 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "The noblest men I know on earth. 
 
 Are men whose hands are brown with toil, 
 
 Who, backed by no ancestral graves, 
 Hew down the wood and till the soil. 
 
 And thereby win a prouder fame 
 Than follows a king's or a warrior's name." 
 
 A Avriter iu the "Criterion" tells of 
 some personal interviews he had with 
 Theodore Roosevelt, and in conversation 
 on the subject of physical weakness in 
 very early life, Mr. Roosevelt explains 
 how he was growing tired of being re- 
 garded with pity because he was "a 
 sickly boy." "I was determined," he 
 says, "to make a man of myself!" Such 
 a determination was, if we may be par- 
 doned coining a word, eminently Roose- 
 veltian. When spoken to about being a 
 city boy, he replied: "I belong as much 
 to the country as to the city. I owe all 
 my vigor to the country." Now young 
 gentlemen, from sixteen to seventeen and 
 upwards, you who are growing weary 
 of the hum-drum and monotony of the 
 farm, put that in your memory jar for 
 keeps! 
 
EOOSEVELT. 27 
 
 Before he reached his teens, young 
 Theodore made a voyage with his father 
 across the Atlantic. Remember, this 
 was thirty years ago. A voyage in those 
 days under the most favorable circum- 
 stances was a very different experience 
 from a voyage in these later years. Now, 
 vv^e travel in palaces of splendor v/ith all 
 inconveniences and even sea-sickness at 
 a minimum; then, a voyage to England 
 or any part of Europe for such as were 
 not tolerably good sailors, was simply a 
 tedious torture. To this observant boy 
 of eleven, this journey upon the world of 
 waters must have been a wonderful ex- 
 periences Most of us can remember what 
 strange emotions possessed us when we 
 for the first time found ourselves out of 
 sight of land. There was "water, water 
 everywhere," the water hemmed us in, 
 and sea and sky shook hands, and it 
 seemed to our young) imagination as 
 though we were at least a hundred thous- 
 and miles from anywhere, and a million 
 miles from home. 
 
28 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt was practical 
 rather than emotional, even when a boy. 
 A friend of those early years, Mr. George 
 Cromwell, who shared this voyage with 
 young Roosevelt tells some pleasant 
 stories of the trip. He describes Theo- 
 dore as "a tall, thin lad, with bright 
 eyes and legs like pipe stems," a fragile 
 piece of humanity who gave little prom- 
 ise of the vigorous life that was before 
 him. 
 
 "One of the things I remember about 
 him on that voyage," says Mr. Cromwell, 
 "was that after the ship had got out of 
 sight of land, he remarked, half to him- 
 self as he glanced at the waters, 'I guess 
 there ought to be a good many fish here.' 
 Then an idea suddenly struck him, and 
 turning to me he said: 'George, go get 
 me a small rope from somewhere, and 
 we'll play a fishing game.' I don't know 
 why I went at once in search of that line, 
 without asking why he didn't go himself, 
 but I went and it never occurred to me 
 to put the question. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 29 
 
 "Well, I went after the line and 
 brought it to him. While I was gone on 
 the errand, he had thought out all the de- 
 tails of the fishing game, and had climbed 
 on top of a coiled cable — for, of course, 
 he was to be the fisherman. 
 
 " 'Now,' he said, as I handed him the 
 line, 'all you fellows lie down flat on the 
 deck here, and make believe to swim 
 around like fishes. I'll throw one end of 
 the line down to you, and the first fellow 
 that catches hold of it is a fish that has 
 bit my hook. He must just pull as hard 
 as he can, and if he pulls me down off 
 this coil of rope, why, then, he will be the 
 fisherman and I will be a fish. But if he 
 lets go, or if I pull him up here off the 
 deck, why, I will still be the fisherman. 
 The game is to see how many fish each 
 of us can land up here. The one who 
 catches the most fish wins.' 
 
 "The rest of us lay down flat on our 
 stomachs," Mr. Cromwell says, in con- 
 tinuation of his narrative, "and made 
 believe to swimj and Theodore, standing 
 
30 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 above us on the coiled cable, threw down 
 one end of his line, a thin but strong rope. 
 If I remember correctly my brother was 
 the first fish to grasp the line, and then 
 commenced a mighty struggle. It seemed 
 to be much easier for the fish to pull the 
 fisherman down than for the fisherman 
 to haul up the dead weight of a pretty 
 heavy boy lying flat on the deck below 
 him; and I tell 3-ou it was a pretty hard 
 struggle. My brother held on to the line 
 with both hands, and wrapped his legs 
 around it, grapevine fashion. Theodore 
 braced his feet on the coiled cable, stiff- 
 ened his back, shut his teeth hard, and 
 wound his end of the line around his 
 waist. At first he tried by sheer muscle 
 to pull the fish up; but he soon found it 
 was hard work to lift up a boy about as 
 heavy as himself. Then another bright 
 idea struck him. He pulled less and less, 
 and at last ceased trying to pull at all. 
 Of course the fish thought the fisherman 
 was tired out, and he commenced to pull, 
 hoping to get Theodore down on deck. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 31 
 
 He didn't succeed at first, and pulled all 
 the harder. He rolled over on his back, 
 then on his side, then sat up, all the time 
 pulling and twisting and yanking at the 
 line in every possible way; and that was 
 just what Theodore hoped the fish would 
 do. You see, all this time, while my 
 brother w^as using his strength, Theo- 
 dore simph' stood still, braced like steel, 
 and let him tire himself out. Before very 
 long the fish was so out of breath that 
 he couldn't pull an}' longer, l^esides, the 
 thin rope had cut his hands and made 
 them sore. Then the fisherman com- 
 menced slowly but steadily to pull on the 
 line, and in a very few minutes he had 
 ni}^ brother hauled up alongside of him 
 on the coil of cable." 
 
 A story is told of these early days 
 which we give for what it is w' orth. We 
 have seen this episode fastened on al- 
 most as many young aspiring orators as 
 there are imaginary authors of "The 
 Beautiful Snow." 
 
 The stor}' runs thus: — 
 
 Young Roosevelt was a favorite pupil 
 
32 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 in the smaller institution where the 
 schoolmaster, a gentleman of the old 
 school, taught a score of boys the things 
 most essential for entrance into old Har- 
 vard. In those callow days Theodore was 
 not the finished orator that characterized 
 his later years of public life. Upon one 
 occasion he was called upon to recite 
 the poem beginning: 
 
 "At midnight, in his guarded tent, 
 The Turk lay dreaming of the hour 
 When Greece, her knees in suppliance bent. 
 Should tremble at his power." 
 
 Theodore arose and started out brave- 
 ly. With all the flourishes of boyish en- 
 ergy he repeated the lines as far as 
 "When Greece, her knees — " and then 
 stopped. 
 
 He stammered, shuffled his feet and 
 began again: "When Greece, her 
 knees — " The old schoolmaster leaned 
 forward, and, in a shrill voice, said: 
 "Grease 'em again, Teddy, and maybe it 
 will go then." And Teddy with his usual 
 pluck tried it again with marked suc- 
 cess. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 COLLEGE DAYS— DAYS OF TRAVEL. 
 
 ADd now come Roosevelt's halycon 
 days. For if ever halycon days come to 
 mortal man, they are those days spent 
 in college and university, when the 
 young mind, free from care and untram- 
 meled by any burden of responsibility, is 
 buoyed with hope and all aflame with 
 dreams of destiny. The exercise that 
 would be very wearying to the ordinary 
 man is a perfect luxury to the athlete; 
 and to the true alumnus who loves his 
 Alma Mater"; the college quadrangle is a 
 patch of Paradise, and all the regions 
 round about are Elysian fields. There 
 are no friendships like college friend- 
 ships, no memories so delightful. 
 
 Young Roosevelt entered Harvard Col- 
 lege with all the enthusiasm of the earn- 
 est student. His father had often im- 
 
 33 
 
34 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 pressed on him, and on his brother and 
 sisters, the wise words of Solomon: 
 "Whatsoever thy hand flndeth to do, do 
 it with all thy might." He went to Har- 
 vard resolved to get from Harvard all 
 Harvard could give. He devoted him- 
 self most ardently to these special lines 
 of study: 
 
 1. History. 
 
 2. Natural History. 
 
 - 3. Political Economy. 
 
 When a boy on his father's farm he 
 had lived nearer to nature's heart than 
 he knew. He saw the beauty of earth 
 and sea and sky, "with eyes serene;'^ he 
 heard the voices of the woodlands, the 
 songs of birds and the sighing of the 
 night-winds, with "the inner ear." He 
 longed to see nature in her grander forms 
 and her sublimer manifestations. And 
 all in/ good time these yearnings were sat- 
 isfied on the snowy heights of the Jung- 
 frau and the Matterhorn; and amid the 
 majestic solitudes of the canons of Col- 
 orado. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 
 
 35 
 
36 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt was never a 
 dreamer of dreams, and with all a poet's 
 love of nature in her multitudinous 
 forms, he was practical to the very utter- 
 most, and studied with equal zest ab- 
 struse logical questions and the prosier 
 tenets of political economy. 
 
 He was for a little time editor of the 
 "Harvard Advocate," but the luxury of 
 wielding that mystic wand the editorial 
 "We" was only an incident, hardly an 
 episode in his busy career. 
 
 What distinction he won at Harvard 
 was rather in the line of athletics. He 
 took his full share in all the delights and 
 exercises of the gymnasium and the field. 
 He was the champion lightweight boxer 
 at Harvard, and entertains a very high 
 regard for the fistic art. He says: — 
 
 "When I was in Harvard, and sparred 
 for the championship, I suffered a heavier 
 punishment than any man there did, and 
 I have been knocked out at Polo twice 
 I don't care much for professional sport 
 of any kind, but I thoroughly believe in 
 
ROOSEVELT. 37 
 
 boxing, exactly as I believe in football 
 and other manly games." 
 
 At last the college days came to an 
 end. Theodore Roosevelt was graduated 
 from Harvard College in 1880. He was 
 a Phi Beta Kappa man. He brought 
 away from his Alma Mater the ground- 
 work and foundation of generous, liberal 
 education, upon which he has been build- 
 ing steadily and surely ever since. There 
 was a brief period of study at Dresden, 
 then came days of happy, inspiring and 
 invigorating travel. A year was spent 
 in Europe and the East. Switzerland, 
 the fairest country God's sun shines on, 
 the scene of all that is enchanting, pictur- 
 esque and beautiful, had special charms 
 for the young American traveler. Moun- 
 tains are always attractive to the ambi- 
 tious. There is a physical, a mental — and 
 for the matter of that, a moral bracing 
 in the atmosphere of their summits that 
 can nowhere else be found; and tliis little 
 Switzerland is the land of mountains, 
 range on range, whose glittering peaks 
 
38 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 are white with iinmelting snows; the 
 land of Mont Blanc, of the Jiingf ran and 
 the Matterhorn. How lordly and sub- 
 lime those monarchs of the mountain 
 stand! What a theatre of glory is 
 Chamouni's Vale! 
 
 Who that has once read can ever forget 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ''Hymn Be- 
 fore Sunrise in the Vale of Ghamouni?" 
 It is necessary to stand in the mystic 
 vale and see the sunlight on Mont Blanc's 
 "White and awful brow," to fully appre- 
 ciate these matchless lines, which it was 
 worth living to write if the poet had 
 written nothing more: 
 
 "Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star 
 In his steep course? So long he seems to pause 
 On thy bald, awful head, O sovereign Blanc! 
 The Arve and Arvelron at thy base 
 Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form, 
 Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines. 
 How silently! Around thee and above. 
 Deep in the air and dark, substantial black — 
 An ebon mass. Methinks thou piercest it. 
 As with a wedge! But when I look again. 
 It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, 
 Thy habitation from eternity! 
 
KOOSEVELT. 39 
 
 O, dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee. 
 Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
 Didst vanish from my thought. Entranced in 
 
 prayer, 
 I worshipped the Invisible. 
 * * * * * * 
 
 Who bade the sun 
 Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living 
 
 flowers, 
 Of lovliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? 
 God!— Let the torrents, like a shout of nations, 
 Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! 
 God!— sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome 
 
 voice ! 
 Ye pine-groves, with j^our soft and soul-like 
 
 sounds! 
 And they too have a voice, you piles of snow. 
 And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! 
 Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost! 
 Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! 
 Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain storm. 
 Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! 
 Ye sighs and wonders of the elements! 
 Utter forth God— and flll the hills with praise!" 
 
 The sight of brave men and brave wo- 
 men daring the perilous task of climbing 
 the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn stirred 
 every drop of blood in young Roosevelt's 
 heart, and with true Rooseveltian ambi- 
 tion he started to climb these mountains, 
 
40 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 and did not Stay his climbing till he 
 reached the summit. The thing thihs in- 
 trepid man undertakes he generally ac- 
 complishes, sooner or later. He reminds 
 one of that Scripture text: "And the 
 children of Israel started out to go to 
 the land of Canaan, and to the land of 
 Canaan they went." Returning home by 
 way of London he made a host of friends, 
 and was enthusiastically elected a mem- 
 ber of the Alpine Club of London. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 LIFE IN EARNEST. 
 
 The days of preparation are over, life 
 now begins in earnest. The feeble, deli- 
 cate boy had become th^ robust, stalwart 
 young man. He was barely twenty-three 
 years of age, the drama of life was about 
 to begin. The curtain was rising, he 
 knew his cue, and was waiting for the 
 call. He might have chosen a butterfly 
 life. He w^as even now possessed of 
 wealth enough to have kept him in lux- 
 ury all his life. He might have spent his 
 days in sauntering idleness, a pet of soci- 
 ety, a favorite of the clubs. But one 
 glance of the young New Yorker shows 
 that none of these things are to his taste. 
 He stands four-square, and looking with 
 level, earnest eyes, gives the world as- 
 surance of a man. 
 
 For a few months he attempted the 
 41 
 
42 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 study of the law with his uncle, Robert 
 B. Roosevelt; but he was born for advo- 
 cacy, for energy, for fighting, for vigor- 
 ous action rather than quiet musing, the 
 battlefield rather than the cloister was 
 his choice. He plunged into the political 
 world — and just then the political world 
 of New York offered all the fighting a 
 reasonable man could desire. He began 
 attending primaries and other political 
 meetings, and found enough to employ 
 his ardor to the uttermost He began 
 making political addresses that evi- 
 denced much study and a thorough un- 
 derstanding of the political situation. 
 
 Shrewd, far-seeing men began to speak 
 of Theodore Roosevelt as one of the 
 "coming men of largest promise!" And 
 their predictions were not without rea- 
 sonable foundation. A man who could 
 speak with the directness and force that 
 began to characterize all his public utter- 
 ances, was sure to win the confidence as 
 well as the admiration of his hearers. 
 He was a growing power on the platform, 
 
ROOSEVELT. 43 
 
 and began to sway multitudes with tlie 
 wand of straiglitforward common sense, 
 rather than by any tricks of the profes- 
 sional orator. One of the memorable ad- 
 dresses of this period was delivered be- 
 fore a conference for good government, 
 held in the City of Philadelphia. On that 
 occasion Mr. Koosevelt said: 
 
 "There are two gospels I always want 
 to preach to reformers, whether they are 
 working for civil service reform, for 
 municipal reform, or for any other re- 
 form., The first is the gospel of mora lity ; 
 the next is the gospel of eflflciency. To a 
 body like this I do not think I have to 
 dwell much upon the necessity of being 
 straight and decent, for of course a man 
 must try to render disinterested, honest 
 service to the community if he has the 
 least claim to be called a good citizen. 
 But I know you don't need to have me 
 dwell upon this side of the question. You 
 come here representing the men who sin- 
 cerely wish to see our municipal govern- 
 ment purified, to see our public officials 
 
44 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 elected because they are likely to render 
 honest service to the community, and to 
 see our whole political life conducted 
 in accordance with the highest standards 
 of morality. 
 
 "I don't have to tell you to be upright, 
 but I do think I have to tell you to be 
 practical and efficient. When I say prac- 
 tical I don't mean that you have got to 
 connive at wrong-doing or submit to it; 
 on the contrary, I believe that the most 
 practical politicians are the most honest, 
 and that in the long run the politics of 
 fraud and treachery and bribery and 
 foulness are unpractical politics. But I 
 do mean to say that you have got to face 
 facts as they are; that, while keeping a 
 high standard, you have yet got to realize 
 that there are very many men whose 
 standard is not so high, and that you 
 must strive to get out from these men 
 the best that lies in them, even though 
 it is not absolute best. In condemning 
 men whose standards are not so high as 
 they ought to be (though this condem- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 45 
 
 nation is often necessary), you must be 
 careful not to encourage men whose 
 standards are still lower. It is sometimes 
 necessary to help the best by overthrow- 
 ing the good, even though it produces 
 the temporary triumph of the bad; but 
 such action must always be regarded as 
 exceptional; to follow it out as a steady 
 policy is an infallible method of working 
 evil to the community. 
 
 "Two points in especial bear in mind; 
 be actors, and not merely critics of others, 
 in the first place, and in the second, do 
 not try to accomplish anything at the 
 very beginning, and then because you fail 
 abandon the effort to accomplish any- 
 thing. 
 
 "As to the first point, criticism is a 
 very good thing, but work is a much bet- 
 ter one. It is not the man who sits at 
 home in his parlor, the man who reads 
 his evening paper before the fire and says 
 how bad our politicians are, who ever 
 works an improvement in our municipal 
 government. It is the man who goes out 
 
46 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 to the primaries and the polls, who at- 
 tends the meetings of his party organiza- 
 tions if he is a party man, or who gets up 
 effective independent organizations if he 
 is not a party man, the man who v/ins in 
 actual hard fighting, and who is not 
 afraid of the blood and sweat — he is the 
 man who deserves our gratitude; he is 
 the man upon whom we must ultimately 
 rely for results. Meetings like this, 
 where all of us who believe alike get to- 
 gether, talk with one another, and learn 
 to see the situation as it is, and try to 
 plan methods for making it better, serve 
 an admirable purpose, too; but the real 
 battle must be fought out on other and 
 less pleasant fields. In the end the work 
 has got to be done by actual, hard, stub- 
 born, long continued service in the field 
 of practical politics itself. You have got 
 to go out and meet not merely the men 
 who think like you, but the men who 
 think differently from you. You have 
 got to try to win them to your side by 
 argument, to try to beat them and over- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 47 
 
 throw them, and drive them from the 
 field if you can't win them by argument. 
 You may as well make up your mind at 
 the beginning that when you thus go into 
 practical politics you will make some 
 mistakes, and you will be criticised by 
 those who don't go in; but you may make 
 up your mind also that in no other way 
 can you ever achieve anything, and that 
 the crown must finally be awarded, not 
 to the man who says how poorly others 
 have done their work, but to the man 
 who actually does the work, even though 
 he does it imperfectly and with many 
 shortcomings. 
 
 "Again, don't try to begin by reform- 
 ing the whole world. Prove yourself to 
 be a tolerably efficient under-officer be- 
 fore you aspire to the work of the com- 
 mander-in-chief. Of course, from the 
 outset you must take an interest in the 
 great problems of state and national leg- 
 islation, no less than of municipal; but 
 this must not be all. Go into your own 
 assembly district, try to find out the men 
 
48 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 who think as you do, and whom you can 
 spur into taking some kind of an active 
 part; then, whether you are a Republican 
 like myself, a Democrat like my friend 
 here, or an Independent like my friend 
 there, try to get your fellows to organize 
 with you and to organize on a basis of 
 desire for clean, decent government. Be- 
 come thoroughly familiar with the work 
 of the different machines in your district, 
 with the work gone through in nomi- 
 nating candidates, no less than in prepar- 
 ing for the actual battle at the polls. Try 
 to make your influence felt on your local 
 representative, whether a councilman, 
 alderman, or any other oflflcial. Make 
 yourself a power. Teach the politicians, 
 and by degrees teach the people, too, that 
 you are not only disinterested, but that 
 you are efficient also; that you are striv- 
 ing for the right, and that when you hit 
 you hit to some purpose. 
 
 "In carrying on your battle for decency 
 remember one thing; if you are to win 
 you must win by being straight out 
 
ROOSEVELT. 40 
 
 Americans, and by conducting your cam- 
 paign in the regular American spirit. If 
 you try to organize your movement on 
 any line of caste, or any line of birth- 
 place or of creed, you will be beaten, and 
 you will deserve to be beaten. Go into 
 our politics simply as Americans. Work 
 heartily with the man in whose ideas 
 you believe and who believes in your 
 ideas, without any reference to whether 
 he is a Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Prot- 
 estant, whether he was born here or 
 abroad, whether he is a banker or a 
 butcher, a professor or a hod-carrier, a 
 railway president or the owner of a cor- 
 ner store; in short, act as Americans, and 
 as nothing else. 
 
 "In conclusion, one thing: Don't forget 
 that while you must cultivate all the 
 softer virtues, yet that you will cease to 
 be men if you fail to cultivate the strong- 
 er virtues likewise. You must be disin- 
 terested, unselfish, upright; but you must 
 also be sincere and resolute and courage- 
 ous, morally and physically able to take 
 
50 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 punishment without flinching, and to 
 give punishment in turn when the time 
 and the need arise. Above all, remember 
 that there is nothing more contemptible 
 than to flincli from a task because you 
 find it disagreeable, or because at first 
 you fail to achieve the success that you 
 think you should. If you find that at first 
 you are powerless, that your efforts for a 
 month or two or a year or two fail to re- 
 sult in anything, then it is merely your 
 duty to redouble your efforts, and, if nec- 
 essary, to try to change and improve your 
 methods. If you find that the people with 
 whom you are thrown in contact in polit- 
 ical life have low moral ideals, and are 
 coarse and disagreeable, and yet too 
 often are triumphant, why, instead of 
 flinching from them, remember that if 
 you are men you will stand up all the 
 stouter in your battle. If you wish to ac- 
 complish anything in the field of munic- 
 ipal reform you must be upright and dis- 
 interested; you must be practical and 
 willing to work hard, and not merely 
 
EOOSEVELT. 51 
 
 criticise; you must be Americans through 
 and through, in temper and spirit and 
 heart, and you must possess the essential 
 virtues of manliness, of resolution, and of 
 indomitable courage." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ROOSEVELT'S HISTORY OF THE NAVAL WAR 
 
 OF 1812. 
 
 Later on in these pages opportunity 
 will present itself to call attention to 
 Theodore Eoosevelt as a man of rare 
 literary power and of untiring in- 
 dustry in the realm of letters. The 
 world at large is not aware how many 
 good books this busy man of affairs has 
 placed upon the bookshelf of the world, 
 some of which are surely destined to 
 more than ephemeral fame. This seems 
 to be on the whole a good time to call 
 attention to his exhaustive compedium 
 of Naval matters contained in a large 
 octave volume of 549 closely printed 
 pages, entitled, "The Naval War of 1812; 
 or the History of the United States Navy 
 During the Last War with Great Brit- 
 ain." Theodore Roosevelt lives in this 
 invaluable book. He has written him- 
 52 
 
ROOSEVELT. 53 
 
 self into this important national record — 
 the frankness, the impartiality, the fear- 
 less honesty, the transparent patriotism 
 that characterize the man, are all here, 
 bristling on every page of this first effort 
 of his facile and enchanting pen. There 
 will be time enough by and by for elegant 
 phrases and ornate forms of speech; but 
 just now the young author is very busy 
 with stern hard facts. He was in the 
 very morning of his manhood when he 
 undertook this task, that to the ordinary 
 mind would seem dull and uninviting. 
 But America greatly needed such a book. 
 In the brief preface to the first edition of 
 "The Naval War of 1812," the author 
 says: 
 
 "Much of the material in our Navy De- 
 partment has never been touched at all. 
 In short, no full, accurate, and unpreju- 
 diced history of the War has ever been 
 written." 
 
 But such a book was greatly needed. 
 No nation can afford that any pages of its 
 history should be forgotten, but there are 
 
54 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 some pages so fraught with importance 
 that to leave them blank would be a dis- 
 honor and a shame. Such were the pages 
 that comprise the years 1812-1813-1814- 
 1815. Mr. Eoosevelt boldly set himself 
 to the task of preparing this goodly vol- 
 ume. Later on in the preface he says: — 
 "Without abating a jot from one's devo- 
 tion to his country and his flag, I think 
 a history can be made just enough to 
 warrant its being received as an author- 
 ity equally among Americans and Eng- 
 lishmen. I have endeavored to supply 
 such a work. It is impossible that errors, 
 both of fact and opinion, should not have 
 crept in; and although I have sought to 
 make it in character as non-partisan as 
 possible, these errors will probably be 
 in favor of the American side." 
 
 Speaking of this work, Rupertl Hughes, 
 writing in the "Criterion," says: "It goes 
 back to the sources, and reconstructs 
 history with critical determination to 
 find the truth. He finds many of the 
 American historians given to bombast 
 
KOOSEVELT. 55 
 
 and distortion of facts, and he leaves to 
 the English authority, James, hardly a 
 shred of reputation, proving him an un- 
 scrupulous misquoter even of British 
 authorities, and in general a liar extra- 
 ordinary and plenipotentiary. Colonel 
 Roosevelt thinks that Commodore Perry 
 has been grossly over-rated. The en- 
 thusiasm he withholds from Perry he 
 lavishes on Macdonough. He writes ex- 
 pertly of ships and crews and guns. This 
 book has reached its seventh edition, and 
 explains his fitness, in learning at least, 
 for the post of Assistant Secretary of the 
 Navy, though his appointment caused, at 
 first, some surprise." 
 
 In the very beginning of the volume 
 the author gives a graphic picture of the 
 relative conditions of the British and 
 United States Navy, part of which we 
 here transcribe: — 
 
 "During the early years of this century 
 England's naval power stood at a height 
 never reached before or since by that of 
 any other nation. On every sea her na- 
 
56 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 vies rode, not only triumphant, but with 
 none to dispute their sway. These island 
 folk had long claimed the mastery of the 
 ocean, and they had certainly succeeded 
 in making their claim completely good 
 during the time of bloody warfare that 
 followed the breaking out of the French 
 Kevolution. Since the year 1792 each 
 European nation, in turn, had learned 
 to feel bitter dread of the weight of Eng- 
 land's hand. In the Baltic, Sir Samuel 
 Hood had taught the Russians that they 
 must needs keep in port when the Eng- 
 lish cruisers were in the offing. The de- 
 scendants of the Vikings had seen their 
 whole navy destroyed at Copenhagen. 
 No Dutch fleet ever put out after the day 
 when off Camperdown Lord Duncan took 
 possession of DeWinter's shattered ships. 
 But a few years before 1812 the greatest 
 sea-fighter of all time had died in Trafal- 
 gar Bay, and in dying had crumbled to 
 pieces the navies of France and Spain. 
 
 "From that day England's task was 
 but to keep in port such of her foes' ves- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 57 
 
 sels as she had not destroyed. France 
 alone still possessed fleets that could be 
 rendered formidable, and so from the 
 Scheldt to Toulon, her harbors were 
 watched and her coasts harried by the 
 blockading squadrons of the English. 
 Elsewhere the latter had no fear of their 
 power being seriously assailed; but their 
 vast commerce and numerous colonies 
 needed ceaseless protection. According- 
 ly, in everj' sea their cruisers could be 
 found, of all sizes, from the stately ship 
 of-the-line, with her tiers of heavy can- 
 non and her many hundreds of men, down 
 to the little cutter carrying but a score 
 of souls and a couple of light guns. All 
 these cruisers, but especially those of 
 the lesser rates, wxre continually brought 
 into contact with such of the hostile ves- 
 sels as had run through the blockade, or 
 were too small to be affected by it, 
 French and Italian frigates were often 
 fought and captured when they were 
 skirting their own coasts, or had started 
 off on a plundering cruise through the 
 
58 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 Atlantic, or to the Indian Ocean; and 
 tliough the Danes had lost their larger 
 ships they kept up a spirited warfare 
 with brigs and gunboats. So the English 
 marine was in constant exercise, attend- 
 ed with almost invariable success." 
 
 Then follows a vivid and graphic de- 
 scription of the naval power of the 
 United States w^hen Congress declared 
 war upon Great Britain. 
 
 "Such," says Theodore Roosevelt, "was 
 Great Britain's naval power when the 
 Congress of the United States declared 
 war upon her. While she could number 
 her thousand sail, the American navy in- 
 cluded but half a dozen frigates, and six 
 or eight sloops and brigs; and it is small 
 matter for surprise that the British 
 should have regarded their new foe with 
 contemptuous indifference. Hitherto, the 
 American seamen had never been heard 
 of except in two or three engagements 
 with French frigates, and some obscure 
 skirmishes against the Moors of Tripoli, 
 none of which could possibly attract at- 
 
EOOSEVELT. 59 
 
 tention in the years that saw Aboukir, 
 Copenhagen and Trafalgar. And yet 
 these same petty wars were the school 
 which raised our marine to the highest 
 standard of excellence. A continuous 
 course of victory, won mainly by seaman- 
 ship, had made the English sailor over- 
 weeningly self-confident, and caused him 
 to pay but little regard to manoeuvring 
 or even to gunnery. Meanwhile the 
 Americans learned, by receiving hard 
 knocks, how to give them, and belonged 
 to a service too young to feel over-confi- 
 dence in itself. One side had let its train- 
 ing relax, while the other had carried It 
 to the highest possible point. Hence, our 
 ships proved, on the whole, victorious iu 
 the apparently unequal struggle, and the 
 men who had conquered the best seamen 
 of Europe were now in turn obliged to 
 succumb. Compared with the great 
 naval battles of the preceding few years, 
 our bloodiest conflicts were mere skirm- 
 ishes, but they were skirmishes between 
 the hitherto acknowledged Kings of the 
 
60 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 Ocean, and seamen who yet proved to 
 be more than their equals. For over a 
 hundred years, or since the time when 
 they had contended on equal terms with 
 the great Dutch admirals, the British 
 had shown a decided superiority to their 
 various foes, and during the latter quar- 
 ter of the time this superiority, as already 
 said, was very marked, indeed; in conse- 
 quence, the victories of the new enemy 
 attracted an amount of attention alto- 
 gether disproportionate to their material 
 effects. And it is a curious fact that our 
 little navy, in which the art of handling 
 and fighting the old broadside, sailing 
 frigate in single conflict, was brought to 
 the highest point of perfection ever 
 reached, that this same navy should have 
 contained the first representative of the 
 modern war steamer, and also the tor- 
 pedo — the two terrible engines which 
 were to drive from the ocean the very 
 white-winged frigate that had first won 
 honor for the starry flag. 
 
 "The tactical skill of Hull or Decatur 
 
ROOSEVELT. 61 
 
 is now of merely archaic interest, and has 
 but little more bearing on the man- 
 oeuvring of a modern fleet than have the 
 tactics of the Athenian galleys. But the 
 war still conveys some practical lessons 
 as to the value of efficient ships and, 
 above all, of efficient men in them. Had 
 we only possessed the miserable gun- 
 boats, our men could have done nothing; 
 had we not possessed good men, the 
 heavy frigates would have availed us lit- 
 tle. Poor ships and impotent artillery 
 had lost the Dutch almost their entire 
 navy; fine ships and heavy cannon had 
 not saved the French and Spanish from 
 a like fate. We owed our success to put- 
 ting sailors even better than the Dutch 
 on ships even finer than those built by 
 the two Latin seaboard powers." 
 
 A few brief passages from Chapter IX. 
 of this elaborate volume in which Mr. 
 Roosevelt sums up the results of the war, 
 will serve the purpose of presenting to 
 the young American of this generation 
 an intelligible conception of that great 
 
62 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 struggle, and of the character of the men 
 who conducted it to an honorable and 
 successful issue. 
 
 The treaty of peace between the United 
 States and Great Britain was signed at 
 Ghent, December 24, 1814, and ratified 
 at Washington, February 18, 1815. But 
 during these first two months of 1815, 
 and until the news reached the cruisers 
 on the ocean, the warfare went on with 
 much the same characteristics as before. 
 The blockading squadrons continued 
 standing on and off before the ports con- 
 taining warships with the same unweary- 
 ing vigilance; but the ice and cold pre- 
 vented any attempts at harrying the 
 coast except from the few frigates scat- 
 tered along the shore of the Carolinas 
 and Georgia, There was no longer any 
 formidable British fleet in the Chesa- 
 peake or Delaware, while at New Orleans 
 the only available naval force of the 
 Americans consisted of a few small row- 
 
ROOSEVELT 
 
 63 
 
 boats, with which they harrassed the 
 rear of the retreating British. 
 
 ****** 
 
 In summing up the results of the strug- 
 gle on the ocean, it is to be noticed that 
 very little was attempted, and nothing 
 done, by the American Xavy that could 
 materially affect the result of the war. 
 * * * The material results were not 
 very great, at least in their effect on 
 Great Britain, whose enormous navy did 
 not feel in the least degree the loss of a 
 few frigates and sloops. But, morally, 
 the result was of inestimable benefit to 
 the United States. The victories kept 
 up the spirits of the people cast down by 
 the defeats on land; practically decided 
 in favor of the Americans the chief ques- 
 tion in dispute— Great Britain's right of 
 search and impressment — and gave the 
 navy, and thereby the country, a world 
 wide reputation. I doubt if ever before a 
 nation gained as much honor by a few 
 single-ship duels. For there can be no 
 question which side came out of the war 
 
64 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 with the greatest credit. The damage 
 inflicted by each on the other was not 
 very unequal in amount, but the balance 
 was certainly in favor of the United 
 States, as can be seen by the following 
 tables, for the details of which reference 
 can be made to the various years: 
 
 AMERICAN LOSS. BRITISH LOSS. 
 
 Caused: Tonnage. Guns. Tonnage. Guns. 
 
 By Ocean cruisers. .5,987 278 8,451 351 
 
 On the lakes 727 37 4,159 212 
 
 By the army 3,007 116 500 22 
 
 By privateers ... 402 20 
 
 Total 9,718 431 13,512 605 
 
 In addition, we lost four revenue cut- 
 ters, mounting 24 guns, and, in the ag- 
 gregate of 387 tons, and also 25 gun- 
 boats, with 71 guns, and in the aggregate 
 of nearly 2,000 tons. This would swell 
 our loss to 12,105 tons, and 526 guns; but 
 the loss of the revenue cutters and gun- 
 boats can fairly be considered to be coun- 
 ter-balanced by the capture or destruc- 
 tion of the various British Royal Pack- 
 ets — all armed with from 2 to 10 guns^ 
 
ROOSEVELT. 65 
 
 tenders, barges, etc., which would be the 
 aggregate of at least as great tonnage 
 and gun force, and with numerous crews. 
 
 The British Navy numbering at the 
 outset a thousand cruisers, had accomp- 
 lished less than the Americans, which 
 numbered but a dozen. Moreover, most 
 of the loss suffered by the former was in 
 single fight, while this had been but twice 
 the case with the Americans, who had 
 generally been overwhelmed by num- 
 bers. 
 
 ***♦♦# 
 
 The clock of his years had not struck 
 twenty-five when Theodore Roosevelt 
 produced this exhaustive standard vol- 
 ume of national importance. It has 
 passed through seven editions; it is ac- 
 cepted both by British and American 
 seamen as an authority on the special 
 subject with which it deals, and has a 
 place in the library of every warship in 
 the American Navy and every Naval in- 
 stitution in the United States. It would 
 
66 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 be worth the while of every American 
 sailor to study this book. The author of 
 this book is very proud of the American 
 sailor. Speaking of them as a class, he 
 says: 
 
 "There were no better seamen in the 
 world than the American Jack; he had 
 been bred to his work from his infancy, 
 and had been off in a fishing dory almost 
 as soon as he could walk. When he grew 
 older, he shipped on a merchantman or 
 whaler, and in those warlike times, when 
 our merchant marine was compelled to 
 rely pretty much on itself for protection, 
 each craft had to be handled well; all 
 who were not were soon weeded out by 
 a process of natural selection of which 
 the agents were French picaroons, Span- 
 ish buccaneers, and Malay pirates. It was 
 a rough school, but it taught Jack to be 
 both skillful and self-reliant." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN THE WORLD OF POLITICS. 
 
 In the days when Roscoe Conkling was 
 in all his glory as the Republican leader 
 of New York State, and John Kelly sat 
 as Democratic King in Tammany Uall; 
 when everything of a political character 
 was run by the respective party ma- 
 chines; when the true patriot seemed lost 
 in the professional politician; Theodore 
 Roosevelt came to the front. He had been 
 trained to regard citizenship as involving 
 simple, practical responsibilities. He 
 thought, for example, that every man 
 should learn how to bear arms. He had 
 entered the State Militia, and subse- 
 quently joined the Eighth Regiment, 
 New York State National Guards, as 
 Second Lieutenant, of which he became 
 Captain in 1888. The war with Spain 
 w^as not even dreamed of in those days, 
 
 or 
 
68 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 and the young lieutenant of the State 
 National Guard could not know for what 
 brave service he was preparing himself. 
 
 The first plunge into politics was as 
 candidate for the State Legislature, in 
 the Twenty-first district. The district was 
 Republican. Voters had grown tired of 
 their ward "boss" and the name of young 
 Roosevelt had power to charm. He was 
 nominated at the primaries, and in due 
 course he was elected. Mr. Roosevelt, 
 referring some years after to this episode 
 in his life, says : — 
 
 "I always believed, and do yet, that a 
 man should join a political organization 
 and should attend the primaries; that he 
 should not be content to be governed, 
 but should do his part in the work. So 
 upon leaving college I went to the local 
 political headquarters, attended all the 
 meetings and took part in whatever was 
 up. There came a revolt against the 
 member of the Assembly from that dis- 
 trict, and I was nominated to succeed 
 him, and was elected." 
 
ROOSEVELT. 69 
 
 In his "Life of Eoosevelt," referring to 
 his entrance on public service, Mr. Clem- 
 ens says: — 
 
 "When Mr. Roosevelt took the oath of 
 office, in the Assembly in January, 1882, 
 both houses of the Legislature presented, 
 in external appearance at least, a marked 
 contrast to the weed Legislature of a 
 decade previous. In Weed's time the 
 legislators^ had received three dollars per 
 day. In 1882 they received fifteen dollars. 
 Mr. Roosevelt was the youngest member 
 of the Legislature. Some of the old polit- 
 ical war horses from New York promptly 
 named him ^silk-stocking,' and passed 
 him by as one of the freaks of a popular 
 election. But they misjudged their man, 
 for Mr. Roosevelt had a faculty of making 
 himself a storm center. He studied his 
 colleagues until he knew whom he could 
 trust and whom he must fight, and then, 
 quite to the dismay of some of his fellow 
 legislators, he went to work. Within 
 two months he was) the undisputed leader 
 of the Republican minority of the house. 
 
70 eoosetelt. 
 
 He began at once his fight for reform, 
 and fought so well that in a year he was 
 known all over the country as a new 
 power in the Albanj^ halls of legislation. 
 
 "Mr. Roosevelt believes now, as he be- 
 lieved then, that 'Politics and war are the 
 two biggest games there are.' He played 
 in politics at Albany like a soldier, at- 
 tacked the bosses and the methods of the 
 machine, and laughed bravely enough, 
 when the New York newspapers, backed 
 by the bosses, lampooned and derided 
 him and his motives. He succeeded in se- 
 curing the passage of the famous Eoose- 
 velt Aldermanic bill, which deprived the 
 City Council of New York of the right to 
 veto the mayor's appointments, the pro- 
 vision under which Weed and his ring- 
 sters had waxed fat This was the most 
 important work he did in Albany. 
 
 "The voters of the Twenty-first As- 
 sembly District re-elected him by the 
 large majority of 2,219, the candidate 
 running 2,000 votes ahead of his ticket. 
 Soon after the opening of the session of 
 
ROOSEVELT 
 
 71 
 
73 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 1883, Mr. Roosevelt commenced a war- 
 fare against the railroad companies. He 
 introduced a bill requiring the New 
 York elevated railroad companies to 
 reduce their fares from ten to five cents. 
 The bill passed both houses after much 
 agitation. But it was vetoed by Gover- 
 nor Cleveland on the ground of uncon- 
 stitutionality, because it disregarded the 
 implied obligation which had arisen be- 
 tween the State and the elevated roads 
 when the franchise was granted. Cleve- 
 land furthermore held that it would in- 
 volve a breach of faith, inasmuch as 
 liberal inducements had been offered to 
 secure rapid transit in New York, and 
 the rates of fare allowed had been an 
 essential part of the consideration under 
 which capital had ventured into the en- 
 terprise. Mr. Roosevelt recognized the 
 weight of these arguments. He saw that 
 he had been wrong in voting for the bill 
 and he was not the man to preserve a 
 stolid acquiescence in error when that 
 error had been demonstrated. A motion 
 
KOOSEVELT. 73 
 
 came up to pass the bill over the Gover- 
 nor's veto. Eoosevelt astonished his as- 
 sociates by opposing it. He astonished 
 them still more by the manfully frank 
 and courageous method of his opposition. 
 " 'I have to say with shame,' he began, 
 *that when I voted for this bill I did not 
 act as I think I ought to have acted, and 
 as I generally have acted on the floor of 
 this House. For the only time that I 
 ever voted contrary to what I think to 
 be honestly right I did at that time. I 
 have to confess that I wealdy yielded, 
 partly to a vindictive feeling toward the 
 infernal thieves who have that railroad 
 in charge, and partly to the popular voice 
 of New York. For the managers of the 
 elevated railroads I have as little feeling 
 as any man here, and if it were possible 
 I would be willing to pass a bill of at- 
 tainder against Gould and all of his as- 
 sociates. I realize that they have done 
 the most incalculable harm to this com- 
 munity — ^with their hired stock-jobbing 
 newspaper, with their corruption of the 
 
74 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 Judiciary, and with their corruption of 
 this House. It is not a question of doing- 
 right to them, for they are merely com- 
 mon thieves. As to the resolution — a pe- 
 tition handed in by the directors of the 
 company — signed by Gould and his son, 
 I would pay more attention to a petition 
 signed by Barney Aaron, Owen Geoghe- 
 gan, and Billy McGlory than I would 
 pay to that paper, because I regard these 
 men as part of an infinitely dangerous 
 order — the wealthy criminal class.' 
 
 "Although the motion to pass the bill 
 over Governor Cleveland's veto was lost, 
 the assertions of Mr. Koosevelt, and his 
 phrase 'the wealthy criminal class,' 
 caught the applause of the masses and 
 placed the young assemblyman high in 
 the estimation of the people. 
 
 "Immediately after his re-election in 
 1883, Mr. Roosevelt began a canvass for 
 the nomination of speaker. He was op- 
 posed by all the machine politicians of 
 his party, and it was a tribute to his skill 
 and his personal qualities that notwith- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 75 
 
 standing this opposition he had come 
 very near success. It was fortunate that 
 he failed, for he at once became the leader 
 of the majority on the floor, and success- 
 fully carried through the Legislature the 
 series of bills which established his repu- 
 tation as a lawmaker. 
 
 "Among his other successful work in 
 Albany, he organized a committee to in- 
 vestigate the work of county officials in 
 New York, as a result of which the 
 county clerk, who had been receiving 
 eighty-two thousand a year in fees; the 
 sheriff, who had been taking one hundred 
 thousand dollars, and the registrar,whose 
 perquisites were also very large, all be- 
 came salaried officials. After his third 
 re-election in 1884, he introduced the 
 Civil Service Law, a bold and revolution- 
 ary political measure at that time. He 
 worked hard for legislation for the bene- 
 fit of New York City, and was exceeding- 
 ly active in furthering all philanthropic 
 bills and those measures having for their 
 object the interests of the laboring men. 
 
76 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 He was the man who instituted the move- 
 ment for the abolition of tenement-house 
 cigar factories. He was chairman of the 
 noted Legislative Investigating Commit- 
 tee, the Koosevelt Committee, which 
 brought to light many of the abuses ex- 
 isting in the city government at that 
 time." 
 
 Such men as Koosevelt dignify legis- 
 lation and make nations great. 
 
 At the Republican National Conven- 
 tion at Chicago in 1884, Mr. Roosevelt 
 took his place as a delegate, uninstructed, 
 but in favor of Senator Edmunds for 
 President as against James G. Blaine. He 
 was defeated with Curtis and the rest of 
 the men, most of whom sulked in their 
 tents, and after a while became mug- 
 wumps. But not so with Mr, Roosevelt. 
 He left Chicago for Dakota, whither we 
 will follow him and mark how he enjoys 
 the luxury of frontier life. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CHIMNEY BUTTE RANCH: THE SPORTS- 
 MAN ON THE PLAINS. 
 
 We come now to some of the most ro- 
 mantic experiences of Mr. Roosevelt's 
 busy life. He has left the busy world of 
 men and has sought the solitudes of the 
 far West to live in a ranch and play the 
 part of a cowboy and a sportsman. It 
 will be impossible to give more than a 
 very brief reference to these exciting 
 times in the far West, but we commend 
 to all young men the perusal of Roose- 
 velt's own record of those eventful days. 
 The book is entitled: "Hunting Trips of 
 a Ranchman; Being Sketches of Sports 
 on the North Cattle Plains." The book 
 is a charm and an education. On the 
 northwestern border of North Dakota, 
 six hundred miles from St. Paul, where 
 the Little Missouri winds its course 
 77 
 
78 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 through the heart of the Bad Lands, is 
 the town of Medora, surrounded by huge 
 buttes of scorched clay. 
 
 "Eight or nine miles up the river from 
 the little town," says Mr. Clemens, ''is 
 'Chimney Butte,' the home ranch of Mr. 
 Koosevelt Here the valley widens; the 
 giant buttes have receded, leaving a wide 
 stretch of bottom lands. A half-mile to 
 the southwest stands one of those singu- 
 lar formations so common to the Bad 
 Lands, a long, slender pyramid capped 
 with a large flat rock. This gives to the 
 ranch its local name, although it is gen- 
 erally called the 'Maltese Cross' ranch 
 from the cowboy custom of calling 
 ranches after the brand of the cattle 
 herded there. The ranch proper is a story 
 and a half high and built of hewed logs. 
 The first story contains a kitchen, living 
 room, and a private room for Mr. Roose- 
 velt when he visits the ranch. Little con- 
 sideration is given to sleeping apart- 
 ments. Cowboys sleep anywhere; but in 
 bad weather they spread their blankets 
 
ROOSEVELT. 79 
 
 on the floor upstairs. To the right is the 
 stable, while in front is the horse coiTal. 
 This is built in circular form to prevent 
 crowding and jamming in corners. When- 
 ever a horse is wanted the whole herd is 
 driven in. 
 
 "The ranch building is most pic- 
 turesque. From the low, long veranda, 
 shaded by leafy cottonwoods, one can 
 look across sand bars to a strip of 
 meadow behind which rises the sheer 
 cliffs. From the doorway of his ranch 
 Mr. Roosevelt has killed a deer, and big 
 game abounds in the vicinity. He has 
 worked here in a flannel shirt and over- 
 alls tucked into alligator boots, side by 
 side with his cowboys during many an 
 exciting round-up, at night to sleep on 
 bear skins and buffalo robes, trophies 
 of his skill as a hunter. 
 
 "When he first went West they called 
 him the 'four-eyed tenderfoot'— at least 
 did some of the cowboys w^ho did not 
 know him, for his reputation for courage 
 was there before him, and a certain 
 
80 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 ranchman who shared that reputation 
 said he would like to run across such a 
 ^tenderfoot;' if he did, he was 'going to 
 fill him full of holes.' This remark was 
 carried to Mr. Roosevelt, who turned his 
 horse and rode over toward his neigh- 
 bor's house. Just what happened there 
 no one knows, but neither of them was 
 hurt and the ranchman thereafter was a 
 good friend of the 'tenderfoot' 
 
 "There are really no limits to the ranch 
 property. The Bad Lands are unsurveyed 
 government land, and from their nature 
 can never be used for any other purpose 
 than the present. The cattle range for 
 miles and miles undisturbed. When left 
 alone they naturally locate themselves, 
 and the bulk of the herd can be found 
 within a radius of forty miles, though 
 scattered bands may drift as far as two 
 hundred miles from the home ranch. A 
 system of round-ups insures their recov- 
 ery. Mr. Roosevelt owns two brands — 
 tlie 'Elkhorn' and the 'Maltese Cross.' 
 The Elkhorn ranch is located thirty miles 
 
ROOSEVELT. 81 
 
 down the river from Medora. It was or- 
 iginally intended to be the home ranch, 
 and the buildings are much more elabor- 
 ate and expensive than the Maltese 
 Cross. But the two have been consolida- 
 ted and administered from the latter, it 
 being a superior location." 
 
 The whole region swarmed with game 
 of all sorts, more especially elk, deer and 
 mountain sheep. Mr. Roosevelt learned 
 much and enjoyed more during his first 
 year of cowboy life on the plains. The 
 next summer he came again and hunted 
 all sorts of big game. He tells the fol- 
 lowing graphic story of an interview he 
 had with a grizzly in Idaho. The bear 
 was wounded and charged with manifest 
 anger. 
 
 "I held true, aiming behind the shoul- 
 der," says Mr. Roosevelt, "and my bullet 
 shattered the point or lower end of his 
 heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly 
 the great bear turned with a harsh roar 
 of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody 
 foam from his mouth, so that I saw the 
 
82 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 gleam of his white fangs; and then he 
 charged straight at me, crashing and 
 bounding through the laurel bushes, so 
 that it was hard to aim. I waited until 
 he came to a fallen tree, raking him, as 
 he topped it, with a ball, which entered 
 his chest and went through the cavity 
 of his bod}' ; but he neither swerved nor 
 flinched, and at the moment I did not 
 know that I had struck him. He came 
 steadily on, and in another second was 
 almost upon me. I fired for his forehead, 
 but my bullet went low, entering his open 
 mouth, smashing his lower jaw and going 
 into the neck. I leaped to one side almost 
 as I pulled the trigger; and through the 
 hanging smoke the first thing I saw was 
 his paw, as he made a vicious side blow at 
 me. The rush of his charge carried him 
 past. As he struck he lurched forward, 
 leaving a pool of bright blood where his 
 muzzle hit the ground; but he recovered 
 himself, and made two or three jumps 
 onward, while I hurriedly jammed a 
 couple of cartridges into the magazine. 
 
ROOSEVELT 83 
 
 my rifle holding only four, all of which 
 I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but 
 as he did so his muscles seemed suddenly 
 to give way, his head drooped, and he 
 rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. 
 Each of my first three bullets had in- 
 flicted a mortal wound." This Mr. 
 Roosevelt calls his most thrilling mo- 
 ment. 
 
 Very delightful too is his description 
 of a night ride on the plains: 
 
 "For nine hours we rode steadily 
 across the moonlit prairie. The hoof- 
 beats of our horses rang out in steady 
 rhythm through the silence of the night, 
 otherwise unbroken, save now and then 
 by the wailing cry of a coyote. The roll- 
 ing plains stretched out on all sides of 
 us, shimmering in the clear moonlight, 
 and occasionally a band of spectral look- 
 ing antelopes swept silently away from 
 before our party." 
 
 How he loved his horse let these words 
 tell: 
 
 "For him is the joy of the horse well 
 
84 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 ridden and the rifle well held; for him 
 the long days of toil and hardship reso- 
 lutely endured, and crowned at the end 
 with triumph. In after years there shall 
 come forever to his mind the memory of 
 endless prairies shimmering in. the bright 
 sun; of vast snow-clad wastes lying des- 
 olate under gray skies; of melancholy 
 marches; of the rush of mighty rivers; of 
 the breath of the evergreen forest in 
 summer; of the crooning of ice-armored 
 pines at the touch of the winds of win- 
 ter; of cataracts roaring between hoary 
 mountain masses; of all the innumerable 
 sights and sounds of the wilderness; of 
 its immensity and mystery, and of the 
 silence that broods in its still depths." 
 
 We all think of Mr. Roosevelt as brave 
 and rugged, but he can write with the 
 pen of a poet as witness this description 
 of the night song of the mocking bird: 
 
 "The mocking bird is a singer that has 
 suffered much from its powers of mim- 
 icry. On ordinary occasions, and espe- 
 cially in the daytime, it insists on play- 
 
EOOSEVELT. 85 
 
 ing the harlequin. But when free in its 
 own favorite haunts at night, in the love 
 season, it has a song, or rather songs, 
 which are not only purely original, but 
 are also more beautiful than any other 
 bird music whatsoever. Once I listened 
 to a mocking bird singing the livelong 
 spring night, under the full moon, in a 
 magnolia tree; and I do not think I shall 
 ever forget its song. 
 
 "The great tree was bathed in a flood 
 of shining silver; I could see each twig, 
 and mark every action of the singer, who 
 was pouring forth such a rapture of ring- 
 ing melody as I have never listened to 
 before or since. Sometimes he would 
 perch motionless for many minutes, his 
 body quivering and thrilling with the 
 outpour of music. Then he would drop 
 softly from twig to twig till the lowest 
 limb was reached, when he would rise, 
 fluttering and leaping through the 
 branches, his song never ceasing for an 
 instant until he reached the summit of 
 the tree and launched into the warm 
 
8G 'ROOSEVELT. 
 
 scent laden air, floating in spirals, with 
 outspread wings, until, as if spent, while 
 his song rose into an ecstasy of ardor 
 and passion. His voice rang like a 
 clarionet in rich, full tones, and his ex- 
 ecution covered the widest possible com- 
 pass; theme followed theme, a torrent 
 of music, a swelling tide of harmony, in 
 which scarcely any two bars were alike. 
 I stayed till midnight listening to him; 
 he was singing when I went to sleep; he 
 was still singing when I woke a couple 
 of hours later; he sang through the live- 
 long night. * » » 
 
 "Yet in certain moods a man cares less 
 for even the loveliest bird songs than 
 for the wilder, harsher, stronger sounds 
 of the wilderness, the guttural booming 
 and clucking of the prairie fowl and the 
 great sage fowl in spring; the honking 
 of gangs of wild geese, as they fly in rapid 
 wedges; the bark of an eagle, wheeling 
 in the shadow of storm-scarred cliffs; or 
 the far-off clanking of many sand-hill 
 cranes, soaring high overhead in circles 
 
EOOSEVELT. 87 
 
 which cross and recross at an incredible 
 altitude. Wilder yet, and stranger, are 
 the cries of the great four-footed beasts; 
 the rhythmic pealing of a bull-elk's chal- 
 lenge; and that most sinister and mourn- 
 ful sound, ever-fraught with foreboding 
 and rapine, the long-drawn baying of 
 the gray wolf." 
 
 He always speaks with great modesty 
 of his prowess as a marksman. "I my- 
 self am not and never will be more than 
 an ordinai-y shot, for my eyes are bad 
 and my hand not over steady; yet I have 
 killed every kind of game to be found on 
 the plains, partly because I have hunted 
 on the plains, partly because I have 
 hunted very perseveringly, and partly 
 because by practice I have learned to 
 shoot about as well at a wild animal as 
 at a target." 
 
 A correspondent of the New York 
 "Herald" writing from Medora, in 1895, 
 tells an anecdote of Mr. Roosevelt too 
 good to be forgotten: "For a long time 
 after he had established his ranches the 
 
88 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 feeling between the outlaw element and 
 the cattlemen ran high. It culminated 
 in a meeting, held in a little, unfinished 
 freight shanty at Medora, for the purpose 
 of banding the cattle owners together 
 for mutual protection. It was openly 
 hinted that a certain deputy sheriff was 
 in collusion with the tough element. Not 
 more than a score of quiet, determined 
 men made up the meeting. The sheriff 
 was present, an interested spectator. 
 After some preliminary forms of or- 
 ganization, Mr. Roosevelt got up and ad- 
 dressed the meeting, or rather, addressed 
 the sheriff. Never in the history of the 
 frontier has such a speech been listened 
 to. He openly accused the sheriff of dis- 
 honesty and incompetence, and with the 
 reflected light from the officer's pearl- 
 handled revolver at his belt flashing 
 across his gold-rimmed glasses, the 
 speaker scored him as a man unworthy 
 and unfit for his office. It is one thing 
 to deliver a fiery accusation of general 
 or personal charges at a crowded meet- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 89 
 
 ing of law-abiding people. It is another 
 to coolly stand before a silent handful of 
 frontiersmen and openly accuse one of 
 dishonesty. Death stares closely in the 
 face of the man who dares attempt it, for 
 these men, bred in isolation, are sensitive 
 to the quick on their personal honor, and 
 an accusation that would be laughed at 
 in Cooper Union would eat out a man's 
 heart here. With downcast head the 
 sheriff said never a Avord, but his prestige 
 was gone forever." 
 
 It is interesting to know that in all 
 these wanderings in the Far West, Mr. 
 Roosevelt took his little library of mod- 
 ern classics with him. Books of natural 
 history, Irving and Hawthorne and Poe 
 were great favorites of his, and Robert 
 Burns was a constant companion. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THREE GREAT OFFICES— CIVIL SERVICE, 
 POLICE COMMISSIONER, UNDER- 
 SECRETARY OF THE NAVY. 
 
 Step by step the young politician 
 climbed to posts of importance and high 
 responsibility. 
 
 In 1886 Mr. Roosevelt was the candi- 
 date of the Republican party for Mayor 
 of New York. His opponents were 
 Abram S. Hewitt and Henry George. 
 He made a brave and fearless fight, but 
 he was defeated. Nevertheless he re- 
 ceived the largest number of votes ever 
 polled by a Republican candidate for the 
 office. 
 
 In the spring of 1889, Mr. Roosevelt 
 was appointed a Civil Service Commis- 
 sioner by President Benjamin Harrison. 
 To the many trying and exacting tasks 
 of his important office the new incumbent 
 addressed himself with vigor and deter- 
 
 90 
 
ROOSEVELT. 91 
 
 mination. To conduct examinations and 
 reports was in his judgment time wasted 
 unless it was associated with the thor- 
 ough working out o^ the whole plans and 
 purposes set forth in the Civil Service 
 Law. He made friends and enemies in 
 the prosecution of his commission. He 
 fought with ungloved hands the spoils- 
 man and the bribe-giver, and was deter- 
 mined that while he was in commission 
 the Civil Service Law should be honored 
 "in spirit and purpose as well as letter. 
 If difficulties beset his path by reason of 
 official tardiness or from any more ques- 
 tionable cause, he had a very simple 
 method. He would place the matter in 
 all its details before the President If in 
 a reasonable time no notice was taken of 
 the matter, he would hand the whole 
 subject over to the press. His perfect 
 frankness won for him great popular fa- 
 vor and confidence. There was nothing 
 hidden, nothing concealed, everything 
 was as clear as the day, as transparent 
 as the light. When President Cleveland 
 
92 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 came into office Mr. Roosevelt was re- 
 tained in office, but it was with the ex- 
 press understanding that he was to be 
 perfectly free to investigate whatever he 
 believed to be in any sense crooked. He 
 was to be untrammeled in speech and 
 action. 
 
 Here is a characteristic Roosevelt let- 
 ter addressed to the chairman of the 
 Committee on Reform in the Civil Serv- 
 ice of the Fifty-third Congress; under 
 dateof May 25, 1894: 
 
 "Congressman Williams, of Missis- 
 sippi, attacked the commission in sub- 
 stance because, under the commission, 
 white men and men of color are treated 
 with exact impartiality. As to this I 
 have only to say, that so long as the pres- 
 ent commissioners continue their official 
 existence they will not make, and so far 
 as in their power lies, will refuse to allow 
 others to make, any discrimination] what- 
 soever for or against any man because of 
 his color, any more than because of his 
 politics or religion. We do equal and 
 
ROOSEVELT. 93 
 
 exact justice to all, and I challenge Mr. 
 Williams or any one else to show a single 
 instance where the commission has 
 failed to do this. Mr. Williams specified 
 the Railway Mail Service in Mississippi 
 as being one in which negroes are em- 
 ployed. The books of the Railway Mail 
 Service for the division including South 
 Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama 
 and Mississippi were shown me yester- 
 day, and according to these books about 
 three-fourths of the employees are white 
 and one-fonrth colored. Under the last 
 administration it was made a reproach 
 to us that we did full and entire justice 
 to the Southern Democrats, and that 
 through our examinations many hun- 
 dreds of them entered the classified serv- 
 ice, although under a Republican admin- 
 istration. Exactly in the same way it is 
 now made a reproach to us that under 
 our examinations honest and capable 
 colored men are given an even chance 
 with honest and capabh^ white men. I 
 esteem this reproach a high compliment 
 
94 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 to the commission, for it is an admission 
 that the commission has rigidly done its 
 duty as required by law without regard 
 to politics or religion, and without re- 
 gard to color. 
 "Very respectfully, 
 
 "THEODORE ROOSEVELT." 
 
 Beyond all question one of the grand- 
 est services any man ever rendered to his 
 country was the service Mr. Roosevelt 
 renderd to America in his conduct of 
 Civil Service Commission. That service 
 will have beneficial influences on the 
 state when we have all been long sleep- 
 ing in our graves. 
 
 On the 6th of May, 1895, on the in- 
 vitation of William L. Strong, recently 
 elected Mayor of New York, Mr. Roose- 
 velt became the President of the new 
 Board of Police Commissioners. The 
 New York Police Department reeked 
 with abuses. The new Commissioner de- 
 clared they were directly the result of 
 the intrusion of politics into the Police 
 
ROOSEVELT. 95 
 
 Department. The famous Lexow investi- 
 gation revealed that the rank and file 
 and the highest officers of the force were 
 guilty of levying blackmail upon liquor 
 dealers and keepers of evil resorts for 
 "protecting" them in their nefarious 
 callings and in the deliberate violation 
 of the law. "The finest in the world" was 
 in bad odor. 
 
 The annual parade of the police force 
 in New York was omitted this year, 
 which looked as though serious business 
 was on hand. 
 
 "Within a month," says a writer in a 
 well-known magazine — McClure's — "Mr. 
 Roosevelt was the most hated as well as 
 the best loved man in New York. With 
 characteristic clearness of vision he had 
 determined at once on a course of action, 
 and having determined upon it he pro- 
 ceeded with something of the energy of 
 a steam engine to put it into force. His 
 reasoning had all the simplicity of orig- 
 inality. He was appointed to enforce the 
 laws as they appeared on the statute 
 
96 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 6ooks. He enforced them. That was 
 originality; it rarely had been done be- 
 fore. The excise law compelling saloons 
 to close on Sunday had been enforced 
 against the poorer saloon keepers in or- 
 der that the police might levy blackmail 
 on the wealthy liquor dealers. Mr. 
 Roosevelt enforced it impartially against 
 both rich and poor. To him a dead letter 
 law was as bad as hypocrisy in the 
 church." 
 
 Brynes, the once powerful Superin- 
 tendent of Police, fell from place and 
 power. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt's life was threatened. 
 Sensational newspapers abused him with 
 unwonted bitterness. Members of his 
 own board were against him. But he 
 stood firm as a rock. 
 
 To all assaults and threats Mr. Roose- 
 velt made this bold answer: 
 
 "I am here to enforce the law as I find 
 it. I shall enforce it. If you don't like 
 the law repeal it." 
 
 We here quote a most interesting pas- 
 
HALL OK lU:i'Ki:sKXr.\li\-i;s, WASTIIXGTON 
 
ROOSEVELT. 97 
 
 sage from a paper contributed to Mun- 
 sey's Magazine by Mr. Roosevelt on "The 
 Ethnology of the Police": 
 
 "For the professional 'know nothing' I 
 soon grew to feel much distrust. I al- 
 ways endeavored to keep my temper with 
 every one, and to listen patiently to every 
 complaint, but when one man attacked 
 another because of his creed or his birth- 
 place, I got rid of him in summary 
 fashion. I treated with equal shortness 
 those who sought to have a man ad- 
 vanced because of his creed. I remember 
 that on one occasion I received, on the 
 same day, a letter from a certain agitator 
 much given to attacking Catholics, urg- 
 ing the promotion of a certain man be- 
 cause he was a Protestant, and, as he as- 
 serted, had been kept down by Catholic 
 influence; and two others letters, one 
 fromj a priest and one from a professional 
 politician, urging the promotion of an- 
 other man because he had weight in 
 'Catholic Irish circles,' and because they 
 thought the Catholic Irish entitled to 
 
98 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 'recognition.' For a moment I thought 
 of refusing to investigate the record and 
 capacity of either man. Finally I did in- 
 vestigate, and found that they were both 
 bad. I took the utmost pleasure in writ- 
 ing to their various backers that the men 
 were unfit for promotion, and that even 
 if they were fit, I should certainly decline 
 to promote them when they relied on 
 such arguments for advancement. I 
 added that I should positively refuse to 
 'recognize' any creed, or any nationality, 
 or anything else except fitness. In other 
 words, if there were ten promotions, and 
 the best ten candidates were Jews, they 
 would secure all the prizes, but if they 
 were not the best, then none of them 
 would be promoted; and no consideration 
 as to 'recognizing' any body of men, or 
 any nationality, would enter into the 
 matter one way or the other, whether 
 they were Jews, Catholics, or Protest- 
 ants." 
 
 On the 6th of April, 1897, Mr. Roose- 
 velt accepted the call of President Mc- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 99 
 
 Kinley, to be Assistant Secretary of the 
 Navy Department 
 
 Of his fitness for the post there could 
 be little question. Added to the reputa- 
 tion he had recently won as one of the 
 most capable men of affairs in America, 
 was the standing proof of his thorough 
 and exhaustive knowledge of all naval 
 matters in his* "History of the Naval War 
 of 1812." Eoosevelt was soon master of 
 all the duties of his office. He was among 
 the very first to boldly announce that 
 war was imminent with Spain. He was 
 a born fighter and believed in fighting 
 men. He held this theory: 
 
 "All the great masterful races have 
 been fighting races. Cowardice in a race, 
 as in an individual, is the unpardonable 
 sin. The timid man who cannot fight, 
 or the selfish, short-sighted, or foolish 
 man who will not) take the steps that will 
 enable him to fight, stand on almost the 
 same plane." 
 
 He was a diligent student of the signs 
 
 L. of C. 
 
100 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 of the times, and a year before war was 
 declared with Spain he said: 
 
 "The enemies we may have to face will 
 come from over sea; they may come from 
 Europe, or they may come from Asia. 
 Events move fast in the West; but this 
 generation has been forced to see that 
 they move even faster in the oldest East. 
 Our interests are as great in the Pacific 
 as in the Atlantic, in the Hawaiian 
 Islands as in the West Indies. Merely 
 for the protection of our own shores, we 
 need a great navy ; and what is more, we 
 need it to protect our interests in the 
 islands from which it is possible to com- 
 mand our shores and to protect our com- 
 merce on the high seas." 
 
 W^hen the cloud "no bigger than a 
 man's hand" appeared on the horizon he 
 set to work with most admirable vigor. 
 The new warships were hurried on to 
 completion, old ships were repaired, the 
 crew of every ship was recruited to its 
 full strength, and the coal bins were all 
 
ROOSEVELT 
 
 101 
 
102 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 filled with coal. He acted on Hamlet's 
 advice: 
 
 "If it be not now, it is to come. 
 If it is not to come, it will be now, 
 The readiness is all." 
 
 He would have no fooling, no half- 
 hearted work. He said to a friend, "In 
 ordinary routine matters if a man does 
 ordinarily well, I am satisfied, but if he 
 doesn't do the work of importance in the 
 Navy with the snap and vigor I believe is 
 necessary, I'll cinch him till he squeals." 
 
 It is interesting to know that Roose- 
 velt was directly responsible for Dewey's 
 appointment to the Asiatic Squadron. 
 It was furthermore through Eoosevelt 
 that the "Olympia" was detained at 
 Hong Kong after being ordered home. 
 On February 25th, Mr. Roosevelt sent a 
 confidential dispatch to Dewey, in which 
 he said: 
 
 "Order the squadron, except 'Mono- 
 cacy,' to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. 
 In the event of declaration of war with 
 Spain your duty will be to see that the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 103 
 
 Spanish squadron does not leave the 
 Asiatic coast, and then assume offensive 
 operations in the Philippine Islands. Keep 
 ^Olympia' until further orders." 
 
 A footnote by the Bureau of Naviga- 
 tion says: " 'Olympia' had had orders to 
 proceed to United States." This dis- 
 patch of Mr. Roosevelt's was the first 
 that was sent by our government in re- 
 gard to the taking of the Philippines. 
 
 Moreover, it was largely owing to 
 Dewey that the famous order was sent to 
 "capture or destroy" the Spanish fleet. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ROMANCE OF THE ROUGH RIDERS- 
 GATHERING OF THE CLANS. 
 
 Broadcloth, buckskin, coats of blue or tan. 
 
 Strip it off for action, and beneath you'll find a 
 
 man. 
 The boy that bucked the center and the lad that 
 
 roped the steer 
 Chums in fighting fellowship — charging with a 
 
 cheer. 
 
 Their horses are picketed leagues away. 
 
 Their sabers are on the nail; 
 They have taken the rifle at break of day, 
 
 They have taken the narrow trail. 
 
 The shimmering blade of the bayonet 
 
 Is red in the downing sun; 
 'Twill burn with a ruddier crimson yet 
 
 Or ever the work is done. 
 
 "Now, why do the scavenger grave-crabs go 
 
 A-cluttering down the dell?" 
 "O, ask of the vulture hovering low; 
 
 It may be that he can tell." 
 104 
 
ROOSEVELT. 105 
 
 "Is yonder the gleam of a mountain stream 
 'Mid 'boscage, creeper and root?" 
 
 "Quick! drop ye down in the jungle brown 
 And cuddle your stock, and shoot!" 
 
 The hunter stripped to the cartridge belt 
 And stalked in the seething maze; 
 
 The Indian fighters crawled and knelt 
 And pulled at the rifle blaze. 
 
 Kentucky fought with a grim delight 
 And Texas with his soul; 
 But the football rusher reared his height 
 And plunged for the deadly goal. 
 
 They yelled disdain of the driving rain 
 
 Of steel that drilled and tore; 
 If the wounded sobbed it was not for pain, 
 
 But that they could fight no more. 
 
 Then, volleying low at the hidden foe, 
 
 They rushed him — two to ten; 
 They were trained in the rule of an iron school. 
 
 And they were their Colonel's men. 
 
 From thicket to thicket, and glade to glade. 
 
 And out to the jungle's marge, 
 They harried him back o'er a clotted track 
 
 And formed for the final charge. 
 
 Hark to the swell of the Rebel yell, 
 
 The bugle calm and clear. 
 The "uh-luh-luh-loo" of the tameless Sioux 
 
 And the roar of the Saxon cheer! 
 
106 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 The Baresark awoke in the Teuton folk; 
 
 The Roman was born anew; 
 The pride of the blood of the Maccabiee 
 
 Revived in the fighting Jew; 
 
 While, up on the right, like a storm at night, 
 
 Rilled with the riving flame, 
 Their eyes ashine, in a steadfast line, 
 
 The negro troopers came. 
 
 Sons of the Past!— her best and last— 
 
 At Freedom's bugle call. 
 The Races sweep to the conquered keep 
 
 The flag that shelters all. 
 
 In peace ye prate of the needs of state 
 
 And winnow your meager souls, 
 Refining if this be truly great, 
 
 And quake at clouded goals. 
 
 When we trust our weal to the clashing steel, 
 
 The Land calls forth her own; 
 Then it's Ho! for the men of heart and brain. 
 
 And blood and brawn and bone! 
 
 Broadcloth, buckskin, garb of blue or tan,— 
 Rip it with a bullet and beneath you'll find a man. 
 Ebon-featured regular, swarthy volunteer. 
 Chums in fighting-fellowship— charging with a 
 cheer. 
 
 — Arthur Guiterman. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 107 
 
 On the 6th of May, 1898, a memorable 
 scene was enacted in the office of Adju- 
 tant-General Corbin, in the presence of 
 a goodly company composed of leading 
 army officers, senators, representatives 
 and others. The occasion was the swear- 
 ing in of Mr. Theodore Koosevelt as 
 Lieutenant-Colonel of United States 
 Volunteers, to serve with the regiment 
 of mounted riflemen, to be made up 
 mainly of plainsmen and rough riders. 
 The oath was administered by General 
 Corbin. Eoosevelt's determination to 
 enter personally into the conflict between 
 the United States and Spain was, to re- 
 peat the phrase we have already used 
 with emphasis — "Rooseveltian." Before 
 Dewey left the sleepy waters of Hong 
 Kong to shake the silence of Manila Bay 
 with terrific storm Roosevelt had made 
 up his mind and said to a friend : "There 
 is nothing more for me to do here," re- 
 ferring to his position in the Navy De- 
 partment, "I've got to go into the fight 
 myself." His friends said he was not 
 
108 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 wise, and dogmatic editors, who knew 
 not only everything that was, but every- 
 thing that was going to be, prophesied 
 that Eoosevelt would "ruin his career." 
 He resigned nevertheless, in due and offi- 
 cial form. 
 
 The correspondence which passed be- 
 tween Secretary Long and Mr. Roosevelt 
 with reference to his retirement from the 
 Navy Department is well worth preserv- 
 ing. Under date of May G, 1898, Mr. 
 Roosevelt wrote to Secretary Long, in- 
 closing a letter to the President tender- 
 ing his resignation as Assistant Secre- 
 tary of the Navy, saying: 
 
 "My Dear Mr. Secretary: Let me add 
 one word personally. I don't suppose I 
 shall ever have a chief under whom I 
 shall enjoy serving as I have enjoyed 
 serving under you, nor one toward whom 
 I shall feel the same affectionate regard. 
 It is a good thing for a man to have, as 
 I have had in you, a chief whose whole 
 conduct in office, as seen by those most 
 intimately connected wath him, has been 
 
EOOSEVELT. 109 
 
 guided solely by resolute disinterested- 
 ness and single-minded devotion to the 
 public interest. 
 
 "I hate to leave you more than I can 1 
 say. I deeply appreciate, and am deeply 
 touched by, the confidence you have put 
 in me and the more than generous and 
 kindly spirit you have always shown 
 toward me. I have grown not merely to 
 respect you as my superior officer, but to 
 value your friendship very highl}^; and I 
 trust I have profited by association with 
 one of the most high-minded and upright 
 public servants it has been my good for- . 
 tune to meet." 
 
 Secretary Long replied under date of 
 May 7, as follows : 
 
 "My Dear Mr. Koosevelt: I have your 
 letter of resignation to the President, 
 but, as I have told you many times, I 
 have it with the utmost regret. I have 
 often expressed, perhaps too emphatical- 
 ly and harshly, my conviction that you 
 ought not to leave the post of Assistant 
 Secretary of the Navy where your serv- 
 
110 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 ices have not only been of such great 
 value, but of so much inspiration to me 
 and to the whole service. But now that 
 you have determined to go to the front, 
 I feel bound to say that, while I do not 
 approve of the change, I do most heartily 
 appreciate the patriotism and the sin- 
 cere fidelity to your convictions which 
 actuate you. 
 
 "Let me assure you how profoundly I 
 feel the loss I sustain in your going. 
 Your energy, industry and great knowl- 
 edge of naval interests, and especially 
 your inspiring influence in stimulating 
 and lifting the whole tone of the person- 
 nel of the navy, have been invaluable. I 
 cannot close this reply to your letter 
 without telling you also what an affec- 
 tionate personal regard I have come to 
 feel for you as a man of the truest tem- 
 per and most loyal friendship. I rejoice 
 that one who has so much capacity for 
 public service and for winning personal 
 friendships has the promise of so many 
 
ROOSEVELT. ni 
 
 years of useful and loving life before 
 him." 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt's letter to the President 
 was as follows: 
 
 "I have the honor herewith to tender 
 my resignation through the Secretary of 
 the Navy, and at his request make it take 
 effect when you desire. It is with the 
 greatest reluctance that I sever my con- 
 nection with your administration, and I 
 only do it because I hope thereby to have 
 the chance to take an even more active 
 part in carrying out one of the great 
 works of your administration— the free- 
 ing of Cuba and the driving of Spain from 
 the western hemisphere. I shall always 
 deeply appreciate your kindness to me, 
 and shall always try to show myself 
 worthy of the trust you have reposed in 
 me." 
 
 The President's answer through Secre- 
 tary Porter was as follows: 
 
 "My Dear Mr. Secretary: Although 
 the President was obliged to accept your 
 resignation of recent date, I can assure 
 
112 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 you that lie has done so with very great 
 regret. Only the circumstances men- 
 tioned in your letter and your decided 
 unchangeable preference for your new 
 patriotic work has induced the President 
 to consent to your severing your present 
 connection with the administration. 
 Your services here during your entire 
 term of ofQce have been faithful, able 
 and successful in the highest degree, and 
 no one appreciates this fact more keenly 
 than the President himself. Without 
 doubt your connection with the navy will 
 be beneficially felt in several of its de- 
 partments for many years to come. 
 
 "In the President's behalf, therefore, I 
 wish at this time to thank you most 
 heartily and to wish jou all success in 
 your new and important undertaking, for 
 which I hope and predict a brilliantly 
 victorious result. 
 
 "John Addison Porter." 
 
 No sooner was it known that Eoose- 
 velt was goius; to form a regiment than 
 
UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE. 
 
 UNITED STATES POSTOFFICF. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 113 
 
 the clans began to gather from hill and 
 vale, from North and South and East and 
 West. 
 
 'Tor the few days that he remained at 
 his desk in the Xavy Department," says 
 Mr. Clemens, "his office was crowded to 
 overflowing with an assemblage of cow- 
 boys, plainsmen, college students, and ex- 
 policemen of the New York force, who 
 were among those anxious to join the 
 command of which Mr. Roosevelt was to 
 be Lieutenant-Colonel. The callers were 
 decidedly unique in appearance. The 
 plainsmen and rough riders wore broad- 
 brimmed sombreros, and gave an unmis- 
 takable evidence of their ability to round 
 up a herd of refractory steers. They 
 were all tall, well-built, athletic fellows, 
 bronzed from exposure, and the picture 
 of health and endurance. There were 
 several young Englishmen in the motley 
 gathering who had preferred this service 
 as more exciting than ranching. Three 
 ex-policemen of the New York force were 
 in the party, looking quite as stalwart as 
 
114 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 the ranchmen. There was a sprinkling 
 also of 'tenderfeet' coming from the col- 
 leges and universities, as well as from 
 great social centers. 
 
 "Clubmen, who were also horsemen, 
 friends and acquaintances of Mr. Roose- 
 velt, applied for the honor of joining him 
 in this interesting crusade. Among those 
 accepted from the New York clubs were 
 Woodbury Kane, William Tiffany, Craig 
 Wadsworth, and Reginald Ronalds. 
 Woodbury Kane, a younger brother of 
 Colonel De Lancey Kane, was a noted 
 polo player and cross-country rider. He 
 had hunted not only in America, but 
 with the more famous packs of England. 
 He was a graduate of Harvard. Craig 
 Wadsworth had been one of the best rid- 
 ers in the Genessee Valley Hunt Club 
 for several years, and a skillful cotillion 
 leader. William Tiffany was a nephew 
 of Mrs. August Belmont and a grand- 
 nephew of Commodore Oliver H. Perry, 
 the hero of the battle of Lake Erie. 
 Reginald Ronalds was a son of Mrs. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 115 
 
 Pierre Lorillard Ronalds. He was a grad- 
 uate of Yale, and was one of the best 
 players on the 'Varsity eleven." 
 
 The regiment also included among its 
 members Hamilton Fish, Jr., a son of 
 Nicholas Fish; Townsend Burden, Jr., a 
 son of I. Townsend Burden; Dudley Dean, 
 the famous football quarterback; Guy 
 Munchie, the coach; Bull, of the Harvard 
 'Varsity crew, and Hollister, one of the 
 best half-mile runners in the country. 
 All these young men were recent grad- 
 uates of or students at Harvard. Among 
 the graduates of Princeton enrolled in 
 the regiment were Horace Devereaux, 
 of Colorado Springs, who was a crack 
 football player during his college term, 
 and Basil Ricketts, a son of General 
 Ricketts, of the United States Army. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt did not very heartily ap- 
 prove of the title "Rough Riders" at the 
 first. He thought it might be to some ex- 
 tent misleading. But it seemed on the 
 whole the most appropriate name that 
 could be found. 
 
116 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 The colonelcy of the regiment was 
 given to Dr. Leonard Wood, of Massa- 
 chusetts, a captain and assistant surgeon 
 of regulars, then on duty in Washington 
 in personal attendance on the President 
 and Secretary of War. Mr. Roosevelt 
 paid the following compliment to Dr. 
 Wood in "KScribner's": "He had served 
 in General Miles' inconceivably harass- 
 ing campaigns against the Apaches, 
 where he had displayed such courage 
 that he won that most coveted of distinc- 
 tions — the medal of honor; such extraor- 
 dinary physical strength and endurance 
 that he grew to be recognized as one of 
 the two or three white men who could 
 stand fatigue and hardship as well as an 
 Apache; and such judgment that toward 
 the close of the campaigns he was given, 
 though a surgeon, the actual command 
 of more than one expedition against the 
 bands of renegade Indians. Like so many 
 of the gallant fighters with whom it was 
 later my good fortune to serve, he com- 
 bined, in a very high degree, the qual- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 117 
 
 ities of entire manliness with entire up- 
 rightness and cleanliness of character. 
 It was a pleasure to deal with a man of 
 high ideals, who scorned everything 
 mean and base, and who also possessed 
 those robust and hardy qualities of body 
 and mind, for the lack of which no merely 
 negative virtue can ever atone. He was by 
 nature a soldier of the highest type, and 
 like most natural soldiers, he was, of 
 course, born with a keen longing for ad- 
 venture; and, though an excellent doctor, 
 what he really desired was the chance 
 to lead men in some kind of hazard." 
 
 It would be impossible to exaggerate 
 the wild enthusiasm with which the 
 Rough Riders rallied around their leader. 
 Theodore Roosevelt was the idol of his 
 comrades. A somewhat rough and vigor- 
 ous poem appeared in the "Criterion" of 
 New York from the pen of Mr. H. W. 
 Phillips. The "boys" had given their 
 Lieutenant Colonel the name of "Laugh- 
 ing Horse" and it sticks to him yet. 
 
118 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "So, Teddy, you've come to your own again! 
 
 I thought it was mighty strange 
 That you had forgotten the good old times 
 
 And the friends of the cattle range. 
 But now the old gun has been polished up. 
 
 And I'm ready to cross the sea 
 And ride with you, Teddy Roosevelt! 
 
 Old 'Laughing Horse' for me! 
 
 "Together we've ridden the range, my lad, 
 
 And slept on the ground o' night; 
 And you were the boy for a high old time, 
 
 A cuss in a stand-up fight. 
 Besides, you were square as a die, old pard. 
 
 And all that a man should be. 
 So I'm with you, Teddy Roosevelt, 
 
 Old 'Laughing Horse' for me! 
 
 "The boys have just whooped to your call, my 
 lad. 
 From the hot desert Texan trail 
 To where the wild yell of the blizzard's sweep 
 
 Makes mock of the coyote's wail. 
 They'll stay at your back till your chest caves in, 
 
 And screech in the thick of the fuss: 
 "Sock h — 11 to 'm! Teddy Roosevelt! 
 Old 'Laughing Horse' for us." 
 
 "Now, I don't know what the row's all about, 
 
 But my trail lies before me plain; 
 For, Teddy, you've said that the thing to do 
 Is to wallop the hide off Spain. 
 
KOOSEVELT. 119 
 
 So here we go off again fresh, my lad, 
 And the Greasers will d n soon see 
 
 That I'm with you, Teddy Roosevelt! 
 Old 'Laughing Horse' for me!" 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ON TO SANTIAGO. 
 LAS GUASIMAS AND SAN ' JUAN. 
 
 The limits of this volume are such that 
 it will be impossible to give more than 
 a brief reference to the stirring scenes at 
 Las Guasimas and Santiago that have 
 given the Rough Riders such enviable 
 fame. Governor Roosevelt has published 
 a most graphic account of this heroic 
 episode in his eventful career. To that 
 charming volume, the thrilling chapters 
 of which first appeared in Scribner's 
 Magazine for 1899, w^e cordially com- 
 mend our readers. 
 
 At daybreak on the 24th of June, 1898, 
 the Rough Riders and the regulars, led 
 by Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel 
 Roosevelt went with a bold and daunt- 
 less bearing into the first fight which is 
 
 130 
 
ROOSEVELT. 121 
 
 known as the Battle of Las Guasimas, 
 so called from the large number of nut- 
 bearing Las Guasimas trees in the im- 
 mediate neighborhood. 
 
 The men were all eager for the fray. 
 Tired and worn and hungry, they were 
 spoiling for a fight. 
 
 '*Our first fight," says Colonel Roose- 
 velt, "was at Las Guasimas. It is the 
 veriest nonsense to speak of it as an am- 
 bush. We knew just where the Spanish 
 were. And General Young, with the 
 First and Tenth Regulars, with Colonel 
 Wood, who had our Rough Riders, said 
 that they should march b^^ different 
 routes, and hit the Spaniards right and 
 left at the same time. Colonel Wood 
 struck those two lines almost directly to- 
 gether. It was a mountainous country, 
 covered by thick jungles, and to force 
 a pass defended by double our number 
 caused a brisk fight with loss; but we 
 forced it. 
 
 "There must have been nearly fifteen 
 hundred Spaniards in front and to the 
 
122 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 sides of us. They held the ridges with 
 rifle pits and machine guns and hid a 
 body of men in ambush in the thick jun- 
 e;le at the sides of the road over which 
 we were advancing. Our advance guard 
 struck the men in ambush and drove 
 them out. But we lost Captain Capron, 
 Lieutenant Thomas, and about fifteen 
 men killed or wounded. The Spanish 
 firing was accurate — so accurate, in- 
 deed, that it surprised me, and their 
 firing was fearfully heavy. I want to 
 say a word for our own men. Every offi- 
 cer and man did his duty up to the 
 handle. Not a man flinched." 
 
 In this fight Sergeant Hamilton Fish, 
 Jr., and Captain Capron both fell to the 
 unutterable sorrow of their comrades. 
 
 Then came the terrible charge of San 
 Juan. Colonel Roosevelt says: 
 
 "The last day of June I took command 
 of the regiment, Colonel Wood having 
 been put in command of a brigade on the 
 morning of the big fight, July 1. We 
 were at first held in reserve, many of our 
 
EOOSEVELT. 123 
 
 men being killed or wounded before we 
 had a chance to fire a shot. It was at 
 this fight that Captain O'Neill, of Ari- 
 zona, was killed, a man who ranked with 
 Capron in value to the regiment, a man 
 as gallant as he was efficient. 
 
 "At last we got the order to support 
 the regulars and to make an assault on 
 San Juan Hill in force. Moving forw^ard 
 we had the honor to be the first to break 
 through the line of the Spanish intrench- 
 ments, storming the hills on the right 
 of our front, together with the Ninth 
 Cavalry and fragments of other regi- 
 ments of the cavalry divisions of the 
 First, Third, Sixth, and Tenth. 
 
 "When we captured the hill we first 
 turned our fire on a hill to our left, which 
 w^as soon after carried by the infantry, 
 and we then rushed another line of in- 
 trenchments on the hills in our front. 
 Having taken these, we swung on the 
 left, and drove the Spaniards before until 
 we took the chain of hills which imme- 
 diately fronted the city of Santiago. 
 
124 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "These repeated changes, of course, 
 caused much confusion in all the regi- 
 ments, and we of the cavalry, when we 
 had taken the chain of hills, found all of 
 our six regiments gTeatly mixed. I was 
 the highest officer left on the extreme 
 front, and had portions of all six cavalry 
 regiments under me, and I shall always 
 cherish the liveliest feeling of brother- 
 hood and respect for the officers and men, 
 not only of my regiment, but of the en- 
 tire cavalry division, with and alongside 
 of whom I fought on that day and the 
 days succeeding." 
 
 When Colonel Roosevelt rode up that 
 fatal hill, no one of all his followers ex- 
 pected him to finish it alive. His coat 
 was off, he wore a blue shirt and brown 
 canvas trousers. Richard Harding Davis 
 thus describes the scene: 
 
 "Mounted on horseback and charging 
 the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, 
 he made you feel that you would like to 
 cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue 
 polka-dot handkerchief, which, as he ad- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 135 
 
 vanced, floated out straight behind his 
 head like a guidon. His was a splendid 
 heroic figure, a romantic warrior, a veri- 
 table knight of old." 
 
 John S. Winter, Jr., who was a sharer 
 in this terrible conflict, says: 
 
 "A man for whom I had conceived 
 quite a friendship during our voyage 
 over was running bareheaded in front of 
 me. Killed and wounded men were scat- 
 tered around, and I was greatly affected 
 by the sight of them; but the full signifi- 
 cance of the phrase 'the art of war' burst 
 upon me only when I saw my friend's 
 head shot to pieces by an explosive bul- 
 let. He fell with a thud, and I ran past 
 his body. In a short time the enemy re- 
 treated to Santiago. Our loss was twelve 
 killed and about forty wounded ; the ene- 
 my's loss about doubled that number. 
 
 "The wounded were sent to a hospital 
 on the coast, and the dead were collected 
 for burial. This was a most impressive 
 scene, and brought tears to the eyes of 
 many. The men, wrapped in their blan- 
 
126 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 kets, were laid side by side in one grave. 
 The chaplain read the Episcopal burial 
 service, and the regiment grouped around 
 the grave and sang ^Nearer, My God, to 
 Thee/ 'Taps' were sounded by the 
 bugler, the grave was filled, and we slow- 
 ly went back to our tents." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 GRAND RALLY OF ROUGH RIDERS: ROOSE- 
 VELT'S ORATION. 
 
 In the month of June, this present year 
 1899, there was a grand reunion of the 
 Rough Riders at Las Vegas, N. M. When 
 Colonel Roosevelt, clad in his Rough 
 Rider uniform, appeared in sight, 5,000 
 people massed about the depot gave ut- 
 terance to the wildest delight. When 
 the Colonel looked about him for a mo- 
 ment to recognize his old comrades, and 
 then, with a genial smile, said: "I'm 
 mighty glad to see you, boys," there rose 
 a shout of welcome that shook the whole 
 region round about. The business meet- 
 ing of the Rough Riders Regimental As- 
 sociation was held in the Duncan Opera 
 House. Mr. A. A. Jones, on behalf of the 
 citizens of Las Vegas, gave an address of 
 welcome. He said in conclusion: 
 
 127 
 
128 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "We are more than grateful to have as- 
 sembled here from the various States and 
 Territories this happy throng who join us 
 in tendering to you our hospitality, love 
 and affection." 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt said in response: 
 
 "Just at this time I would not have left 
 New York State for any purpose save to 
 attend the reunion of my old regiment, 
 and for that purpose I would have gone 
 to Alaska, or anywhere else, for the bond 
 that unites us together is as close as any 
 bond of human friendship can be. 
 
 "It was our good fortune to be among 
 those accepted when the country called 
 to arms a year ago last spring, and when 
 ten men volunteered for every one that 
 could be chosen, I think I may say, with- 
 out boasting, that the regiment did its 
 duty in every way and that its record is 
 subject for honorable pride, not only as 
 regards the members themselves, but the 
 country at large. I am proud of you be- 
 cause you never complained and never 
 flinched. When you went to war you 
 
EOOSEVELT. 
 
 129 
 
 ROOSEVELT ON SAN JUAN HILL. 
 
130 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 knew you would not have an easy time; 
 you expected to encounter hardships, and 
 you toolv them without a murmur. You 
 were all readiness to learn promptness 
 and obedience, which make it possible to 
 turn the American volunteer so soon into 
 a first-class type of fighting man. 
 
 "Of those who landed for the brief cam- 
 paign in the tropical midsummer against 
 Santiago, one-fourth were killed or 
 wounded, and three-fourths of the re- 
 mainder were, at one time or another, 
 stricken down by fever. Many died, but 
 there is not one among you so poor in 
 spirit that he does not count fever, 
 wounds and death itself as nothing com- 
 pared Avith the honor of having been able 
 to serve with the regiment under the flag 
 of the United States in one of the most 
 righteous wars which this century has 
 seen. 
 
 "This was a typical American regi- 
 ment. The majority of its members came 
 from the Southv^est, but not all. Wei had 
 in our ranks Easterners, Westerners, 
 
KOOSEVELT. 131 
 
 Northerners, Southerners, Catholics, 
 Protestants, Jews, Gentiles — men whose 
 parents were born in Germany or Ire- 
 land, and men whose parents were born 
 on the banks of the James, the Hudson 
 and at Plymouth Ilock nearly three cen- 
 turies ago; and all were Americans in 
 heart and soul, in spirit and purpose — 
 Americans, and nothing else. We knew 
 no distinction or creed, birthplace, or 
 residence. All the creed for us was that 
 a man should do his duty, should show 
 himself alert, patient and enduring, good 
 in camp and on the march, and valiant in 
 battle. 
 
 "My comrades, the regiment was but a 
 microcosm of our great country and the 
 principles which enabled us to make 
 so much out of it are those upon 
 which we must act in the nation 
 itself if we are to stand level to 
 the needs of our great destiny. In 
 administering this great country w^e 
 must know no North, South, East or 
 West; we must pay no heed to a man's 
 
132 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 creed; we must be indifferent as to 
 whether he is rich or poor, provided only 
 he is indeed a good man, a good citizen, 
 a good American. In our political and 
 social life alike, in order to permanently 
 succeed we must base our conduct on the 
 Decalogue and the Golden Rule; we must 
 put in practice those holy virtues, for the 
 lack of which no intellectual brilliancy, 
 no material prosperity can ever atone. It 
 is a good thing for a nation to be rich, but 
 it is a better thing for a nation to be the 
 mother of men who possess the qualities 
 of honesty, of courage and of common 
 sense. 
 
 "We have many great problems ahead 
 of us, we Americans, as we stride along 
 the road to national greatness — prob- 
 lems of home administration and prob- 
 lems that affect our dealings v»ith the 
 outside world. We cannot solve them if 
 we approach them in the spirit of levity 
 or vain-glorious boastfulness; still less 
 if we approach them in a spirit of timid- 
 ity, and, least of all, if in dealing with 
 
KOOSEVELT. 133 
 
 them we do not insist upon honesty and 
 righteousness, upon that uprightness of 
 character which is the keystone in the 
 arch of true national greatness. The 
 problems that rise from 3 ear to year dif- 
 fer widely and must be met in widely 
 different ways, and not one of them can 
 be properly solved unless we approach 
 it with rigid fearlessness and with a sin- 
 cere purpose to do justice to all men, ex- 
 acting it from others and exacting it no 
 less from ourselves. 
 
 "I am proud of the w^ay in which you 
 have taken up the broken threads of your 
 lives — in which you have gone back to 
 the ranch, the mine and the counting 
 room. In so doing you show yourselves 
 to be typical American citizens, for it has 
 always been the pride of our country 
 that an American while most earnestly 
 desirous of peace was ever ready to show 
 himself a hard and dangerous fighter if 
 need should rise, and that, on the other 
 hand, when once the need had passed he 
 could prove that war had not hurt him 
 
134 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 for the work of peace, and that he was all 
 the fitter to do this work for having done 
 the other, too. We may be called to war 
 but once in a generation and I most 
 earnestly hope that we shall not have to 
 face war again for many years. The 
 duties of peace are always with us and 
 these we must perform all our lives long, 
 fromi year's end to year's end, if we are to 
 prove ourselves in very fact good citi- 
 zens of the commonwealth. We must 
 work hard for the sake of those depend- 
 ent upon us; we must see that our chil- 
 dren are brought up in a way that will 
 make them v/orthy of the great in- 
 heritance which we, their fathers, have 
 ourselves received from those that went 
 before us. We must do our duty by the 
 State. We must frown upon dishonesty 
 and corruption and war for honesty and 
 righteousness. 
 
 "Let me say a word of those to whom 
 our thoughts should turn at such a time, 
 both among the living and among the 
 dead, to our absent living comrades, and 
 
ROOSEVELT. 135 
 
 especially toi our former commander, now 
 Major-General Leonard Wood, whose ad- 
 ministration of the Province of Santiago 
 has reflected the utmost credit not merely 
 upon himself, but upon the nation so for- 
 tunate as to have him in her service. We 
 send to them the heartiest and most loyal 
 greeting. With these men we hope in 
 the no distant future to strike hands 
 again, and as long as we live and they 
 live we shall all be bound together by 
 most indissoluble ties. But when we come 
 to speak of our dead comrades, of the 
 men who gave their lives in the fierce 
 rush of the jungle fighting, or who 
 wasted to death in the fever camps, we 
 can only stand with bared heads and 
 pray that we may so live as at the end to 
 die as worthily as these, our brothers, 
 died. Allan Capron, in the sunny prime 
 of youth, in his courage, his strength and 
 his beauty; "Bucky" O'Neill, than whom 
 in all the army there breathed no more 
 dauntless soul — of these and other gal- 
 lant comrades, the men who carried the 
 
136 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 rifles in the ranks, all we can say is that 
 they proved their truth by their endeavor 
 that in the hour of our greatest need 
 these rose level to the need and gallantly 
 and cheerfully gave to their country the 
 utmost that any man can give — their 
 lives, for we read in the Holy Writ "that 
 greater love hath no man than this, to 
 lay down his life for a friend." 
 
 "And these men so loved their country 
 that they gallantly gave their lives for 
 her honor and renown and for the uplift- 
 ing of the human race. Now their work 
 is over, their eyes are closed forever, their 
 bodies molder in the dust, but the spirit 
 that was in them cannot die and it shall 
 live for time everlasting. 
 
 "So much for our comrades of the regi- 
 ment. Let us not forget our comrades 
 who this summer are facing all that we 
 faced last summer. Let us not forget the 
 gallant men, the regulars and volunteers, 
 who are upholding the honor of the flag 
 and the interests of the nation in the 
 Philippines. Surely there is not one of 
 
KOOSEVELT. 137 
 
 us whose veins have not tingled with 
 pride as he read of the gallantry of those 
 men; and I suppose few of us have not 
 thought at times that we should like our- 
 selves to fight beside Lawton as we 
 fought beside him last July, and to see 
 if the Hough Riders could not do their 
 share of the work with the splendid men 
 who followed Funston, Hale and other 
 daring leaders who, during the past six 
 months have added so many new pages to 
 the houor roll of American history. To 
 our shame, be it said, there are men in 
 this nation so indifferent to the country's 
 honor, so lukewarm in patriotism and 
 courage that they would let all the work 
 of these men go for naught — let their 
 blood be spilled in vain. But the houor 
 of our battle is sounded and the puny 
 folk who deem it otherwise are woefully 
 mistaken in their countrymen. Where 
 our flag has been raised it shall not be 
 hauled down. If any difficulty seems 
 greater than we expected it merely 
 means we shall exert a little more 
 
138 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 strength in overcoming. I read with 
 pride the other day how both Senators 
 from California, those of opposite politi- 
 cal parties, joined in assuring the Presi- 
 dent that California would stand like a 
 rock behind him in seeing that there was 
 no step back in the Philippines, and so I 
 can assure him of the great State of 
 which I have the honor to be the Gov- 
 ernor. We stand ready to give him 
 whatever he needs in men and money to 
 put down the savagery to which we are 
 opposed in the Philippines. He shall 
 have all he wishes to put it down quickly, 
 and whether it is put down quickly or 
 not he shall have our support in ever in- 
 creasing measure until the last spark of 
 resistance has been stamped out. We 
 want no peace talk with men who bear 
 arms in their hands. When once they 
 submit they shall be treated with abso- 
 lute justice and equity and their rights 
 most carefully guarded; but until they 
 submit they must be taught with rough 
 hands what it is to make war on the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 139 
 
 American flag. There is no East and no 
 West when we come to deal with ques- 
 tions of this kind. The United States is 
 to be the great power of the Pacific, and 
 we men of the Atlantic Coast are good 
 Westerners and are as resolutely bent 
 upon upbuilding our power in the Pa- 
 cific as the men on the Pacific slope them- 
 selves. 
 
 "We are a great nation. We must 
 show ourselves great not only in the ways 
 of peace but in the preparedness for war 
 which best insures peace. We must up- 
 build our navy and anny until they cor- 
 respond to the new need which the new 
 country will bring. Above all, my com- 
 rades and my fellow-countrymen, we 
 must build up in this country that spirit 
 of social and civic honesty and courage 
 which alone can make this nation reach 
 the highest and most lasting greatness." 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR OF NEW 
 YORK. 
 
 The successful warrior is sure to be- 
 come the idol of the people. There is no 
 success like success in arms. The con- 
 queror is about the only man who has not 
 to wait until he is dead to receive the 
 honor due to his name. Most men have 
 to die, and then take out their share of 
 honor in flattering funeral eulogies they 
 cannot hear; and floral tributes, whose 
 beauty they cannot see and whose frag- 
 rance they cannot inhale. But the hero 
 who comes back from the war a con- 
 queror, hears the bugles blowing, and 
 sees the banners in the sunshine and the 
 fireworks at night. 
 
 Moreover your successful warrior be- 
 comes a persistent irresistible influence. 
 Without a single effort on his part he is 
 
 140 
 
ROOSEVELT. 141 
 
 moved to the front. There is no help for 
 it. It is the inevitable. Cromwell was 
 the hero of Long Marston Moor and he 
 was made Lord Protector of the Com- 
 monwealth of England; the Duke of 
 Wellington came triumphant from Wa- 
 terloo to be made Prime Minister of Eng- 
 land; General Grant rode in from the 
 Appomatox to be made President of the 
 United States, and Theodore Koosevelt 
 came from Las Guasimas and the bloody 
 heights of Santiago to be made Governor 
 of New York. Certain of the New York 
 Kepublieans began to talk of Roosevelt 
 for Governor before the surrender of 
 Santiago. A leader among the Repub- 
 licans is reported as expressing a rapidly 
 growing opinion when he said: 
 
 "Governor Roosevelt is, without ques- 
 tion, the most prominent Republican in 
 the State at the present time. He would 
 make a war candidate who would be in- 
 vincible. His popularity extends all 
 through the country districts, and is 
 greater there than in New York City." 
 
142 KOOSEYELT. 
 
 At this, some thoughtless demagogues 
 laughed most heartily, as though it were 
 a huge joke. But the day for the Re- 
 publican Convention drew on apace. 
 Leading Democrats began to recognize 
 that there was danger in the air. On 
 all hands the impression gathered 
 strength that if Mr. Eoosevelt received 
 the nomination he would surely succeed. 
 The rank and file of the Republicans of 
 the State were ready to follow Roosevelt 
 with a zeal and enthusiasm equal to that 
 of the gallant Rough Riders, because 
 they believed he would lead them on to 
 a successful battle against bossism and 
 the machine, and that the reign of good 
 government and pure politics would 
 come. 
 
 Governor Black was Roosevelt's only 
 rival. On Tuesday, September 27, 1898, 
 the Republican State Convention was 
 held at Saratoga. The chairman was 
 Senator Horace White, of Syracuse. 
 Judge J. R. Cady, of Hudson, nominated 
 Governor Black, and that most per- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 143 
 
 suasive of orators, the Hon. Cliauncey 
 M. Depew, nominated Theodore Koose- 
 velt. The oration, which ranks among 
 the finest classics of modern American 
 oratory, was as follows: 
 
 "Gentlemen: Not since 18G3 has the 
 Republican party met in convention 
 when the conditions of the country were 
 so interesting or so critical. Then the 
 emancipation proclamation of President 
 Lincoln, giving freedom and citizenship 
 to four million of slaves, brought about 
 a revolution in the internal policy of our 
 government which seemed to multitudes 
 of patriotic men full of the gravest dan- 
 gers to the republic. The effect of the 
 situation was the sudden and violent 
 sundering of the ties which bound the 
 past to the present and the future. New 
 problems were precipitated upon our 
 statesmen to solve, which were not to be 
 found in the text-books of the schools 
 nor in the manuals of traditions of Con- 
 gress. The one courageous, constructive 
 party which our politics has kuowu for 
 
144 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 half a century, solved those problems so 
 successfully that the regenerated and 
 disenthralled republic has grown and 
 prospered under this new birth of liberty 
 beyond all precedent and every predic- 
 tion. 
 
 "Now, as then, the unexpected has 
 happened. The wildest dream ever born 
 of the imagination of the most optimistic 
 believer in our destiny could not foresee 
 when McKinley was elected tw^o years 
 ago the on-rushing torrent of events of 
 the past three months. We are either to 
 be submerged by this break in the dikes 
 erected by Washington about our gov- 
 ernment, or we are to find by the wise 
 utilization of the conditions forced upon 
 us how to be safer and stronger within 
 our old boundaries, and to add incalcul- 
 ably to American enterprise and oppor- 
 tunity by becoming masters of the sea, 
 and entering with the surplus of our 
 manufactures the markets of the world. 
 We cannot retreat or hide. We must 
 'ride the waves and direct the storm.' A 
 
Ti;i:siI)ENT ROOSEVELT 
 Takiiitc till' oath of office at fluft'alo. 
 New York, September l-i. 1901. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 145 
 
 war has been fought and won, and vast 
 possessions, new and far away, have been 
 acquired. In the short space of one hun- 
 dred and thirteen days politicians and 
 parties have been forced to meet new 
 questions and to take sides upon start- 
 ling issues. The face of the world has 
 been changed. The maps of yesterday 
 are obsolete. Columbus, looking for the 
 Orient and its fabled treasures, sailed 
 four hundred years ago into the land- 
 locked harbor of Santiago, and to-day his 
 spirit sees his bones resting under the 
 flag of a new and great country which 
 has found the way and conquered the 
 outposts, and is knocking at the door of 
 the farthest East. 
 
 "The times require constructive states- 
 men. As in 1776 and 1865, we need archi- 
 tects and builders. A protective tariff, 
 sound money — the gold standard, the re- 
 tirement of the government from the 
 banking business, and State issues are 
 just as important as ever. Until three 
 months ago to succeed we would have 
 
146 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 had to satisfy the voters of the soundness 
 and wisdom of our position on these 
 questions. The cardinal principles of 
 Eepublican policy will be the platform 
 of this canvass and of future ones. But 
 at this juncture the people have tem- 
 porarily put everything else aside and 
 are applying their whole thought to the 
 war with Spain and its consequences. 
 We believe that they think and will vote 
 that our war with Spain was just and 
 righteous. We cannot yet say that 
 American constituencies have settled 
 convictions on territorial expansion and 
 the government of distant islands and 
 alien races. We can say that Repub- 
 lican opinion glories in our victories and 
 follows the flag. 
 
 "The resistless logic of events over- 
 comes all other considerations and im- 
 pels me to present the name of, as it will 
 persuade you to nominate as our candi- 
 date for Governor of the State of New 
 York, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. If 
 he were only the hero of a brilliant 
 
ROOSEVELT. 147 
 
 charge on the battlefield, and there was 
 nothing else which fitted him for this 
 high place, I would not put him in nom- 
 ination. But Colonel Koosevelt has 
 shown conspicuous ability in the public 
 service for ten years. He was a soldier 
 three months. It is not time which tells 
 with an executive mind and restless en- 
 ergy like Roosevelt's, but opportunity. 
 Give him the chance and he leads to vic- 
 tory. He has held two positions which 
 generally ruin the holder of them with 
 politicians and the unthinking. One was 
 Civil Service Commissioner and the other 
 Police Commissioner for New York 
 City. So long as the public did not 
 understand him there was plenty of lurid 
 language and gnashing of teeth. The 
 people are always just in the end. Let 
 them know everything that can be said 
 about a man and see all the searchlight 
 of publicity will reveal and their verdict 
 is the truth. When the smoke had 
 cleared away from the batteries of abuse 
 they saw the untouched and unharmed 
 
148 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 figure of a public-spirited, broad-minded, 
 and courageous officer, wlio understood 
 official responsibility to mean the per- 
 formance without fear or favor of the 
 work he had promised to do and obed- 
 ience to the laws he had sworn to sup- 
 port. The missiles from those batteries 
 flew by him as innocuously as did the 
 bullets from the Spanish Mausers on the 
 hill of San Juan. 
 
 '^¥/hen he became Assistant Secretary 
 of the Navy he was in a sphere more 
 congenial to his genius and abilities. He 
 is a better soldier than he is a policeman. 
 Life on the plains had broadened his 
 vision and invigorated his youth. Suc- 
 cessful excursions into the literature of 
 the ranch, and the hunting for big game 
 had opened up for him the present re- 
 sources and boundless possibilities of 
 the United States. He was fortunately 
 under the most accomplished, able, gen- 
 erous, and indulgent chief in Secretary 
 Long. A small man would have been 
 jealous of this dynamitic bundle of 
 
ROOSEVELT. 149 
 
 brains, nerves, energy and initiative, but 
 our distinguislied Seeretar3' gave full 
 scope to his brilliant assistant. The 
 country owes much to him for the effi- 
 ciency and splendid condition of our 
 navy. 
 
 "The wife of a cabinet officer told me 
 that when Assistant Secretary Roose- 
 velt announced that he had determined 
 to resign and raise a regiment for the 
 war, some of the ladies in the administra- 
 tion circle thought it their duty to 
 remonstrate with him. They said: *Mr. 
 Koosevelt, you have six children, the 
 youngest a few months old, and the eld- 
 est not yet in the teens. While the coun- 
 try is full of young men who have no 
 such responsibilities and are eager to 
 enlist, you have no right to leave the 
 burden upon your wife of the care, sup- 
 port and bringing up of that family.' 
 Roosevelt's answer was a Roosevelt an- 
 swer: 'I have done as much as any one 
 to bring on this war, because I believed 
 it must come, and the sooner the better, 
 
150 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 and now that war is declared I have no 
 right to ask others to do the fighting and 
 stay at home myself.' 
 
 "The regiment of Kough Riders was an 
 original American suggestion, to demon- 
 strate that patriotism and indomitable 
 courage are common to all conditions of 
 American life. The same great qualities 
 are found under the slouch hat of the 
 cowboy, and the elegant imported tile 
 of New York's gilded youth. Their 
 mannerisms are the veneers of the West 
 and the East; their manhood is the same. 
 
 "In that hot, and pest-cursed climate 
 of Cuba officers had opportunities for 
 protection from miasma and fever which 
 were not possible for the men. But the 
 Eough Riders endured no hardships nor 
 dangers which were not shared by their 
 Colonel. He helped them dig the ditches ; 
 he stood beside them in the deadly damp- 
 ness of the trenches. No floored tent for 
 him if his comrades must sleep on the 
 ground and under the sky. In that 
 world-famed charge of the Rough Riders 
 
EOOSEVELT. 151 
 
 through the hail of shot and up the hill 
 of San Juan, their Colonel was a hundred 
 feet in advance. The bullets whistling- 
 by him are rapidly thinning the ranks 
 of these desperate fighters. The Colonel 
 trips and falls and the line wavere, but 
 in a moment he is up again, waving his 
 sword, climbing and shouting. He bears 
 a charmed life. He clips the barbed wire 
 fence and plunges through, yelling 'Come 
 on, boys; come on, and w^e will lick hell 
 out of them.' The moral force of that 
 daring cowed and awed the Spaniards, 
 and they fled from their fortified heights 
 and Santiago was ours. 
 
 "Colonel Roosevelt is the typical citi- 
 zen-soldier. The sanitary condition of 
 our army in Cuba might not have been 
 known for weeks through the regular 
 channels of inspection and report to the 
 various departments. Here the citizen in 
 the Colonel overcame the official routine 
 and reticence of the soldier. His graphic 
 letter to the government and the round 
 robin he initiated brought suddenly and 
 
152 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 sharply to our attention the frightful 
 dangers of disease and death, and re- 
 sulted in our boys being brougnt im- 
 mediately home. He may have been sub- 
 ject to court-martial for violating the 
 articles of war, but the humane im- 
 pulses of the people gave him gratitude 
 and applause. 
 
 "It is seldom in political conflicts, 
 when new and unexpected issues have 
 to be met and decided, that a candidate 
 can be found who personifies the pop- 
 ular and progressive side of those issues. 
 Representative men move the masses to 
 enthusiasm and are more easily under- 
 stood than measures. Lincoln, with his 
 immortal declaration, made at a time 
 when to make it insured his defeat by 
 Douglas for the United States Senate, 
 that *a house divided against itself can- 
 not stand. I believe this government 
 cannot endure permanently half-slave 
 and half-free', embodied the anti-slavery 
 doctrine. Grant, with Appomattox and 
 the parole of honor to the Confederate 
 
ROOSEVELT. 153 
 
 Army behind him, stood for the per- 
 petuity of union and liberty. McKin- 
 ley, by his long and able advocacy of its 
 principles, is the leading spirit for the 
 protection of American industries. For 
 this year, for this crisis, for the voters 
 of the Empire State, for the young men 
 of the country and the upward, onward 
 and outward trend of the United States, 
 the candidate of candidates is the hero 
 of Santiago, the idol of the Rough Riders 
 — Colonel Theodore Roosevelt." 
 
 There were other speeches for Gov- 
 ernor Black and for Colonel Roosevelt, 
 and when the roll of delegates was called 
 the vote was seven hundred and fifty- 
 three votes for Roosevelt and two hun- 
 dred and eighteen for Black. Judge J. 
 R. Cady, of Hudson, who had placed Gov- 
 ernor Black in nomination, immediately 
 moved to make the nomination of Colonel 
 Roosevelt unanimous, and Senator 
 Hobart Kruni, of Schoharie, who had 
 been one of Governor Black's chief ad- 
 visers, assured the convention of entire 
 
151 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 harmony in the party when he followed 
 Judge Cady with this speech: "On be- 
 half of Governor Frank S. Black and on 
 behalf of every delegate who voted for 
 him in this convention, I say they will 
 stand by the nomination of Colonel 
 Roosevelt, as Colonel Roosevelt stood by 
 the country. We will not be in the re- 
 serve forces, but we will be at the front 
 and we will stand shoulder to shoulder 
 with the best of you and push Colonel 
 Theodore Roosevelt into the executive 
 chair by a tremendous majority. More 
 than that we will take the executive 
 chair for Colonel Roosevelt as he took as 
 a Rough Rider the heights of San Juan. 
 
 On the 8th of October, 1898, the editor 
 of the "Criterion" published a most en- 
 thusiastic article in advocacy of the 
 candidature of Theodore Roosevelt. Two 
 paragraphs are well worth quoting: 
 
 "All through the State of New York 
 the name of Theodore Roosevelt for Gov- 
 ernor has awakened enthusiasm. Noth- 
 ing can stand before it. 
 
KOOSEVELT. 155 
 
 "He comes into the battle a fighting 
 man. His foes are the foes of the Union 
 and the citizen, and he does not hesitate 
 but advances on them from the front. 
 
 "He has the habit of victory and that 
 is a badge only worn by the worthy. 
 
 "Happy indeed is the candidate who 
 comes forward so manfully to the new 
 battle and with such a trail of triumphs 
 behind him — and always in the cause of 
 good and honest government. It is not 
 merely the dauntless Colonel of Rough 
 Riders dashing forward to capture 
 trenches of the enemy, but the cour- 
 ageous legislator, the indefatigable, 
 President of the Police Commission, the 
 tireless Civil Service Commissioner, the 
 argus-eyed and every-eye-wide-open As- 
 sistant Secretary of the Navy who pre- 
 pared it for the victories that swept the 
 
 flag of Spain from the four seas." 
 « * * » » 
 
 "Let it, then, be a joyous, wholesome, 
 whole-souled canvass, with the battle- 
 cry of 'Roosevelt and Victory' ringing 
 
15G EOOSEVELT. 
 
 down the lines. It is a canvass to in- 
 spire the young who aspire and to stim- 
 ulate the old who remember. It is to be 
 kept in view that there are other heights 
 to storm beside those of San Juan and 
 El Caney, many battles to be fought for 
 the people's weal w^ith those magical 
 bullets made of paper which can kill at 
 a thousand miles — the ballots. Many a 
 weary day is to pass in the trenches be- 
 fore all the evil powers in politics sur- 
 render. For the hour of waiting, of 
 preparation, where will be found a bet- 
 ter, more thoughtful, more watchful, 
 more considerate commander than Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt? When the hour comes 
 to charge who will be the leader with 
 more courage more coolness, more mag- 
 netism than the gallant man chosen by 
 the people's voice to lead the people?'^ 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ELECTED GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK. 
 
 The nomination of Theodore Roosevelt 
 for the high position of Governor of the 
 great State of New York, met with 
 hearty and almost universal approval. It 
 seemed as if every "boy" you met on 
 Broadway and in Printing House Square 
 had a Roosevelt button in his coat. The 
 press at large seemed most sincere and 
 hearty in its indorsement. The New 
 York "Sun" spoke these generous words 
 concerning Colonel Roosevelt: 
 
 "A united party never had a worthier 
 representative than this Republican and 
 American. Honest, intelligent, capable, 
 patriotic and fearless he is, and all men 
 know it. His character and his record 
 command that sort of enthusiastic sup- 
 port which comes from the heart and not 
 
 157 
 
158 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 merely, from the sense of partisan obliga- 
 tion. There is neither humbug nor vain- 
 glory, nor again the guile of self-seeking 
 in his composition. The people know that 
 he is genuine, that he goes himself 
 wherever he is willing to send others, and 
 that he gets there; and to that quality of 
 man they will be true, whether he is 
 Colonel or candidate." 
 
 It was admitted on every hand that 
 the election of Theodore Roosevelt was 
 "a foregone conclusion;" but those who 
 know most of political warfare, know 
 that these "foregone conclusions" need 
 a great deal of watching, and often a 
 great deal of encouragement The al- 
 ready popular candidate became daily 
 more popular, he met the people face 
 to face, and the trinity of old Caesarian 
 verbs were true for him. He met the 
 people, he spoke a few earnest words, 
 and they were won to his banner. In the 
 brief period between September 27th and 
 election day, November the 8th, he de- 
 livered nearly three hundred speeches. 
 
GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT DELIVERING HIS INAUGURAL, 
 
IGO EOOSEVELT. 
 
 Most of them were brief — from the plat- 
 form of a railway car. He was a genius 
 at the making of short, impressive 
 speeches; courage, faith in his party 
 and its principles, the utmost frankness 
 and a deathless determination, char- 
 acterized them all. He impressed upon 
 his hearers the broad wide issue of their 
 action. "You are not only New Yorkers, 
 but Americans," was a favorite battle- 
 cry. The following is a sample of one 
 of his telling addresses: 
 
 "My opponents ask you to vote only 
 as New Yorkers. I ask you to vote as 
 New Yorkers; I ask you to remember 
 every State issue; I ask you to keep in 
 mind carefully every matter concerning 
 the welfare of New York. 
 
 "But I ask you also to remember that 
 you are not only New Yorkers, but 
 Americans, that you have interests not 
 only in the State but in the Union — • 
 which is greater than any State — that 
 your welfare is bound up with the wel- 
 fare of the nation, and that the honor of 
 
ROOSEVELT. 161 
 
 each man of you is sensitive to the honor 
 of the flag. 
 
 "I ask you to remember than you can- 
 not, if you would, help letting your bal- 
 lots this fall have their effect throughout 
 the Union. You cannot vote a half bal- 
 lot. You cannot put a caveat on your 
 ballot that will only be heard of in the 
 State of New York. 
 
 "As New York goes on November 8th, 
 so the friends of honest finance, the be- 
 lievers in national honor throughout the 
 Union will be elated or cast down." 
 
 As election day drew nigh it was mani- 
 fest that Colonel Roosevelt counted 
 among his friends and followers not only 
 the men of the Republican party, but 
 men of all ranks and conditions, the ad- 
 herents of every form of faith and of 
 every political persuasion. 
 
 A very graphic description of that 
 memorable election day was given by 
 Vance Thompson in the "Criterion," part 
 of which we quote: 
 
 "And Tuesday morning came in — like 
 
162 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 a lamb — and though it went out with a 
 lion-like roar of 'Teddy! Teddy,' yet was 
 it as mild an election day as one could 
 see in the quietest spot of the old world. 
 All the disturbance was in those 'scare- 
 heads' of the sensational journals. The 
 great city of New York cast her vote 
 with a dignity that was almost astound- 
 ing — to one who had put faith in the 
 shrieking prophets of the press. 
 
 "In the gray and early morning the 
 voting booths were already crowded. 
 Workingmen, city employes, policemen, 
 firemen and all those who were held to 
 their posts during the day voted early. 
 Perhaps this six o'clock voting was 
 briskest in the Democratic districts. A 
 trifle later, from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock, the 
 business men came. Had you stood at 
 the right corner in Sixth avenue, you 
 might have seen Chauncey Depew step 
 lightly — in spite of his years — in to vote 
 and come out cracking jokes and 
 prophecies. At no time was there a 
 crowd about the uptown polling places — 
 
ROOSEVELT. 163 
 
 a line of ten or fifteen men at most, a 
 couple of policemen and a few scouts. 
 Had you not been on the outlook you 
 would hardly have fancied anything 
 special was going on, even in those cigar 
 shops and laundries and iron booths 
 where the fate of good government was 
 being decided. 
 
 "Not until you came to that strange, 
 crowded land below Fourteenth street 
 — at which the reformers look askance — 
 would 3'ou have known that there was 
 something on. The Bowery had an air at 
 once saintly and rakish. The saloons 
 were closed, apparently, and this gave 
 the thoroughfare a sort of Sunday look, 
 but the Bowery boys were out in force 
 and in a holiday — or perhaps I should 
 say alco-holiday — mood. Crowds 
 streamed, shouting through the narrow 
 streets that run over into the Jewish 
 quarter; crowds surged at the comers, 
 but it was only what is seen in Martin 
 Engelville every idle day in the year. The 
 polling places were in queer little shops 
 
164 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 and stores. One in Essex street: Two 
 policemen lolling at the door, bored, in- 
 different; through the window you saw a 
 little showcase filled with cheap cigars 
 and cigarettes and a black-eyed woman 
 in a gaudy shawl; beyond was the table 
 at which the election-inspector sat, and 
 beyond this, hidden by a dingy curtain, 
 was the mysterious arcanum, where the 
 cross is made in the circle. It is all so 
 temporary, so informal, so casual, that 
 it seems a reflection on the dignity of 
 the ballot. Would it be a bad plan to 
 have permanent and uniform polling 
 booths? But that is neither here nor 
 there. You turn away from the East 
 Side, which is no longer the tough East, 
 but a decorous, if rather dirty East, and 
 you go away sadly, like the rich young 
 man in the parable, for you had expected 
 bloodshed and cracked and unabashed 
 voters. 
 
 "In the region of the great hotels the 
 hours went by with a brisker swing and 
 livelier air. There you were among the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 165 
 
 prophets and the men who bet or offer to 
 bet, and the men who can tell you that 
 *the tenth of the twenty-third is running 
 ten behind on the first hour,' and thus 
 foretell the ultimate result, as Ouvier 
 built up a mastodon from a toe-joint. In 
 the Hoffman House and its white neigh- 
 bor, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, gather all 
 the men who have been some one or 
 other. On this one day in the year they 
 dust themselves and come down from 
 their shelves and live for a little while 
 in the hubbub that was once their lives. 
 Pathetic? If you think so. 
 
 "A quiet day. It was like an election 
 in Auburn, loveliest village of the plain; 
 anything but pulsific. 
 
 "But when the news came in 
 
 "It was known by 8 o'clock that the 
 Tammany ticket was running hopelessly 
 behind. Evening newspapers jumped 
 blithely at conclusions and announced 
 in big type 'Roosevelt wins,' and then 
 from end to end Broadway was split with 
 tin horns and megaphones and the yells 
 
166 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 of enthusiasts. For a little while longer 
 the lights shone in the magic lanterns; a 
 little while longer stout, bediamonded 
 Tammany men wandered from the Hoff- 
 man House to Delmonieo's offering to bet 
 anything from shirts to houses; and then 
 the crowds melted away, hardly waiting 
 for the end, but satisfied that all had 
 ended well. 
 
 "Ever since dark the bonfires had 
 blazed round the island — 'Eastside, 
 Westside, all around the town' — and the 
 small boys and girls had danced impish- 
 ly. And at midnight almost every street 
 running toward the rivers flickered with 
 the dying fires." 
 
 The election of the 8th of November, 
 1898, resulted in the triumph of Colonel 
 Roosevelt, whose plurality was eighteen 
 thousand and seventy-nine. But even 
 better than this triumph of personal 
 character and worth, if anything can be 
 better, it was felt profoundl}' and grate- 
 fully by all thoughtful patriotic men, 
 that tliis election meant not only the 
 
KOOSEVELT. 167 
 
 triumph of their candidate, but through 
 him the triumph of pure, honest govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Colonel Koosevelt took the oath of of- 
 fice at noon December 31, 1898, at the 
 office of the Secretaryi of State in Albany. 
 Monday, January 2, 1899, was Inaugura- 
 tion Day and Albany was in all her glory. 
 Thousands of people gathered from all 
 parts of the great Empire State, Albany 
 had never seen such an inauguration 
 crowd before. The ceremony began at 
 11 o'clock in the Assembly Chamber. Mr. 
 Roosevelt was duly installed as the thir- 
 ty-sixth Governor, under the constitu- 
 tion of New York State, which went into 
 effect in the year 1777. Governor Black 
 welcomed the new incumbent of the high 
 office. Governor Roosevelt responded : 
 
 "I appreciate very deeply all you say, 
 and the spirit that prompts you to say it. 
 We have the same ends in view; we are 
 striving to accomplish the same results; 
 each of us, according to the light that is 
 
168 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 in him, is seeking to advance the welfare 
 of the people. 
 
 "A very heavy responsibility rests 
 upon the Governor of New York State, a 
 State of seven million inhabitants, of 
 great wealth, of widely varied industries, 
 and with a population singularly diversi- 
 fied, not merely in occupation, but in 
 race, origin, in habits of life, and in ways 
 of thought It is not an easy task so to 
 frame our lav/ s that Justice may be done 
 to all alike in such a population, so many 
 of whom have interests that seem entire- 
 ly antagonistic. But upon the great and 
 fundamental issues of good government 
 there must always be a unity of interest 
 among all persons who v, ish well to the 
 commonwealth. There is much less need 
 of genius or of any special brilliancy in 
 the administration of our government 
 than there is need of such homely virtues 
 and qualities as common sense, honesty, 
 and courage. There are very many diffi- 
 cult problems to face, some of w^hich are 
 as old as government itself, while others 
 
ROOSEVELT. 169 
 
 have sprung into being in consequence of 
 the growing complexity and steadily in- 
 creasing tension of our social life for the 
 last two generations. It is not given to 
 any man, nor to any set of men, to see 
 with absolutely clear vision into the 
 future. All that can be done is to face 
 the facts as we find them, to meet each 
 difficulty in practical fashion, and to 
 strive steadily for the betterment both of 
 our civic and our social conditions. 
 
 "We must realize, on the one hand, 
 that we can do little if we do not set our- 
 selves a high ideal, and, on the other, 
 that we will fail in accomplishing even 
 this little if we do not work through 
 practical methods and with a readiness 
 to face life as it is, and not as we think 
 it ought to be. Under no form of gov- 
 ernment is it so necessary thus to com- 
 bine efficiency and morality, high prin- 
 ciple and rough common sense, justice, 
 and the sturdiest physical and moral 
 courage, as in a republic. It is absolutely 
 impossible for a republic long to endure 
 
170 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 if it becomes either corrupt or cowardly, 
 if its public men, no less than its private 
 men, lose the indispensable virtue of hon- 
 esty, if its leaders of thought become 
 visionary doctrinaires, or if it shows a 
 lack of courage in dealing with the many 
 grave problems which it must surely 
 face, both at home and abroad, as it 
 strives to work out the destiny meet for 
 a mighty nation. 
 
 "It is only through the party system 
 that free governments are now success- 
 fully carried out, and yet we must keep 
 very vividly before us that the usefulness 
 of a party is strictly limited by its useful- 
 ness to the State, and that in the long 
 run he serves his party best who most 
 helps to make it instantly responsive to 
 every need of the people and to tho high- 
 est demands of that spirit which tends to 
 drive us onward and upward. It shall be 
 my purpose, so far as I am given strength, 
 to administer my office with an eye sin- 
 gle to the welfare of all the people of this 
 great commonwealth." 
 
ROOSEVELT. 171 
 
 Then came the usual public reception 
 of the new Governor, at which at least 
 five thousand people shook hands with 
 him, and every guest of the occasion 
 seemed to vie with every other guest in 
 hearty and enthusiastic congratulation. 
 
 On January 4, Governor Roosevelt 
 transmitted to the State Legislature his 
 first message as Governor. It was a 
 scholarly document of considerable 
 length. Here follows a few important 
 quotations: 
 
 "We are not merely New' Yorkers. We 
 are Americans; and the interests of all 
 Americans, whether from the North, the 
 South, the East or the great West, are 
 equally dear to the men of the Empire 
 State. As w^e grow into a mighty nation, 
 which, whether it will or not, must in- 
 evitably play a great part for good or for 
 evil in the affairs of the world at large, 
 the people of New York wish it under- 
 stood that they look at all questions of 
 American foreign policy from the most 
 thoroughly national standpoint 
 
172 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 "The development in extent and 
 variety of industries has necessitated 
 legislation in the interest of labor. This 
 legislation is not necessarily against the 
 interests of capital; on the contrary, if 
 wisely devised it is for the benefit of both 
 laborers and employers. We have very 
 wisely passed many laws for the benefit 
 of labor, in themselves good, and for the 
 time being, sufficient; but experience has 
 shown that the full benefit of these laws 
 is not obtained through the lack of proper 
 means of enforcing them and the failure 
 to make any one department responsible 
 for their enforcement." 
 
 "The methods of appointment to the 
 civil service of the State are now in utter 
 confusion, no less than three great sys- 
 tems being in effect — one in the city of 
 New York, one in other cities, and one in 
 the State at large. I recommend that a 
 law be passed introducing one uniform 
 practice for the entire State, and provid- 
 ing, as required by the constitution, for 
 the enforcement of proper civil service 
 
W^r=^ 
 
ROOSEVELT. 173 
 
 regulations in the State and its sub- 
 divisions." 
 
 Tlien followed a brief but vigorous 
 reference to half a dozen more or less 
 important questions. 
 
 "I call the attention of the Legislature 
 to the desirability of gradually extend- 
 ing the sphere in which the suffrage can 
 be exercised by women. 
 
 "Inasmuch as many of the statutes re- 
 lating to public schools are conflicting 
 and confusing, the school law should be 
 revised and simplified. 
 
 "In New York City, even more than in 
 the State, there is need of cutting down 
 the salaries of certain officials, of forc- 
 ing others to do more work, and of alto- 
 gether getting rid of yet others. 
 
 "I invite the attention of the Legisla- 
 ture particularly to the evils of over- 
 legislation. The tendency to pass laws 
 which are utterly unnecessary, even 
 when not pernicious, or which are en- 
 acted purely to favor certain special 
 
174 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 private interests, seems to grow instead 
 of diminish. 
 
 "I direct your attention to the custom 
 of the British Parliament, which puts 
 upon the would-be beneficiary the cost of 
 all private and special legislation, and 
 wisely makes it dilficult to obtain at all, 
 and impossible to obtain without full ad- 
 vertisement and discussion. No special 
 law should be passed where passing a 
 general law will serve the purpose." 
 
 Never was a Governor welcomed with 
 more sincere and ungrudging confidence 
 to the duties of his high office. In an 
 article on "Our New Governor," the 
 editor of the "Criterion" says: 
 
 "Theodore Roosevelt's candidacy was 
 not a thing of 'machine' selection. It 
 was forced by the popular desire upon 
 the 'machine.' His achievements in half 
 a dozen trying posts had pointed him out 
 as a brilliant citizen of high ideals, and 
 no one else would suit. To-morrow he 
 will be inaugurated as Governor. How 
 can this brilliant, capable, vigorous man 
 
ROOSEVELT. 175 
 
 —who studied law, was an Assembly- 
 man, a Police Commissioner, a Civil 
 Service Commissioner, an Assistant Sec- 
 retary of the Navy, a Colonel of Rough 
 Riders — how can this man make his 
 Governorship memorable for its results, 
 direct as well as formative ? We will say 
 at the start that it can only be done by 
 every good citizen in the Legislature, in 
 the pulpit, in the lecture hall, in business 
 or at his trade sustaining him. He starts 
 with the advantage of his experience, his 
 acumen, his determination; but with the 
 disadvantage that he will be expected to 
 be brilliant and successful in everything. 
 To a weak man the position of having 
 perpetual brilliance expected of him 
 would continually incite to fireworks in 
 word and deed, only to find that criticism 
 would at once assume an undeceiving 
 tone and wholesale condemnation follow 
 the slightest slip in the pyrotechnic out- 
 fit. Governor Roosevelt will not sin on 
 that side. Startling things may well be 
 expected of him, but he will act from 
 
176 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 maturity of consideration, and with tliat 
 confidence in the popular understanding 
 which marks off the true man of affairs 
 from the mystery-monger." 
 
 "Self Culture," in discussing the 
 "Koosevelt regime," says: 
 
 "Governor Roosevelt has assumed the 
 duties of his office at a time which affords 
 him an excellent opportunity to put into 
 operation the principles which he has 
 hitherto consistently preached, and, in 
 more limited fields than that he now oc- 
 cupies, as consistently practiced. He 
 knows politics and politicians from the 
 A B C of the primary to the legislative 
 chambers; his work on the Civil Service 
 Commission has given him a familiarity 
 with this important branch of govern- 
 ment; and in his present office his former 
 experience in the presidency of the New 
 York Police Commission will be of the 
 greatest value from its revelations of the 
 foul side of popular government when 
 permitted to fall into the hands of the 
 unscrupulous and self-seeking. The 
 
KOOSEVELT. 177 
 
 vigor with which he has heretofore at- 
 tacked every task before him, whether in 
 the Legislature or in the bureaus of 
 municipal and federal government, on 
 the battlefield, or in the arduous labors 
 of an exciting political campaign, can 
 be brought into full play in dealing with 
 the problems of State legislation that 
 now confront him." 
 
178 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT OF 
 THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 While President McKinley's renomination 
 was a foregone conclusion, there was a lively- 
 fight in progress over the nommation of 
 Vice-President. The death of Garret A, 
 Hobart, Vice-President, had brought forward 
 a host of aspirants for that position. Fav- 
 orite sons from various states were brought 
 out, and the contest was keen. Lieutenant- 
 Governor Timothy Woodruff of New York was 
 one of the persistent seekers after the honor, 
 and he had a considerable following. Cor- 
 nelius N. Bliss of the same state was also put 
 forward, and the name of Governor Roosevelt 
 was often mentioned. Illinois had in the 
 forefront Private Joe Fifer, and Congressman 
 Hitt; Iowa presented Congressman Dolliver; 
 Senator C. K. Davis of Minnesota was also 
 mentioned, and Secretary Long of the Navy 
 was considered a possibility. 
 
 Senator Piatt of New York was credited 
 
ROOSEVELT. 179 
 
 with a desire to force the nomination of Gov- 
 ernor Roosevelt, for the purpose of taking 
 that energetic young man out of New York 
 state pontics, and the administration was 
 said to be opposed to such a proceeding. 
 There was no doubt concernmg the attitude 
 of the Governor. He declared openly and 
 frequently that he did not want the nomina- 
 tion, and finally went so far as to assert he 
 would not accept the place if tendered him. 
 
 To the end he remained sincere in his belief 
 that somebody else ought to be nommated, 
 and he carried home with him the satisfying 
 knowledge that he was the only anti-Roose- 
 velt delegate in the Convention. 
 
 William McKinley had reason to be proud 
 that on the Republican ticket for his re- 
 election he had associated with him, as the 
 candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Theodore 
 Roosevelt. Like McKinley, President Roose- 
 velt has been tried and proved true, weighed 
 and not found wanting. 
 
 In time of war both were at the front and 
 both in places where there was the thunder 
 with the deadly hail of battle about them. 
 
ISO RO S E VELT 
 
 It may not be so well remembered by the 
 brave boj^s of to-day, who in, the enthusiasm 
 of their victory over the Spaniards, may for- 
 get the equally daring deeds of their fathers 
 during the dark days of '61 to '65, or those 
 of their grandsires who fought with Wash- 
 ington, but it remains true that just as 
 Roosevelt urged on and was in front of iiis 
 enough Riders, the First United States Vol- 
 unteer Cavalry J so it was with Major McKin- 
 ley, of whom General Sheridan said, in an 
 official report of his ride to Winchester, that 
 he foimd McKinley far in front, urging his 
 men to rally; one of the officers who were 
 "doing their duty." 
 
 Another point of interest in the military 
 careers of the two men was their devotion, 
 as officers, to the care of their men. McKin- 
 ley, then a mere lad in the commissary de- 
 partment, saw during a severe engagement 
 that though it was seemingly his duty to 
 stay in the rear and watch after the stores 
 in his charge, yet the men in front were hard- 
 pressed and without food, and this made the 
 seeming duty a certain mistake. The boy's 
 
ROOSEVELT. 181 
 
 part was to get to the fellow-soldiers and give 
 to them sustenance to support them in their 
 trying position, and so the commissary ser- 
 geant, with shell and shrapnell bursting on 
 every side, went ahead with his provisions 
 and personally risked more danger than the 
 men at the front as he moved among them 
 and handed down to them in the trenches 
 coffee and hardtack. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt, when Spain was 
 whipped and the horrid hand of the tropics 
 was snatching away his brave boys, dared 
 to be sponsor for a message to the home 
 government, in which he called attention 
 to their condition and the very real necessity 
 of bringing them home — away from the pesti- 
 lence and the miserable death in camp, at 
 which the soldier shudders who can laughingly 
 face death in the battlefield. 
 
 McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated 
 at Philadelphia for President and Vice- 
 President, respectively, not in a stampede, 
 but in a formal manner, showing that each 
 was the deliberate choice of the Convention. 
 
 No other candidate than McKinley was 
 
182 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 considered for President. No other candi- 
 date than Roosevelt was seriously considered 
 for Vice-President. 
 
 McKinley got all of the 926 votes in the 
 Convention. Roosevelt got all but one. His 
 was the one vote not cast. 
 
 The concluding session of the Convention 
 took on in a supreme measure the character 
 of a great Republican jubilee. Every man, 
 woman and child stood up when McKinley 
 was placed in nomination by the dashing 
 Foraker, of Ohio, and the standards of all 
 the states traveled to the stage, where they 
 were grouped. 
 
 Governor Roosevelt's speech, seconding 
 McKinley's nomination, was the signal for 
 another demonstration. The Governor made 
 the best speech of the day. It was broad, 
 thoughtful, patriotic and eloquent. 
 
 He drove his knife deep into the Democracy 
 and when he concluded the leaders knew they 
 had on the ticket the man to answer Bryan 
 should the Democratic champion tour the 
 country from a rear platform, as he had 
 done four years before. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 183 
 
 When all the speeches for McKinley had 
 been made, Senator Lodge, the Chairman, 
 ordered the roll of the states to be called for 
 a ballot. There was no other candidate, but 
 it had been determined to make the result 
 formal and clinching. The chairman of each 
 state delegation arose and cast the solid vote 
 of the state for McKinley, and he was declared 
 nominated. 
 
 The nomination of Governor Roosevelt for 
 Vice-President was made amid scenes of great 
 enthusiasm. The Governor was the one popu- 
 lar idol in the Convention. He was placed 
 in nomination by Iowa. 
 
 Colonel "Lafe" Young, an Iowa editor, 
 who was in Cuba as a war correspondent, 
 made the speech. The nomination was sec- 
 onded by Murray, of Massachusetts. 
 
 The selection of McKinley and Roosevelt 
 by the Republican party at Philadelphia was 
 singularly apjDropriate and fitting, for both 
 were men of the Nation; one born of humble, 
 honorable parentage, who has wisely served 
 his Government as soldier and statesman, 
 and the other born to the lie-rit-age of the old 
 
184 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 aristocracy of New York, who was equally 
 anxious to do and is successfully doing a 
 citizen's part in peace and war. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of the 
 great State of New York did not want to be 
 the Vice-Presidential nominee, not that he 
 failed to appreciate the glory and honor, but 
 because he is a man of purpose, and it takes 
 more than a single term for such a man to 
 accomplish all that should be done in the 
 way of bettering the state over which the 
 shadow of the Tammany tiger falls, as the 
 great beast shelters the brothels and saloons, 
 and rejoices when the poor cry for ice, be- 
 cause [that increases the price and the profits 
 of the Mayor and the Tammany associates 
 of the Ice Trust. There was further work 
 for Roosevelt to do, he felt, and as he put it 
 at Philadelphia: 
 
 "In view of the revival of the talk of 
 myself as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I 
 have this to say: It is impossible too deeply 
 to express how touched I am by the attitude 
 of those delegates who have wished me to 
 take the nomination. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 185 
 
 "Moreover, it is not necessary to say how 
 thoroughly I understand the high honor and 
 dignity of the offics— an office so high and 
 so honorable that it is well worthy the am- 
 bition of any man in the United States. 
 
 "But, while I appreciate all this to the 
 full, I nevertheless feel most deeply that the 
 field of my best usefulness to the public and 
 to the party is in New York State, and if 
 the party should see fit to renominate me 
 for Governor, I can in that position help the 
 national ticket as in no other way. 
 
 "I very earnestly ask that every friend of 
 mine in the Convention respect my wishes and 
 my judgment in this matter." 
 
 Every man is liable to be in the wrong. The 
 Governor of the State of New York had but 
 one duty, and that was to again "Rally 
 Round the Flag," and with his President 
 fight the foes of honest money, of national 
 honor in dealing with the possessions that 
 have come to us with the war with Spain. 
 A comment made to a friend not long before 
 he went to Philadelphia illustrates the truth 
 of this statement. He said in effect: 
 
186 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "How will I ever be able to hold myself 
 in if I am Vice-President and there occurs 
 a debate on the floor of the Senate upon the 
 expansion question? If I should hear a 
 bitter, irritating, specious and absurd speech 
 on the anti-expansion side I should feel just 
 like flinging down the gavel, rushing from 
 the Vice-President's place to the floor of the 
 Senate and plunging into the battle." 
 
 Again "Teddy," as the people love to call 
 him, was in error. As Vice-President he 
 was tolerant with all opposing views, but 
 he was not wishy-washy in properly sup- 
 pressing those who were careless of parlia- 
 mentary rules, or submitting to any false 
 courtesy of tradition among the Senators as 
 to their prerogatives when they did not apply 
 themselves to business, or where they were 
 directly treasonable to the United States. 
 
 The Colonel of the Rough Riders could not 
 have been better presented than he was at 
 Philadelphia before the National Republican 
 Convention, which would and did nominate 
 him, whether he would or no. 
 
 It is interesting and proper to state here 
 
R 8 E V E L T . 187 
 
 that among the many present was a young 
 woman, a typical American woman, the 
 mother of an American brood of children, 
 who did not weep and grow hysterical when 
 Teddy went to war, and that as he entered 
 the hall he did not fail to stop and greet her, 
 the mother of his children. She heard the 
 nominating speeches, listened to her big hus- 
 band second the nomination of the President 
 and a little later witnessed the glory of his 
 nomination for the second highest office with- 
 in the gift of the American people, when the 
 crowds swarmed about him after the splendid 
 roll call of the states, the sonorous alphabet, 
 beginning with Alabama, having been called, 
 and there was only one delegate's vote miss- 
 ing, that of the Governor of the State of New 
 York, but that missing vote was many times 
 repeated in the wife's heart, so that it need 
 hot be recorded against him. 
 
 Colonel Lafayette Young, of DesMoines, 
 Iowa, in presenting the name of Governor 
 Roosevelt to the Convention for the Vice- 
 Presidential nomination at Philadelphia, July 
 21, 1900, said: 
 
188 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 " Gentlemen of the Convention : I have lis- 
 tened with profound interest to the numerous 
 indictments pronounced against the Demo- 
 cratic party, and, as an impartial reader of 
 history, I am compelled to confess that the 
 indictments are all only too true. If I am 
 to judge, however, by the enthusiasm of 
 this hour, the Republican Relief Committee 
 sent out four years ago, to carry supplies and 
 succor to the prostrate industries of the 
 Republic, has returned to make formal report 
 that the duty has been discharged. I could 
 add nothing to this indictment, except to 
 say that this unfortunate party through 
 four years of legislation and administrative 
 control had made it, up to 189G, impossible 
 for an honest man to get into debt, or to get 
 out of it. 
 
 "But, my fellow-citizens, you know my 
 purpose, you know the heart of this Con- 
 vention. The country never called for patri- 
 otic sons from any given family, but more 
 were offered than there was room for on the 
 enlistment roll. When this Convention and 
 this great party called for a candidate for 
 
ROOSEVELT. 189 
 
 Vice-President two voices responded, one 
 from the Mississippi Valley by birth, another 
 by loving affection and adoption. 
 
 "It is my mission, representing that part 
 of the great Louisiana purchase, to with- 
 draw one of these sons and suggest that the 
 duty be placed upon the other. I therefore 
 withdraw the name of Jonathan P. Dolliver, 
 of Iowa, a man born with the thrill of the 
 Lincoln and Fremont campaigns in his heart 
 and with the power to stir the hearts and 
 consciences of men as part of his birthright, 
 
 "We turn to this other adopted son of the 
 great middle West, and at this moment I 
 recall that two years ago to-day as many 
 men as there are men and women in this great 
 hall were on board sixty transports lying 
 off Santiago harbor, in full view of the bay, 
 with Morro castle looming up upon the right 
 and another prominence upon the left, with 
 the opening of the channel between. 
 
 "On board those transports were twenty 
 thousand soldiers that had gone away from 
 our shores to liberate another race, to fulfill 
 no obligation but that of humanity. 
 
190 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 "As campaign followers there were those 
 who witnessed this great spectacle of that 
 fleet, and on the ship Yucatan was that 
 famous regiment of Rough Riders of the 
 far West and the Mississippi Valley. In 
 command of that regiment was that fearless 
 young American, student, scholar, plainsman, 
 reviewer, historian, statesman, soldier, of the 
 middle West by adoption, of New York by 
 birth. That fleet, sailing around the point, 
 coming to the place of landing, stood off the 
 harbor, two years ago to-morrow, and the 
 navy bombarded that shore to make a place 
 for landing, and no man that lives who was 
 in that campaign, as an officer, as a soldier, 
 or as a camp follower, can fail to recall the 
 spectacle; and, if he closes his eyes he sees 
 the awful scenes in that campaign in June 
 and July, 1898. Then, the landing being 
 completed, there were those who stood upon 
 the shore and saw these indomitable men 
 land, landing in small boats through the 
 waves that dash against the shore, landing 
 without harbor, but land they did, with 
 their accoutrements on and their weapons 
 
ROOSEVELT. 191 
 
 by their sides. And those who stood upon 
 the shore and saw these men come on thought 
 they could see in their faces, ' Stranger, can 
 you tell me the nearest road to Santiago?' 
 
 "That is the place they were looking for. 
 And the leader of the campaign of one of 
 those regiments shall be the name that I 
 shall place before this Convention for the 
 office of Vice-President of the United States. 
 "Gentlemen of the Convention, I know 
 you have been here a long time and that 
 you have had politics in abundance. I know 
 the desire to complete the work of this Con- 
 vention, but I cannot forbear to say that 
 this occasion has a higher significance than 
 one of politics. The campaign this year is 
 higher than politics. 
 
 "In fact, if patriotism could have its way 
 there would be but one political party and 
 but one electoral ticket in any state of the 
 Union, because political duty would enforce 
 it. In many respects the years 1898 and 1899 
 have been the great years of the Republic. 
 
 ''There is not under any sun or any clime 
 any man or government that cares to insult 
 
192 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 the flag of the United States. Not one. 
 We are a greater and a broader people on 
 account of these achievements. Uncle Sam 
 has been made a cosmopolitan citizen of the 
 world. No one questions his prowess or his 
 bravery. As the result of these campaigns 
 and as the result of the American spirit, my 
 fellow-citizens, the American soldier, ten 
 thousand miles away from home, with a 
 musket in his hands, says to the aggressor, to 
 those who are in favor of tyranny: 'Halt! 
 Who comes there?' and the same spirit says 
 to the beleagured hosts of liberty: 'Hold the 
 fort, for I am coming!' Thus says the spirit 
 of Americanism. Now, gentlemen of the 
 Convention, I place before you this distin- 
 guished leader of Republicanism of the 
 United States, this leader of the aspirations 
 of the people, whose hearts are right, and 
 this leader of the aspirations of the young 
 men of this country. Their hearts and con- 
 sciences are with this young leader, whom I 
 shall name for the Vice-Presidency of the 
 United States, Theodore Roosevelt, of New 
 York." 
 
ROOSEVELT. 193 
 
 Roosevelt's nomination was seconded by 
 Governor Mount, of Indiana, and Senator 
 Chauncey M. Depew, of New York. 
 
 This, briefly is the story of the great Con- 
 vention of Repubhcans in Philadelphia, and 
 does not tell m detail of the enormous enthu- 
 siasm when the Presidential and Vice-Presi- 
 dential candidates were unanimously chosen 
 by their party, nor of the bands and the 
 flags, the fair women and brave men gathered 
 together to witness and be parties to an 
 event historic; a period followed by new 
 sentences, to be written in gold to the honor 
 and glory of the United States. 
 
 It was a sight never to be forgotten. The 
 great hall was crowded to its full capacity 
 and though there was not the uncertainty 
 that makes nominations largely like races 
 spectacular and exciting, yet there was some- 
 thing better than chance— the certainty that 
 two great men were to be nominated by their 
 party for the two most distinguished oflices 
 in the gift of "we, the people of the United 
 States." The people were there in great 
 numbers, ready to voice their approval of 
 
194 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 what was certain, and they had not lost their 
 enthusiasm because there was to be no fight; 
 for they were there to hail the victors of 
 fights already won in peace and war. There 
 could have been nothing more inspiring 
 than these delegates with the names of their 
 glorious States above them, stars in the 
 firmament of the Federation. 
 
 The campaign that followed the nomination 
 was valiantly fought because of the tactics 
 employed by the opposition. In spite of 
 the heroic efforts of the Democratic party, 
 led by Mr. Bryan, McKinley & Roosevelt 
 carried nearly every northern and western 
 state, receiving a larger popular majority 
 than McKinley & Hobart had four years 
 before. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 195 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SUCCEEDS TO THE PRESIDENCY. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt became President of 
 the United States at 3:32 o'clock Saturday 
 afternoon, September 14, 1901. The oath of 
 office was administered by Judge John R. 
 Hazel, of the United States District Court, in 
 the library of the residence of Mr. Ansley Wil- 
 cox, at Buffalo. Mr. Wilcox was an old 
 friend of the Mce-President, and the latter 
 made Mr. Wilcox's house his home during his 
 stay in Buffalo, after the shooting of Presi- 
 dent McKinley. 
 
 The delay in taking the oath after the death 
 of the President was the result of the sanguine 
 feeling among the people that McKinley would 
 recover from his wounds. No one shared this 
 feeling in a higher degree than the Vice-Pres- 
 ident. When the news that the President 
 had been shot became public Mcc-President 
 Roosevelt was in the East. He started im- 
 mediately for Buffalo, and was at the Presi- 
 dent's bedside as soon as possible. He re- 
 
196 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 mained in Buffalo until the physicians an- 
 nounced that there was no fear of the Presi- 
 dent's death, and then left for the Adiron- 
 dacks. 
 
 When the President began to sink Thurs- 
 day night messages were sent to the Vice- 
 President and those members of the Cabinet 
 who, like himself, had left Buffalo, deluded 
 into the belief that the President would soon 
 be able to return to the Capital. The Vice- 
 President, with his usual promptitude, started 
 on the return trip to Buffalo, greatly saddened 
 by the news which made such a step neces- 
 sary. He made a hard night ride from the 
 North Woods to Albany, and by the use of a 
 special train reached Buffalo at 1:35 o'clock 
 Saturday afternoon. 
 
 To avoid the crowd which had gathered 
 at the Union Station to see him the Vice-Pres- 
 ident alighted at the Terrace Station of the 
 New York Central, where a police and mili- 
 tary escort awaited him. He insisted first 
 of all on visiting Mrs. McKinley and offering 
 condolences to her in her hour of anguish. 
 This step he desired to take simply as a pri- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 197 
 
 vate citizen, and when it was accomplished 
 the Vice-President announced himself as ready 
 to take the oath as President. A strong es- 
 cort of military and police had assembled at 
 the Milburn house to escort him to Mr. Wil- 
 cox's, but its presence annoyed the Vice- 
 President, and he halted the guards with a 
 quick, imperative military command, say- 
 ing he would have only two policemen to go 
 along with him. Later he announced that 
 he did not want to establish the precedent of 
 going about guarded. 
 
 The place selected for the administration 
 house, a rather small room, but picturesque, 
 the heavy oak trimmings and the massive 
 bookcases giving it somewhat the appearance 
 of a legal den. A pretty bay window with 
 stained glass and heavy hangings formed a 
 background, and against this Colonel Roose- 
 velt took his position. 
 
 Judge Hazel stood near him in the bay 
 window, and Colonel Roosevelt showed his 
 almost extreme nervousness by plucking at 
 the- lapel of his long frock coat and nervously 
 tapping the hardwood floor with his heel. 
 
198 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 He stepped over once to Secretary Root 
 and for about five minutes they conversed 
 earnestly. The question at issue was whether 
 the President should first sign an oath of of- 
 fice and then swear in or whether he should 
 swear in first and sign the document in the 
 case after. 
 
 Secretary Root ceased his conversation 
 with Colonel Roosevelt, and, stepping back, 
 while an absolute hush fell upon every one in 
 the room, said, in an almost inaudible voice: 
 
 "Mr Vice-President, I " Then his 
 
 voice faltered, and for fully two minutes the 
 tears came down his face and his lips quiv- 
 ered so that he could not continue his utter- 
 ances. There were sjmipathetic tears from 
 those about him, and two great drops ran 
 down either cheek of the successor of William 
 McKinley. 
 
 Mr Root's chin was on his breast. Sud- 
 denly throwing back his head as if with an 
 effort, he continued in broken voice: 
 
 "I have been requested, on behalf of the 
 Cabinet of the late President, at least those 
 who are present in Buffalo, all except two. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 199 
 
 to request that for reasons of weight affecting 
 the affairs of government, you should pro- 
 ceed to take the constitutional oath of Pres- 
 ident of the United States." 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt stepped farther into the 
 bay window, and Judge Hazel, taking up the 
 constitutional oath of ofRce, which had been 
 prepared on parchment, asked him to raise his 
 right hand and repeat it after him. There 
 was a hush like death in the room as the Judge 
 read a few words at a time, and Colonel Roose- 
 velt, in a strong voice and without a tremor, 
 and with his raised hand steady, repeated it 
 after him. 
 
 "And thus I swear," he ended it. The hand 
 dropped by the side, the chin for an in- 
 stant rested on the breast, and the silence re- 
 mained unbroken for a couple of minutes as 
 though the new President of the United States 
 were offering silent prayer. Judge Hazel 
 broke it, saying : 
 
 "Mr. President, please attach your signa- 
 ture," and the President, turning to a small 
 table near by, wrote "Theodore Roosevelt" 
 at the bottom of the document in a firm hand. 
 
200 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 The new President was visibly shaken, but 
 he controlled himself admirably, and with 
 the deep solemnity of the occasion full upon 
 him, he announced to those present that his 
 aim would be to be William McKinley's suc- 
 cessor in deed as well as in name. Deliber- 
 ately he proclaimed it in these words: 
 
 "In this hour of deep and terrible bereav- 
 ment, I wish to state that it shall be my aim 
 to continue absolutely unbroken the policy 
 of President McKinley for the peace and 
 prosperity and honor of our beloved coun- 
 try." 
 
 The great, far-reaching significance of this 
 pledge to continue the policy of the dead Pres- 
 ident, announced at the very threshold of a 
 new governmental regime, profoundly im- 
 pressed his hearers, and President Roose- 
 velt's first step after taking the oath was in 
 line with its redemption. His first act was to 
 ask the members of the Cabinet to retain their 
 portfolios in order to aid him to conduct the 
 government on lines laid down by him whose 
 policy he had declared he would uphold. 
 Such an appeal was not to be resisted, and 
 
ROOSEVELT. 201 
 
 every member of the Cabinet, includmg 
 Secretary of State Hay and Secretary of 
 the Treasury Gage, who were communicated 
 with in Washington, agreed for the present, 
 at least, to retain their several portfolios. 
 
 President Roosevelt has been a hard stu- 
 dent ever since he left college, and numerous 
 interesting and valuable volumes have come 
 from his pen. Among the number are "The 
 Naval War of 1812"; "Hunting Trips of a 
 Ranchman"; three volumes of biography, 
 having Thomas H. Benton, Oliver Crom- 
 well and Gouverneur Morris for their sub- 
 jects; "History of the City of New York"; 
 two volumes on political topics, "The Stren- 
 uous Life" and "American Ideals and Other 
 Essays"; a large four- volume history enti- 
 tled "The Winning of the AVest," his most im- 
 portant literary work, and "The Wilderness 
 Hunter" and "Ranch Life and the Hunting 
 Trail." His experience in the Santiago cam- 
 paign has also been detailed in graphic style 
 in "The Rough Riders," and "Hero Tales 
 from American History," in conjunction with 
 Henry Cabot Lodge. 
 
202 ROOSEVELT, 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt has been married twice. 
 His first wife was Miss Alice Lee, of Boston; 
 the second Miss Edith Carow, of New York. 
 He is the father of six children, two girls and 
 four boys. His domesticlife is ideal. Whether 
 ensconced in winter quarters at Washington 
 or at the famous Roosevelt summer home at 
 Oyster Bay on Long Island, the leader of the 
 Rough Riders is an indulgent father and romps 
 with his children with as much zest as the 
 youngest of them. The youngsters are 
 known as the Roosevelt half-dozen, and all re- 
 flect in some manner the paternal character- 
 istics. The eldest is Alice, tall, dark and 
 serious-looking. She is the only child by 
 the first Mrs. Roosevelt. She rides her fa- 
 ther's Cuban campaign horse with fearless- 
 ness and grace. The next olive branch is 
 Theodore, Jr., or "Young Teddy," the idoi 
 of his father's heart and a genuine chip of 
 the old block. "Young Teddy" is the pres- 
 ent Mrs. Roosevelt's oldest child. Then 
 there are Kermit, Ethel, Archibald and 
 Quentin, the baby of the White House. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 203 
 
 HONORARY DEGREE OF LL.D. IS CONFERRED 
 
 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
 
 APRIL 2, 1903. 
 
 The president addressed his remarks espe- 
 cially to the students, and spoke as follows: 
 
 "Mr. President, Men and Women of the 
 University, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, 
 People of the Great City of the West: I am 
 glad indeed to have the chance of being with 
 you this afternoon to receive this degree. I 
 speak to you of this university, to you, who 
 belong to the institution, the creation of 
 which has so nobly rounded out the great 
 career of mercantile enterprise and prosperity 
 which Chicago not merely embodies, but of 
 which in a peculiar sense the city stands as 
 symbolical. 
 
 "It is of vast importance to our well be- 
 ing as a nation that there should be a foun- 
 dation deep and broad of material well being. 
 No nation can amount to anything great un- 
 less the individuals composmg it have so 
 worked with the head or with the hand for 
 their own benefit as well as for the benefit 
 
204 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 of their fellows in material ways, that the 
 sum of the national prosperity is great. But 
 that alone does not make true greatness or 
 anything approaching true greatness. It is 
 only the foundation for it, and it is the ex- 
 istence of institutions such as this, above all 
 the existence of institutions turning out 
 citizens of the type which I know you turn 
 out, that stands as one of the really great 
 assets of which a nation can speak when it 
 claims true greatness. 
 
 ''From this institution you will send out 
 scholars, and it is a great and a fine thing to 
 send out scholars to add to the sum of pro- 
 ductive scholarship. To do that is to take 
 your part in doing one of the great duties of 
 civilization, but you will do more than that, 
 for greater than the school is the man, and 
 you will send forth men; men who will scorn 
 what is base and ignoble; men of high ideals 
 who yet have the robust, glad sense necessary 
 to allow for the achievement of the high ideal 
 by practical methods. 
 
 "It was one of our American humorists, 
 who, like all true humorists, was also a sage. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 205 
 
 who said that it was easier to be a harmless 
 dove than a wise serpent. Now, the aim in 
 production of citizenship must not be merely 
 the production of harmless citizenship. Of 
 course it is essential that you should not 
 harm your fellows, but if, after you are 
 through with life, all that can be truthfully 
 said of you is that you did not do any harm, it 
 must also truthfully be added that you did 
 no particular good. 
 
 "Remember that the commandment had 
 the two sides, to be harmless as doves and 
 wise as serpents; to be moral in the highest 
 and broadest sense of the word; to have the 
 morality that abstains and endures, and also 
 the morality that does and fears, the moral- 
 ity that can suffer and the morality that can 
 achieve results — to have that and, coupled 
 with it, to have the energy, the power to ac- 
 complish things, which every good citizen 
 must have if his citizenship is to be of real 
 value to the community. 
 
 "Mr. Judson said in his address today that 
 the things we need are elemental. We need 
 to produce not genius, not brilliancy, but the 
 
206 ROOSEVELT, 
 
 homely, commonplace, elemental virtues. 
 The reason we won in 1776, the reason that 
 in the great trial from 1861 to 1865 this nation 
 rang true metal was because the average 
 citizen had in him the stuff out of which good 
 citizenship has been made from time im- 
 memorial, because he had in him courage, 
 honesty, common sense. 
 
 "Brilliancy and genius? Yes, if we can 
 have them in addition to the other virtues. 
 If not, if brilliant genius comes without the 
 accompaniment of the substantial qualities 
 of character and soul, then it is a menace to 
 the nation. If it comes in addition to those 
 qualities, then of course we get the great 
 general, leader, we get the Lincoln, we get the 
 man who can do more than any common 
 man can do. But without it much can be 
 done. 
 
 " The men who carried musket and saber in 
 the armies of the east and the west through 
 the four grim years which at last saw the 
 sun of peace arise at Appomattox had only the 
 ordinary cjualities, but they were pretty good 
 ordinary qualities. They were the qualities 
 
ROOSEVELT. 207 
 
 which, when possessed as those men pos- 
 sessed them, made in their snm what we 
 call heroism; and what those men had need 
 to have in time of war, we must have in time 
 of peace, if we are to make this nation what 
 she shall ultimately become, if we are to 
 make this nation in fact the great republic, 
 the greatest power upon which the sun has 
 ever shown. 
 
 "And no one quality is enough. First of 
 all, honesty — and again remember I am using 
 the word in its broadest signification— hon- 
 esty, decency, clean living at home, clean 
 living abroad, fair dealing in one's own fam- 
 ily, fair dealing by the public. 
 
 "And honesty is not enough. If a man is 
 ever so honest, but is timid, there is noth- 
 ing to be done with him. In the Civil War 
 you needed patriotism in the soldier, but if 
 the soldier had patriotism, yet felt com- 
 pelled to run away, you could not win the 
 fight with him. Together with honesty you 
 must have the second of the virile virtues, 
 courage; courage to dare, courage to stand 
 
208 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 the wrong and to fight aggressively and vig- 
 orously for the right. 
 
 "And if you have only honesty and cour- 
 age, you may yet be an entirely worthless 
 citizen. An honest and valiant fool has but 
 a small place of usefulness in the body politic. 
 With honesty, with courage, must go com- 
 mon sense; ability to work with your fel- 
 lows, ability when you go out of the aca- 
 demic halls to work with the men of this 
 nation, the men of millions who have not 
 an academic training, who will accept your 
 leadership on just one consideration, and 
 that is if you show yourself in the rough 
 work of actual life fit and able to lead, and 
 only so. 
 
 "You need honesty, you need courage, and 
 you need common sense. Above all you need 
 it in the work to be done in the building, 
 the corner stone of which we lay today, — the 
 law school out of which are to come the 
 men who at the bar and on the bench make 
 and construe, and in construing make the 
 laws of this country; the men who must 
 teach by their actions to all our people that 
 
HON. LAFAYETTE YOUNG, 
 
 Editor Des Moines Capital; Delegate at Large to the Repnblican 
 
 National Conventiou, 1900; presented Mr. Eoosevelt for 
 
 Vico-President ; was with the army in 
 
 Cuba as Correspondent. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 209 
 
 this is in fact essentially a government of 
 orderly liberty under the law. 
 
 "Men and women, you— the graduates of 
 this university, you— the undergraduates, 
 upon you rests a heavy burden of responsi- 
 bility; much has been given to you; much 
 will be expected from you. A great work 
 lies before you. If you fail in it you dis- 
 credit yourselves, you discredit the whole 
 cause of education. And you can succeed 
 and will succeed if you work in the spirit of 
 the words and the deeds of President Harper 
 and of those men whom I have known so 
 well who are in your faculty today. I 
 thank you for having given me the chance 
 to speak to you." 
 
 The same evening the President addressed 
 the citizens of Chicago, taking for his subject: 
 
 "the MONROE DOCTRINE." 
 
 "Today I wish to speak to you not merely 
 about the Monroe Doctrine but about our 
 entire position in the western hemisphere 
 —a position so peculiar and predominant 
 that out of it has grown the acceptance of 
 
210 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 the Monroe Doctrine as a cardinal feature 
 of our foreign policy, and in particular I 
 wish to point out what has been done dur- 
 ing the lifetime of the last congress to make 
 good our position in accordance with this 
 historic policy. 
 
 "Ever since the time when we definitely 
 extended our boundaries westward to the 
 Pacific and southward to the Gulf, since the 
 time when the old Spanish and Portuguese 
 colonies to the south of us asserted their 
 independence, our nation has insisted that 
 because of its primacy in strength among 
 the nations of the western hemisphere it 
 has certain duties and responsibilities which 
 oblige it to take a leading part thereon. 
 
 "We hold that our interests in this hemi- 
 sphere are greater than those of any Euro- 
 pean power possibly can be, and that our 
 duty to ourselves and to the weaker repub- 
 lics, who are our neighbors, requires us to 
 see that none of the great military powers 
 from across the seas shall encroach upon 
 the territory of the American republics or 
 acquire control thereover. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 211 
 
 "This policy, therefore, not only forbids 
 us to acquiesce in such territorial acquisi- 
 tion, but also causes us to object to the 
 acquirement of a control which would in 
 its effect be equal to territorial aggrandize- 
 ment. This is why the United States has 
 steadily believed that the construction of 
 the great isthmian canal, the building of 
 which is to stand as the greatest material 
 feat of the twentieth century — greater than 
 any similar feat in any preceding century — 
 should be done by no foreign nation, but by 
 ourselves. 
 
 "The canal must of necessity go through 
 the territory of one of our smaller sister 
 republics. We have been scrupulously care- 
 ful to abstain from perpetrating any wrong 
 upon any of these republics in this matter. 
 We do not wish to interfere with their rights 
 in the least, but, while carefully safeguarding 
 them, to build the canal ourselves under 
 provisions which will enable us, if necessary, 
 to police and protect it, and to guarantee 
 its neutrality, we being the sole guarantor. 
 "Our intention was steadfast; we desired 
 
212 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 action taken so that the canal could always 
 be used by us in time of peace and war 
 alike, and in time of war could never be 
 used to our detriment by any nation which 
 was hostile to us. Such action, by the 
 circumstances surrounding it, was neces- 
 sarily for the benefit and not the detriment 
 of the adjacent American republics. 
 
 "After considerably more than half a 
 century these objects have been exactly 
 fulfilled by the legislation and treaties of 
 the last two years. Two years ago we were 
 no further advanced toward the construc- 
 tion of the isthmian canal on our terms 
 than we had been during the preceding 
 eighty years. 
 
 "By the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, ratified 
 in December, 1901, an old treaty with Great 
 Britain, which had been held to stand in 
 the way, was abrogated, and it was agreed 
 that the canal should be constructed under 
 the auspices of the government of the United 
 States, and that this government should have 
 the exclusive right to regulate and manage 
 
ROOSEVELT. 213 
 
 it, becoming the sole guarantor of its neu- 
 trality. 
 
 " It was expressly stipulated, furthermore, 
 that this guaranty of neutrality should not 
 prevent the United States from taking any 
 measures which it found necessary in order 
 to secure by its own forces the defense of 
 the United States and the maintenance of 
 public order. 
 
 ''Immediately following this treaty con- 
 gress passed a law under which the Presi- 
 dent was authorized to endeavor to secure 
 a treaty for acquiring the right to finish 
 the construction of and to operate the Panama 
 canal, which had already been begun in the 
 territory of Colombia by a French company. 
 The rights of this company were accordingly 
 obtained and a treaty negotiated with the 
 republic of Colombia. 
 
 "This treaty has just been ratified by the 
 senate. It reserves all of Colombia's rights, 
 while guaranteeing all of our own and those 
 of neutral nations, and specifically permits us 
 to take any and all measures for the defense 
 of the canal and for the preservation of our 
 
214 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 interests, whenever in our judgment an exi- 
 gency may arise which calls for action on our 
 part. 
 
 "In other words, these two treaties and 
 the legislation to carry them out have re- 
 sulted in our obtainmg on exactly the terms 
 we desired the rights and privileges which we 
 had so long sought in vain. These treaties 
 are among the most important that we have 
 ever negotiated in their effects upon the fu- 
 ture welfare of this country, and mark a 
 memorable triumph of American diplomacy — 
 one of the fortunate triumphs, moreover, 
 which redound to the benefit of the entire 
 world. 
 
 "About the same time trouble arose in 
 connection with the republic of Venezuela, 
 because of certain wrongs alleged to have 
 been committed, and debts overdue, by this 
 republic to citizens of various foreign powers, 
 notably England, Germany, and Italy. After 
 failure to reach an agreement these powers 
 began a blockade of the Venezuelan coast, 
 and a condition of quasi -war ensued. 
 
 "The concern of our government was, of 
 
ROOSEVELT. 215 
 
 course, not to interfere needlessly in any 
 quarrel so far as it did not touch our inter- 
 ests or our honor, and not to take the atti- 
 tude of protecting from coercion any power 
 unless we were willing to espouse the quar- 
 rel of that power, but to keep an attitude of 
 watchful vigilance and see there was no 
 infringement of the Monroe Doctrine— no 
 acquirement of territorial rights by a Euro- 
 pean power at the expense of a weak sister 
 republic— whether this acquisition might 
 take the shape of an outright and avowed 
 seizure of territory or of the exercise of 
 control which would in effect be equivalent 
 to such seizure. 
 
 "This attitude was expressed in the two 
 following published memoranda— the first 
 being the letter addressed by the secretary 
 of state to the German ambassador, the 
 second the conversation with the secretary 
 of state reported by the British ambassador: 
 
 Department of State, Washington, D. C, 
 Dec. 16, 1901.— His Excellency, Dr. von 
 Holleben, etc. — Dear Excellency: I inclose 
 a memorandum by way of reply to that 
 
216 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 which you did me the honor to leave with 
 me on Saturday, and am, as ever, faithfully 
 yours. JOHN HAY. 
 
 Memorandum — The president in his mes- 
 sage of the 3d day of December, 1901, used 
 the following language: 
 
 ' ' The Monroe doctrine is a declaration that 
 there must be no territorial aggrandizement 
 by any non-American power at the expense 
 of any American power on American soil. 
 It is in no wise intended as hostile to any 
 nation in the old world." 
 
 The president further said: 
 
 ''This doctrine has nothing to do with 
 the commercial relations of any American 
 power, save that it in truth allows each of 
 them to form such as it desires. * * * Wg 
 do not guarantee any state against punish- 
 ment if it misconducts itself, provided that 
 punishment does not take the form of the 
 acquisition of territory by any non-American 
 power." 
 
 His excellency, the German ambassador, 
 on his recent return from Berlin, conveyed 
 personally to the president the assurance of 
 the German emperor that his majesty's gov- 
 ernment had no purpose or intention to 
 make even the smallest acquisition of terri- 
 tory on the South American continent or 
 
ROOSEVELT. 217 
 
 the islands adjacent. This voluntary and 
 friendly declaration was afterward repeated 
 to the secretary of state, and was received 
 by the president and the people of the United 
 States in the frank and cordial spirit in which 
 it was offered. In the memorandum of the 
 11th of December, his excellency, the German 
 ambassador, repeats these assurances as fol- 
 lows: "We declare especially that under no 
 circumstances do we consider in our pro- 
 ceedings the acquisition or the permanent 
 occupation of Venezuelan territory." 
 
 In the said memorandum of the 11th of 
 December the German government informs 
 that of the United States that it has certain 
 just claims for money and for damages wrong- 
 fully withheld from German subjects by the 
 government of Venezuela, and that it pro- 
 poses to take certain coercive measures de- 
 scribed in the memorandum to enforce the 
 payment of these just claims. 
 
 The president of the United States, appre- 
 ciating the courtesy of the German govern- 
 ment in making him acquainted with the 
 state of affairs referred to, and not regarding 
 himself as called upon to enter into the con- 
 sideration of the claims in question, believes 
 that no measures will be taken in this matter 
 by the agents of the German government 
 
218 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 which are not in accordance with the well- 
 known purpose above set forth, of his majesty, 
 the German emperor. 
 
 Sir Michael Herbert to the Marquis of 
 Lansdowne : 
 
 Washington, D. C, Nov. 13, 1902.— I com- 
 municated to Mr. Hay this morning the sub- 
 stance of your lordship's telegram of the 11th 
 instant. His excellency stated in reply that 
 the United States government, although they 
 regretted that European powers should use 
 force against Central and South American 
 countries, could not object to their taking 
 steps to obtain redress for injuries suffered 
 by their subjects, provided that no acquisi- 
 tion of territory was contemplated. 
 
 "Both powers assured us in explicit terms 
 that there was not the slightest intention 
 on their part to violate the principles of 
 the Monroe Doctrine, and this assurance 
 was kept with an honorable good faith 
 which merits full acknowledgment on our 
 part. 
 
 "At the same time the existence of hos- 
 tilities in a region so near our own borders 
 was fraught with such possibilities of dan- 
 ger in the future that it was obviously no 
 
ROOSEVELT. 219 
 
 less our duty to ourselves than our duty 
 to humanity to endeavor to put an end to 
 that. Accordingly, by an offer of our good 
 services in a spirit of frank friendliness to 
 all the parties concerned, a spirit in which 
 they quickly and cordially responded, we 
 secured a resumption of peace — the con- 
 tending parties agreeing that the matters 
 which they could not settle among them- 
 oelves should be referred to The Hague 
 tribunal for settlement, 
 
 "The United States had most fortunate- 
 ly already been able to set an example to 
 other nations by utilizing the great possi- 
 bilities for good contained in The Hague tri- 
 bunal, a question at issue between our- 
 selves and the republic of Mexico being the 
 first submitted to this international court 
 of arbitration. 
 
 "The terms which we have secured as 
 those under which the isthmian canal is to 
 be built, and the course of events in the 
 Venezuelan matter, have shown not merely 
 the ever-growing influence of the United 
 States in the western hemisphere, but also, 
 
220 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 I think I may safely say, have exemplified 
 the firm purpose of the United States that 
 its growth and influence and power shall 
 redound not to the harm, but to the benefit 
 of our sister republics, whose strength is 
 less. Our growth, therefore, is beneficial to 
 human kind in general. 
 
 "We do not intend to assume any position 
 which can give just offense to our neigh- 
 bors. Our adherence to the rule of human 
 right is not merely profession. The history 
 of our dealings with Cuba shows that we 
 reduce it to performance. 
 
 " The Monroe Doctrine is not international 
 law, and, though I think one day it may 
 become such, this is not necessary as long 
 as it remains a cardinal feature of our for- 
 eign policy and as long as we possess both 
 the will and the strength to make it ef- 
 fective. 
 
 "The last point, my fellow-citizens, is all 
 important, and is one which as a people we 
 can never afford to forget. I believe in the 
 Monroe Doctrine with all my heart and 
 soul; I am convinced that the immense 
 
ROOSEVELT. 221 
 
 majority of our fellow-countrymen so be- 
 lieve in it; but I would infinitely prefer to 
 see us abandon it than to see us put it for- 
 ward and bluster about it, and yet fail to 
 build up the efficient fighting strength which 
 in the last resort can alone make it respected 
 by any strong foreign power whose interest 
 it may ever happen to be to violate it. 
 
 "Boasting and blustering are as objec- 
 tionable among nations as among individuals; 
 and the public men of a great nation owe 
 it to their sense of national self-respect 
 to speak courteously of foreign powers, 
 just as a brave and self-respecting man 
 treats all around him courteously. But 
 though to boast is bad, and causelessly to 
 insult another worse, yet worse than all is 
 it to be guilty of boasting, even without 
 insult, and when called to the proof to be 
 unable to make such boasting good. 
 
 "There is a homely old adage which runs : 
 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will 
 go far.' If the American nation will speak 
 softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch 
 of the highest training a thoroughly effi- 
 
222 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 cient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far. 
 I ask you to think over this. 
 
 "If you do you will come to the conclu- 
 sion that it is mere plain common sense, 
 so obviously sound that only the blind can 
 fail to see its truth and only the weakest 
 and most irresolute can fail to desire to put 
 it into force. 
 
 "Well, in the last two years, I am happy 
 to say, we have taken long strides in ad- 
 vance as regards our navy. The last con- 
 gress, in addition to smaller vessels, pro- 
 vided nine of those formidable fighting 
 ships upon which the real efficiency of any 
 navy in war ultimately depends. It pro- 
 vided, moreover, for the necessary addition 
 of officers and enlisted men to make the ships 
 worth having. 
 
 "Meanwhile the navy department has 
 seen to it that our ships have been con- 
 stantly exercised at sea with the great 
 guns, and in maneuvers, so that their ef- 
 ficiency as fighting units, both individually 
 and when acting together, has been steadily 
 improved. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 223 
 
 "Remember that all of this is necessary. 
 A warship is a huge bit of mechanism, well 
 nigh as delicate and complicated as it is 
 formidable. It takes years to build it. It 
 takes years to teach the officers and men 
 how to handle it to good advantage. It is 
 an absolute impossibility to improvise a 
 navy at the outset of war. No recent war 
 between any two nations has lasted as long 
 as it takes to build a battleship, and it is 
 just as impossible to improvise the officers 
 or the crews as to improvise the navy. 
 
 "To lay up a battleship and only send it 
 afloat at the outset of a war, with a raw 
 crew and untried officers, would be not 
 me e y a folly_ but a crime, for it would in- 
 vite both disaster and disgrace. The navy 
 which so quickly decided in our favor the 
 war in 1898 had been built and made ef- 
 ficient during the preceding fifteen years. 
 The ships that triumphed off Manila and 
 Santiago had been built under previous ad- 
 ministrations with money appropriated by 
 previous congresses. The officers and the 
 men did their duty so well because they had 
 
224 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 already been trained to it by long sea serv- 
 ice. 
 
 "All honor to the gallant officers and 
 gallant men who actually did the firghting 
 but remember, too, to honor the public 
 men, the shipwrights and steelworkers, the 
 owners of the shipyards and armor plants, 
 to whose united foresight and exertion we 
 owe it that in 1898 we had craft so good, 
 guns so excellent, and American seamen of 
 so high a type in the conning towers, in the 
 gun turrets, and in the engine rooms. 
 
 "It is too late to prepare for war when 
 war has come, and if we only prepare suffi- 
 ciently no war will ever come. We wish a 
 powerful and efficient navy, not for pur- 
 poses of war, but as the surest guaranty of 
 peace. 
 
 "If we have such a navy — if we keep on 
 building it up — we may rest assured that 
 there is but the smallest chance that trouble 
 will ever come to this nation, and we may 
 likewise rest assured that no foreign power 
 will ever quarrel with us about the Monroe 
 Doctrine." 
 
VICiJ-PRESIDENT ROOaEVELT. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 225 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 LATEST PUBLIC UTTERANCES. 
 
 Saturday afternoon, September 23rd, 
 1899, the first bugle-blast of the Ohio Re- 
 publican campaign rang out from Akron, 
 long and loud and clear. The bugle was 
 in the hand of Governor Roosevelt, who 
 called his comrades to arms, and in im- 
 passioned earnestness besought them to 
 stand firm and fearless by their country's 
 flag. There were fifty thousand people 
 from every part of the State of Ohio pres- 
 ent at this great patriotic demonstra- 
 tion. Farmers and manufacturers, store- 
 keepers and workingmen with their sons 
 and wives and daughters made up the 
 interested throng. 
 
 Many of our great orators have passed 
 away of late. Phillips and Gough and 
 Beecher, James G. Blaine and Colonel 
 Ingersoll will wake the echoes no more. 
 
226 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 But with such orators as Theodore 
 Roosevelt we have nothing to fear. 
 While such men are to be found, true 
 Americanism will not know the lack of 
 able, eloquent advocacy. 
 
 The oration of Governor Roosevelt at 
 Akron was at once an argument, an ex- 
 postulation and a plea. There was the 
 vim and force of the warrior, the fervor 
 of the patriot and withal the grand ac- 
 cent of manliness in every sentence. We 
 quote a few of the most salient para- 
 graphs: 
 
 "The value of a political party and the 
 worth to a nation of a public man must 
 depend very largely upon their sincerity ; 
 and, indeed, the worth of a nation can 
 be to a certain extent gauged by the sin- 
 cerity it exacts from its public men and 
 its parties. If a party raises an issue 
 which it knows is aj false issue, merely for 
 the hope of carrying an election, then 
 that party shows in the most striking 
 way that it is the enemy of the country 
 and unfit to be intrusted with its govern- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 227 
 
 ment The squaring of one's deeds with 
 one's words is the quality above all 
 others which we should exact from pub- 
 lic men and from the spokesmen of great 
 parties, whether these spokesmen appear 
 upon the stump or speak through the 
 platforms of their parties. If the spokes- 
 men of a part}' do not and cannot believe 
 what they say, whether in the way of 
 denunciation or promise, and especially 
 if they promise what they know they can- 
 not perform, and what is palpably in- 
 tended not to result in performance, but 
 in vote-getting at the moment, then they 
 insult the conscience and the intelligence 
 of every freeman fit to exercise a free- 
 man's privilege. 
 
 "The salvation of this country lies to 
 no small extent in the fact that while 
 the bulk of our people fully appreciate 
 the importance of party, and the useful- 
 ness of party government, yet that they 
 put counti*y above party. More than once 
 in the past, when the leaders of a great 
 party, drunk with madness, have fol- 
 
228 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 lowed a path that meant terrible disaster 
 to the nation, the nation has been saved 
 by the fact that the best men in the party 
 declined to follow the leaders who would 
 make it false to the past, false to the 
 country, false to the ideals of its best 
 men. So it was in the Civil War, when the 
 war Democrats honored themselves by 
 standing by the country ; and so it will be 
 now, for we have a right to call upon all 
 sincere lovers of the flag, upon all be- 
 lievers in national honesty and civic up- 
 rightness, upon all men who wish to 
 bring about) the betterment and uplifting 
 of the mass of the people, to stand with 
 us until the heresies for which our op- 
 ponents now fight have been relegated to 
 the unclean dust where they belong. 
 * * » 
 
 "Are the people of this country so short- 
 sighted that they forget the miseries of 
 six years ago? Do they forget the bread 
 riots, the poverty, the squalid want, even 
 of those able and anxious to work? I ap- 
 peal to the evidence of your own senses. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 229 
 
 Are you or are you not better off than 
 you were six years ago? The farmer, the 
 tradesman, the ma^ with the dinner pail, 
 the wage-worker — are these men as a 
 whole better or worse off than they were 
 six years ago? In a great community 
 there is, and there always will be, in- 
 dividual suffering, not only among the 
 shiftless and the ne'er-do-wells, but at 
 certain times and in certain places among 
 the honest and industrious with whom 
 fate has gone hard. We cannot by any 
 laws bring happiness and prosperity to 
 everyone, but we can do what the Repub- 
 lican party has actually done; that is, by 
 wise legislation and wise administration 
 secured the chance for the great bulk of 
 our people to live out their lives and do 
 their work with the odds as much as pos- 
 sible in their favor; the conditions as 
 favorable as they can be made. 
 
 "In the long run it is not in the power 
 of any man or of any outside force to 
 lower the standard of living of the Amer- 
 ican workingman, unless the American 
 
230 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 workingman does it himself. If the 
 wage-workers act with wisdom and with 
 forethought, if they show far-sighted pru- 
 dence in their combinations, industrial 
 and political, their ultimate welfare is 
 assured. In the long run only the Amer- 
 ican workingman can hurt himself. 
 * « « 
 
 "Those who would encourage anarchy 
 at home must naturally strike hands with 
 the enemies of our country abroad. The 
 friend of the bomb-thrower and his apol- 
 ogists are doing what is fit and meet 
 when they strike hands across the seas 
 with those who are fighting our soldiers 
 in foreign lands. Fundamentally the 
 causes which they champion are the 
 same. The step from encouraging the 
 assassination of the guardians of the law 
 at home to the aiding and abetting of the 
 shooting down of our soldiers abroad is 
 but a short one; and it matters little 
 whether the encouragement be given by 
 the exercise of the pardoning power, by 
 raving speeches upon the platform, or by 
 
EOOSEVELT. 231 
 
 the circulation of silly documents com- 
 posed by men too feeble to accomplish 
 the mischief they design. Make no mis- 
 take! In the Philippines we are at war 
 with an enemy who must be put down. 
 It is absolutely impossible to save our 
 honor except through victory, and it is 
 equally impossible to win peace, to re- 
 store order in the islands, or to prepare 
 the way for self-government there save 
 through victory. Every argument that 
 our opponents make now is exactly such 
 as if they were logical they would make 
 on behalf of the Sioux Indians in South 
 Dakota or the Apaches in New Mexico, 
 and such as they actually did make at 
 the outbreak of the Civil War. If we have 
 no moral right to interfere in the Philip- 
 pines then we have no moral right to in- 
 terfere in an Indian reservation. If we 
 have no right in Luzon and should leave 
 it to the Tagals, then we have no right in 
 Alaska and should leave it to the Indians 
 and Eskimos. Not one argument can be 
 made for the proposed line of conduct in 
 
232 EOOSEVELT„ 
 
 the one case that does not apply with 
 exactly as much force to the other. 
 * * * 
 
 "People tell you that the Filipinos are 
 fighting for independence. This was ex- 
 actly what the copperheads of 1861 said 
 of the Confederates. Here in Ohio, Val- 
 landigham ran on the issue that the war 
 was a failure and that the independence 
 of the Southern States should be 
 acknowledged. The feeble Vallan- 
 dighams of to-day take the same 
 position, and if Ohio is true to the great 
 memories of her past, she will give the 
 same answer now that she gave then. 
 No man can hesitate in this strug- 
 gle and ever afterward call him- 
 self a true American and a true 
 patriot. He must stand by the flag. He 
 must uphold the honor and the interest 
 of the nation, and the only way in which 
 he can stand by the one and uphold the 
 other is to overwhelm the party that as- 
 sails both. Undying shame shall be his 
 portion if he does not stand with us at 
 
ROOSEVELT. 233 
 
 this crisis. There is no man living now 
 who has anything but a feeling of respect 
 for the gallant Confederates who showed 
 their sincerity in the appeal to arms and 
 valiantly risked their lives for what they 
 mistakenly thought to be the right; but 
 scant, indeed, is our sympathy for their 
 Northern allies who sat at home and 
 talked treason, but never exposed their 
 bodies to the risk of paying for their 
 words. 
 
 "You will meet short-sighted people 
 who say that Dewey, after sinking the 
 Spanish fleet, should have sailed away 
 from Manila Bay. Of course such con- 
 duct was impossible. It is not too much 
 to say that such conduct would have been 
 infamous. Either the islands would have 
 been left to their own fate had such a 
 course been followed, in which case a 
 series of bloody massacres would have 
 taken place and the war between the 
 Spaniards and Filipinos would have 
 
234 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 dragged along its wretched length until 
 some outside interference took place; or 
 else, what is far more probable, as 
 Dewey's fleet sailed out the fleet of some 
 European power would have sailed in, 
 and we should have had the keen morti- 
 fication of seeing the task which we 
 shrank from begun by some nation which 
 did not distrust its own powers, which 
 had the courage to dare to be great. 
 Dewey had to stay and we had to finish 
 the job we had begun. 
 
 "The talk about the Filipinos having 
 practically' achieved their independence 
 is, of course, the veriest nonsense. Aguin- 
 aldo, who has turned against us, owed 
 his return to the islands to us. It was 
 our troops and not the Filipinos who 
 conquered the Spaniards, and as a conse- 
 quence, it was to us the islands fell, and 
 we shall show ourselves not merely weak- 
 lings unfit to take our place among the 
 great nations of the world, but traitors 
 to the cause of the advancement of man- 
 kind if we flinch from doing aright tJie 
 
ROOSEVELT. 235 
 
 task which destiny has intrusted to our 
 hand. 
 
 "We have no more right to leave the 
 Filipinos to butcher one another and sink 
 slowly back into savagery than we would 
 have the right, in an excess of sentimen- 
 tality, to declare the Sioux or Apaches 
 free to expel all white settlers from the 
 lands they once held. The Filipinos offer 
 excellent material for the future; with 
 our aid they may be brought up to the 
 level of self-government, but at present 
 they cannot stand alone for any length 
 of time. A weak nation can be pardoned 
 for giving up a work which it does badly, 
 but a strong nation cannot be pardoned 
 for flinching from a great work because, 
 forsooth, there are attendant difficulties 
 and hardships. The century which is just 
 closing has seen what the century which 
 is opening will surely also see — vast 
 strides in civilization, the result of the 
 conquest of the world's waste spaces, the 
 result of the expansion of the great, mas- 
 terful, ruling races of the world. There 
 
236 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 is much prattle and much shrieking 
 against expansion. Are the prattlers so 
 ignorant as not to know that the ex- 
 istence of the United States is due to the 
 greatest application of the expansion 
 policy which the world has ever seen? If 
 our forefathers who came over the seas 
 to settle in the vast wooded wilderness 
 along the Atlantic seaboard nearly two 
 centuries ago had been as timid as those 
 degenerate descendants of theirs who 
 now protest against expansion this con- 
 tinent would still be nothing but the 
 hunting ground of the red men. 
 
 "Russia has expanded in Asia, Eng- 
 land in Asia, Africa and Australia, and 
 France and Germany in Africa, all with 
 the strides of giants during the years that 
 have just passed. In every instance the 
 expansion has taken place because the 
 race was a great race. It was a sign and 
 proof of greatness in the expanding na- 
 tion, and moreover bear in mind that in 
 
ROOSEVELT. 237 
 
 each instance it was of incalculable ben- 
 efit to mankind. In Australia a great 
 sister commonwealth to our own has 
 sprung up. In India a peace like the 
 Roman peace has been established, and 
 the country made immeasurably better. 
 So it is in Egypt, in Algiers and at the 
 Cape, while Siberia, before our very eyes, 
 is being changed from the seat of wander- 
 ing tribes of ferocious nomads into a 
 great civilized country. When great na- 
 tions fear to expand, shrink from expan- 
 sion, it is because their greatness is com- 
 ing to an end. Are we still in the prime 
 of our lusty youth, still at the beginning 
 of our glorious manhood, to sit down 
 among the outworn people, to take our 
 place with the weak and craven? A 
 thousand times no! A thousand times 
 rather face any difflculty— rather meet 
 and overcome any danger — than turn the 
 generous and vigorous blood of our na- 
 tional life into the narrow channels of 
 ignominy and fear." 
 
238 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE STUDY AND THE HOME. 
 
 Governor Roosevelt has always been a 
 devoted student. If he had given himself 
 wholly to literary work, he would have 
 made a great place for himself in the 
 world of thought. We have called at- 
 tention earlier in these pages to his mas- 
 terly and impressive "History of the 
 Naval War of 1812." This exhaustive 
 and comprehensive volume has been, and 
 is, and will be for many years to come, a 
 standard work of fully recognized author- 
 ity. Then followed in due order, "The 
 Life of Thomas H. Benton," "The Life of 
 Gouverneur Morris." 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt has also written three 
 bulky volumes: "The Wilderness Hunt- 
 er," "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman," 
 and "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," 
 which stand as the classics of big game 
 hunting in North America, He has a 
 
ROOSEVELT. 239 
 
 clear, enlivening style of narrative, and 
 conveys his impressions just as he talks, 
 with straightforward truthfulness and 
 earnestness. The style is the man. These 
 three books are of the kind that make 
 an active boy thrill and thrill and long 
 for the touch of a trigger. 
 
 While a Civil Service Commissioner, 
 Mr. Roosevelt produced a series of four 
 books, which he considers his "magnum 
 opus." These volumes form the "Win- 
 ning of the West" series and are as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 Vol. I. "From the AUeghanies to the 
 Mississippi, 1769-1770." 
 
 Vol. II. "From the AUeghanies to the 
 Mississippi, 1776-1783." 
 
 Vol. III. "The Founding of the Trans- 
 Alleghany C-ommonwealths, 1781-1790." 
 
 Vol. IV. "Louisiana and the North- 
 west, 1791-1809." 
 
 His volume of essays published by 
 Putnam's Sons, entitled "American 
 Ideals," is one of the grandest compen- 
 diums of the philosophy of True Ameri- 
 
240 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 canisin to be found in the language, it 
 ought to be in the hands and well digest- 
 ed by the minds of every young Ameri- 
 can. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, 
 Long Island, is an ideal «home. There 
 the unselfish politician, the valiant sol- 
 dier, the busy author are all subordinated 
 to the kindly husband and the happy 
 father. The home at Sagamore Hill is a 
 pleasant little commonwealth of peace 
 and prosperity. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt's first wife, Miss Alice 
 Lee of Boston, died in 1884, leav- 
 ing one infant daughter. Two years 
 later he married Miss Edith Ker- 
 mit Carow, a friend of his first wife. 
 There are six children, Alice, and "Ted- 
 dy," Jr., Kermit and Ethel, Archie and 
 Quentin; forming a right merry company 
 when their father, turning away from 
 his books and laying aside the cares of 
 state, joins their games and helps their 
 merriment by being a boy among his 
 boys and girls. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 241 
 
 One of his biographers tells how that 
 on a certain occasion Mr. Koosevelt was 
 called upon to make a speech, of the 
 simplest possible kind, and yet the most 
 difficult, to the children of the Cove 
 School at Oyster Bay. He began by con- 
 fessing cheerfully that when he was a 
 boy he was always looking for an excuse 
 to stay away from school. "There are 
 two things," he said, "that I want you 
 to make up your minds to. First, that 
 you are going to have a good time as long 
 as you live — I have no use for a sour- 
 faced man — and next, make up your 
 minds that you are going to do some- 
 thing worth while. You are going to 
 work hard and do the things you start 
 out to do. 
 
 "Don't let any one impose on you. 
 Don't be quarrelsome. But stand up for 
 your rights. If you've got to fight, fight 
 and fight hard and well. To my mind a 
 coward is the only thing meaner than a 
 liar. 
 
 "Work hard, but have a good time, too. 
 
242 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 If in your work you find a chance for a 
 holiday take it. Enjoy it just as much as 
 you can. But don't think that you can 
 have a holiday all your lives, because that 
 isn't so. You are going to work hard; 
 you must 
 
 "Be brave, but be gentle to little girls 
 and to all dumb animals. The boy who 
 maltreats animals is not worth having 
 his neck wrung." 
 
ROOSEVELT. 243 
 
 SYMPOSIUM 
 
 OF 
 
 Brilliant Tliouolits and Inspirino Words 
 
 FROM THE ESSAYS AND ORATIONS OF 
 
 PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT. 
 
 ECHOES OF GLORY AND A LEGACY 
 OF HONOR. 
 
 The guns that thundered off Manila 
 and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but 
 they also left us a legacy of duty. If we 
 drove out a medieval tyranny only to 
 make room for savage anarchy, we had 
 better not have begun the task at all. It 
 is worse than idle to say that we have 
 no duty to perform and can leave to their 
 fates the islands we have conquered. 
 Such a course would be the course of in- 
 
244 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 famy. It would be followed at once by 
 utter chaos in the wretched islands 
 themselves. Some stronger, manlier 
 power would have to step in and do the 
 work; and we would have shown our- 
 selves weaklings, unable to carry to suc- 
 cessful completion the labors that great 
 and high-spirited nations are eager to 
 undertake. The work must be done. We 
 cannot escape our responsibility, and if 
 we are worth our salt, we shall be glad 
 of the chance to do the work — glad of the 
 chance to show ourselves equal to one of 
 the great tasks set modern civilization. 
 But let us not deceive ourselves as to 
 the importance of the task. Let us not 
 be misled by vain-glory into under- 
 estimating the strain it will put on our 
 powers. Above all, as we value our own 
 self-respect, let us face the responsibil- 
 ities with proper seriousness, courage 
 and high resolve. 
 
 HONEST BUT HARMFUL. 
 
 The professional labor agitator, with 
 
ROOSEVELT. 245 
 
 all his reckless incendiarism of speech, 
 can do more harm than the narrow, hard, 
 selfish merchant or manufacturer who 
 delibarately sets himself to keep the 
 laborers he employs in a condition of de- 
 pendence which will render them help- 
 less to combine against him, and every 
 such merchant or manufacturer who 
 rises to sufficient eminence leaves the 
 record of his name and deeds as a legacy 
 of evil to all who come after him. 
 
 THE IDEAL OF THE FEDERALIST. 
 
 The ideal to be set before the student 
 of politics and the practical politician 
 alike is the ideal of the Federalist. Each 
 man should realize that he cannot do 
 his best, either in the study of politics 
 or in applied politics unless he has a 
 working knowledge of both branches. A 
 limited number of people can do good 
 work by the careful study of govern- 
 mental institutions, but they can do it 
 only if they have themselves a practical 
 
246 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 knowledge of the workings of these in- 
 stitutions. A very large number of peo- 
 ple, on the other hand, may do excellent 
 work in politics without much theoretic 
 knowledge of the subject; but without 
 this knowledge they cannot rise to the 
 highest rank, while in any rank their 
 capacity to do good work will be im- 
 mensely increased if they have such 
 knowledge. 
 
 THE AGE HAS GREAT TASKS. 
 
 We of this generation do not have to 
 face a task such as that our fathers faced, 
 but we have our tasks, and woe to us if 
 we fail to perform them! We cannot, if 
 we would, play the part of China, and be 
 content to rot by inches in ignoble ease 
 within our borders, taking no interest in 
 what goes on beyond them; sunk in a 
 scrambling commercialism; heedless of 
 the higher life, the life of aspiration, of 
 toil and risk; busying ourselves only with 
 
ROOSEVELT. 247 
 
 the wants of our bodies for the day; until 
 suddenly we should find, beyond a 
 shadow of question, what China has al- 
 ready found, that in this world the na- 
 tion that has trained itself to a career 
 of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound 
 in the end to go down before other na- 
 tions which have not lost the manly and 
 adventurous qualities. If we are to be 
 a really great people, we must strive in 
 good faith to play a great part in the 
 world. We cannot avoid meeting great 
 issues. All that we can determine for 
 ourselves is whether we shall meet them 
 well or ill. Last year we could not help 
 being brought face to face with the prob- 
 lem of war with Spain. All we could de- 
 cide was whether we should shirk like 
 cowards from the contest or enter into it 
 as beseemed a brave and high-spirited 
 people; and, once in, whether failure or 
 success should crown our banners. So 
 it is now. We cannot avoid the respon- 
 sibilities that confront us in Hawaii, 
 Cuba, Porto Kico, and the Philippines. 
 
248 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 All we can decide is whether we shall 
 meet them in a way that will redound 
 to the national credit, or whether we 
 shall make of our dealings with these 
 new problems a dark and shameful page 
 in our history. To refuse to deal with 
 them at all merely amounts to dealing 
 with them badly. We have a given prob- 
 lem to solve. If we undertake the solu- 
 tion, there is, of course, always danger 
 that we may not solve it aright, but to 
 refuse to undertake the solution simply 
 renders it certain that we cannot possibly 
 serve it aright. 
 
 ALIEN ELEMENTS. 
 
 The mighty tide of immigration to our 
 shores has brought in its train much of 
 good and much of evil; and whether the 
 good or the evil shall predominate de- 
 pends mainly on whether these newcom- 
 ers do or do not throw themselves heart' 
 ily into our national life, cease to be Eu- 
 
KOOSEVELT. 249 
 
 ropean, and become Americans like the 
 rest of us. More than a third of the peo- 
 ple of the Northern States are of foreign 
 birth or parentage. An immense number 
 of them have become completely Amer- 
 icanized, and these stand on exactl}^ the 
 same plane as the descendants of any 
 Puritan, Cavalier, or Knickerbocker 
 among us, and do their full and honor- 
 able share of the nation's work. But 
 where immigrants, or the sons of immi- 
 grants, do not heartily and in good faith 
 throw in their lot with us, but cling to 
 the speech, the customs, the ways of life, 
 and the habits of thought of the Old 
 World which they have left, they thereby 
 harm both themselves and us. If they 
 remain alien elements, unassimilated, 
 and with interests separate from ours, 
 they are mere obstructions to the current 
 of our national life, and, moreover, can 
 get no good from it themselves. In fact, 
 though we ourselves also suffer from 
 their perversity, it is they who really 
 suffer most. 
 
250 ROOSEVELT, 
 
 THE PERIL OF THE LAWLESS 
 CLASSES. 
 
 Every true American, every man who 
 thinks, and who, if the occasion comes, is 
 ready to act, may do well to ponder upon 
 the evil wrought by the lawlessness of 
 the disorderly classes when once they are 
 able to elect their own chiefs to power. 
 
 THE EMOTIONAL AND THE PRAC- 
 TICAL IN MORALS. 
 
 While there is in modern times a de- 
 crease in emotional religion, there is an 
 immense decrease in practical moral- 
 ity. There is a decrease of the 
 martial type found among savages 
 and the people of the Middle Ages, 
 except as it still survives in the 
 slums of great cities; but there remains 
 a martial type infinitely more efficient 
 than any that preceded it. There are 
 great branches of industry which call 
 forth in those that follow them more 
 
ROOSEVELT. 251 
 
 hardihood, manliness, and courage than 
 any industry of ancient times. The im- 
 mense masses of men connected with the 
 railroads are continually called upon to 
 exercise qualities of mind and body such 
 as in antiquity no trade and no handi- 
 craft demanded. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY MAN SHOULD 
 PLAY HIS PART IN POLITICS. 
 
 The man with a university education 
 is in honor bound to take an active part 
 in our political life, and to do his full 
 duty as a citizen by helping his fellow- 
 citizens to the extent of his power in the 
 exercise of the rights of self-government. 
 He is bound to rank action far above 
 criticism,and to understand that the man 
 deserving of credit is the man who actual- 
 ly does the things, even though imper- 
 fectly, and not the man who confines him- 
 self to talking about how they ought to 
 be done. He is bound to have a high 
 ideal and to strive to realize it, and yet 
 
252 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 he must make up his mind that he will 
 never be able to get the highest good, and 
 that he must devote himself with all his 
 energy to getting the best that he can. 
 Finally, his work must be disinterested 
 and honest, and it must be given without 
 regard to his own success or failure, and 
 without regard to the effect it has upon 
 his own fortunes; and while he must 
 show the virtues of uprightness and tol- 
 erance and gentleness, he must also show 
 the sterner virtues of courage, resolu- 
 tion and hardihood, and the desire to war 
 with merciless effectiveness against the 
 existence of wrong. 
 
 THE WORST FOES OF AMERICA. 
 
 The worst foes of America are the foes 
 to that orderly liberty without which our 
 republic must speedily perish. The reck- 
 less labor agitator who arouses the mob 
 is in the last analysis the most dangerous 
 of the working man's enemies. This man 
 is a real peril ; and so is his sympathizer, 
 
EOOSEVELT. 253 
 
 the legislator, who, to catch votes, de- 
 nounces the judiciary and the military 
 because they put down mobs. 
 
 TRIBUTE TO GENERAL WOOD. 
 
 To General Wood has fallen the duty 
 of preserving order, of seeing that the 
 best Cubans begin to administer the gov- 
 ernment, of pix)tecting the lives and 
 properties of the Spaniards from the 
 vengeance of their foes, and of securing 
 the best hygienic conditions possible in 
 the city; of opening the schools, and of 
 endeavoring to re-establish agriculture 
 and commerce in a ruined and desolate 
 land. 
 
 The sanitary state of the city of San- 
 tiago v/as fdghtful beyond belief. The 
 Cuban army consisted of undisciplined, 
 unpaid men on the verge of becoming 
 mere bandits. The Cuban chiefs were 
 not only jealous of one another, but, very 
 naturally, bitterly hostile to the Span- 
 
254 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 iards who remained in the land. On the 
 other hand, the men of property, not only 
 among the Spaniards, but even among 
 the Cubans, greatly feared the revolu- 
 tionary army. All conditions were ripe 
 for a period of utter anarchy, and under 
 a weak, a foolish, or a violent man this 
 anarchy would certainly have come. 
 General Wood, by his energy, his firm- 
 ness, his common sense, and his modera- 
 tion, has succeeded in working as great 
 an improvement as was possible in so 
 short a time. By degrees he has substi- 
 tuted the best Cubans he can find in the 
 places both of the old Spanish ofiicials 
 and of the Americans who were put iu 
 temporary control. He permits not the 
 slightest violence either on the part of 
 the American soldiers or of the inhabit- 
 ants; he does absolute, even justice to all. 
 
 OWN BKOTHERS TO SHORT- 
 SIGHTED MEN. 
 
 The men who to-day protest against a 
 navy, and protest also against every 
 
ROOSEVELT. 255 
 
 movement to carry out the traditional 
 policy of the country in foreign affairs, 
 and to uphold the honor of the flag, are 
 themselves but following in the course 
 of those who protested against the ac- 
 quisition of the great West, and who 
 failed to make proper preparations for 
 the War of 1812, or refused to support it 
 after it had been made. They are own 
 brothers to the men whose short-sighted- 
 ness and supine indifference prevented 
 any reorganization of the personnel of 
 the navy during the middle of the cen- 
 tury, so that we entered upon the Civil 
 War with captains seventy years old. 
 They are close kin to the men who, when 
 the Southern States seceded, wished to 
 let the Union be disrupted in peace rather 
 than restored through the grim agony of 
 armed conflict. 
 
 OUR IMMEDIATE DUTY. 
 
 I think most Americans realize that 
 facts must be faced, and that for the 
 
256 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 present, and in the immediate future, we 
 shall have, whether we wish it or not, to 
 provide a working government, not only 
 for Hawaii and Porto Ilico, but for Cuba 
 and the Philippines. We may not wish 
 the Philippines, and may regret that cir- 
 cumstances have forced us to take them; 
 but we have taken them, and stay there 
 we must for the time being — whether this 
 temporary stay paves the way for per- 
 manent occupation, or whether it is to 
 last only until some more satisfactory ar- 
 rangement, whether by native rule or 
 otherwise, takes its place. Discussion of 
 theories will not avail much; we have a 
 bit of very practical work to be done, and 
 done it must be, somehow. I am certain 
 that if the Cubans show themselves en- 
 tirely fit to establish and carry on a free 
 and orderly government, the great mass 
 of my fellow-citizens will gladly permit 
 them to decide themselves as to the des- 
 tiny of Cuba, and will allow them to be 
 independent if they so desire. I am also 
 certain that Americans would take much 
 
SENATOR CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW 
 Who seconded Koosevelt's nomination for the Vice-Presidency. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 257 
 
 this position in regard to the Philippines 
 were the conditions such as to justify it. 
 But I am also certain that our people will 
 neither permit the islands again to fall 
 into the clutches of Spain or of some 
 power of Continental Europe which 
 would have interfered to our harm in the 
 last war if it had dared to, nor yet permit 
 them to sink into a condition of squalid 
 and savage anarchy. 
 
 WE MUST NOT SHIRK. 
 
 The policy of shirking our responsibil- 
 ities cannot be adopted. To refuse to at- 
 tempt to secure good government in the 
 new territories acquired last summer 
 would simply mean that we were weak- 
 lings, not worthy to stand among the 
 great races of the world. Such a policy 
 would itself be a failure; and if we fol- 
 low any other policy we can do no worse 
 than fail; so it may be taken for granted 
 that we are going to try the experiment. 
 All that remains is to see that we try it 
 
258 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 under conditions which give us most 
 chances of success; that is, which render 
 it most likely that we shall give good 
 government to the conquered provinces, 
 and therefore add to the honor and re- 
 nown of the American name no less than 
 to the material well-being of our people 
 at home and abroad. 
 
 THE MAN OF WORTH TO THE COM- 
 MONWEALTH. 
 
 No man is worth much to the common- 
 wealth if he is not capable of feeling 
 righteous wrath, and just indignation, if 
 he is not stirred to hot anger by misdo- 
 ing, and is not impelled to see justice 
 meted out to the wrong-doer. 
 
 PHYSICAL AND MORAL COURAGE. 
 
 That orderly liberty which is both the 
 foundation and the capstone of our 
 civilization can be gained and kept only 
 by men who are willing to fight for an 
 ideal; who hold high the love of honor, 
 
ROOSEVELT. 259 
 
 love of faith, love of flag, and love of 
 country. It is true that no nation can be 
 really great unless it is great in peace; in 
 industry, integrity, honesty. Skilled in- 
 telligence in civic affairs and industrial 
 enterprises alike; the special ability of 
 the artist, the man of letters, the man of 
 science, and the man of business; the 
 rigid determination to wrong no man, 
 and to stand for righteousness — all these 
 are necessary in a great nation. But it 
 is also necessary that the nation should 
 have physical no less than moral cour- 
 age; the capacity to do and dare and die 
 at need, and that grim and steadfast reso- 
 lution which alone will carry a great peo- 
 ple through a great peril. 
 
 " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
 THE PREACHERS OF DISCONTENT. 
 
 Something can be done by good laws; 
 more can be done by honest administra- 
 
260 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 tion of the laws; but most of all can be 
 done by frowning resolutely on the 
 preachers of vague discontent 
 
 IMPRACTICABLE DOCTRINAIRES. 
 
 I do not believe that any considerable 
 number of our citizens are stamped with 
 this timid lack of patriotism. There are 
 some "doctrinaires" whose eyes are so 
 firmly fixed on the golden vision of uni- 
 versal peace that they cannot see the 
 grim facts of real life until they stumble 
 over them, to their own hurt, and, what 
 is much worse, to the possible undoing 
 of their fellows. There are some edu- 
 cated men in whom education merely 
 serves to soften the fibre and to elim- 
 inate the higher, sterner qualities which 
 tell for national greatness; and these 
 men prate about love for mankind, or for 
 another country, as being in some hidden 
 way a substitute for love of their own 
 country. 
 
KOOSEVELT. 261 
 
 WHAT NATIONS OWE TO THEIR 
 GREAT MEN. 
 
 Every great nation owes to the men 
 whose lives have formed part of its great- 
 ness not merely the material effect of 
 what they did, not merely the laws they 
 placed upon the statute books or the vic- 
 tories they won over armed foes, but also 
 the immense but indefinable moral in- 
 fluence produced by their wor'ds and 
 deeds upon the national character. 
 
 GENERAL WOOD IN SANTIAGO. 
 
 What General Wood has done in San- 
 tiago other officials must do elsewhere 
 in Cuba, in Porto Rico and in the Philip- 
 pines, not to speak of Hawaii, if our rule 
 in these islands is to be honorable to our- 
 selves and advantageous to the natives. 
 There is no need of prattling about the 
 impossibility of governing the island un- 
 der our constitution and system of gov- 
 ernment. The men who so prattle merely 
 
262 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 show their own weakness; there is not 
 the slightest difficulty in governing the 
 islands if we set about governing them 
 well, and if we choose the General Woods 
 because they are fit for the task and not 
 because they are pressed by selfish inter- 
 ests, whether political or commercial. 
 The inhabitants of the islands are not at 
 the moment fit to govern themselves. In 
 some places they may speedily become 
 fit; in other places the intervening time 
 may be very long indeed. Until the mo- 
 ment does arrive, they have got to be gov- 
 erned; and they have got to be governed 
 by men carefully chosen, who are on the 
 ground, who know what the needs really 
 are, and who have the power given them 
 to meet these needs. Politics should have 
 as little to do with the choice of our 
 colonial administrators as it should have 
 to do with the choice of an Admiral or a 
 General. We cannot afford to trifle with 
 our own honor or with the interests of the 
 great alien communities over which we 
 have assumed supervision. 
 
KOOSEVELT. 263 
 
 THE MOST IGNOBLE CHARACTER. 
 There is not in the world a more igno- 
 ble character than the mere money-get- 
 ting American, insensible to every duty, 
 regardless of every principle, bent only 
 on amassing a fortune, and putting his 
 fortunes to the basest uses — whether 
 these uses be to speculate in stocks and 
 wreck railroads himself, or to allow his 
 son to lead a life of foolish and expensive 
 idleness and gross debauchery, or to pur- 
 chase some scoundrel of high social posi- 
 tion, foreign or native, for his daughter. 
 Such a man is only, the more dangerous if 
 he occasionally does some deed like 
 founding a college or endowing a church, 
 which makes those good people who are 
 also foolish forget his real iniquity. 
 These men are equally careless of the 
 workingmen, whom they oppress, and of 
 the state, whose existence they imperil. 
 There are not very many of them, but 
 there is a very great number of men who 
 approach more or less closely to the type, 
 and, just in so far as they do so approach. 
 
264 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 they, are curses to the country. The man 
 who is content to let politics go from bad 
 to worse, jesting at the corruption of 
 Ijoliticians, the man who is content to see 
 the maladministration of justice without 
 an immediate and resolute effort to re- 
 form it, is shirking his duty and is pre- 
 paring the way for infinite woe in the 
 future. Hard, brutal indifference to the 
 right, and an equally brutal short- 
 sightedness as to the inevitable results 
 of corruption and injustice, are baleful 
 beyond measure; and yet they are char- 
 acteristic of a great many Americans 
 who think themselves perfectly respect- 
 able, and who are considered thriving, 
 prosperous men by their easy-going fel- 
 low-citizens. 
 
 MEN TO WHOM WE OWE MOST. 
 
 We of the United States have passed 
 most of our few years of national life in 
 peace. We honor the architects of our 
 wonderful material prosperity; we ap- 
 
KOOSEVELT, 265 
 
 predate the necessity of thrift, energy 
 and business enterprise, and we know 
 that even these are of no avail without 
 the civil and social virtues. But we feel, 
 after all, that the men who have dared 
 greatly in war, or the work which is akin 
 to war, are those who deserve best of the 
 country. The men of Bunker Hill and 
 Trenton, Saratoga and Yorktown, the 
 men of New Orleans and Mobile Bay, 
 Gettysburg and Appomattox are those 
 to whom we owe most. None of our 
 heroes of peace, save a few great con- 
 structive statesmen, can rank with our 
 heroes of war. 
 
 A NATION OF MERE HUCKSTERS. 
 
 There are^ it is true, influences at work 
 to shake the vitality, conrage, and man- 
 liness of the race; but there are other 
 influences which tell in exactly the op- 
 posite direction; and, whatever may 
 come in the future, hitherto the last set 
 of influences have been strongest As 
 yet, while men are more gentle and more 
 
266 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 honest than before, it cannot be said, that 
 they are less brave; and they are certain- 
 ly more efficient as fighters. If our pop- 
 ulation decreases; if we lose the virile, 
 manly qualities, and sink into a nation 
 of mere hucksters, putting gain above 
 national honor, and subordinating every- 
 thing to mere ease of life; then we shall 
 indeed reach a condition worse than that 
 of the ancient civilizations in the years 
 of their decay. But at present no com- 
 parison could be less apt than that of 
 Byzantium, or Rome in its later years, 
 with a great modern state where the 
 thronging millions who make up the bulk 
 of the population are wage-earners, 
 who themselves decide their own des- 
 tinies; a state which is able in time of 
 need to put into the field armies, com- 
 posed exclusively of its own citizens, 
 more numerous than any which the 
 world has ever before seen, and with a 
 record of fighting in the immediate past 
 with which there is nothing in the an- 
 nals of antiquity to compare. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 267 
 
 IF WE AKE REMISS CUBA WILL 
 HAVE A GRIEVANCE. 
 If political considerations of the baser 
 sort are supreme in the administration of 
 New York City, that is New York City's 
 own fault; but in the Philippines or in 
 Cuba it would be the fault of the Amer- 
 ican people and not of the inhabitants, 
 and would establish a just grievance on 
 behalf of the latter. We cannot afford 
 to let politicians do with our public sery- 
 ice in our dependencies what they have 
 done for the consular service; still less 
 can we afford to let doctrinaires, or hon- 
 est, ignorant people, decide the difficult 
 and delicate questions bound to arise 
 in administering the new provinces. We 
 cannot possibly, at any rate for the pres- 
 ent, do better than to take for each prov- 
 ince some man like General Wood, give 
 him the largest power possible both as 
 to his methods and his subordinates, and 
 then hold him to a strict accountability 
 for the results; demanding that he pre- 
 serve untarnished the honor of the 
 
268 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 American name, by working, not only 
 for the interests of America, but for the 
 interests of the people whose temporary 
 ruler he ia 
 
 A (NATION'S GREATNESS. 
 
 The men who have profoundly in- 
 fluenced the growth of our national 
 character have been in most cases pre- 
 cisely those men whose influence was for 
 the best and was strongly felt as an- 
 tagonistic to the worst tendency of the 
 age. The great writers, who have writ- 
 ten in prose or verse, have done much 
 for us. The great orators, whose burn- 
 ing words on behalf of liberty, of union, 
 of honest government have rung through 
 our legislative halls, have done even 
 more. Most of all has been done by the 
 men who have spoken to us through 
 deeds and not words or whose words 
 have gathered their especial charm and 
 significance because they came from 
 men who did speak in deeds. A nation's 
 
KOOSEVELT. 269 
 
 greatness lies in its possibility of achieve- 
 ment in the present, and nothing helps it 
 more than the consciousness of achieve- 
 ment in the past. 
 
 ENGLAND'S HISTORY RICH IN 
 SPLENDID NAMES. 
 
 England's history is rich in splendid 
 names and splendid deeds. Her litera- 
 ture is even greater than that of Greece. 
 In commerce she has stood in the modern 
 world as more than Carthage was when 
 civilization clustered like a fringe 
 around the Mediterranean. But she has 
 risen far higher than even Greece or 
 Carthage rose, because she possesses 
 also the great masterful qualities which 
 were possessed by the Romans who over- 
 threw them both. England has been fer- 
 tile in soldiers and administrators; in 
 men who triumphed by sea and land; in 
 adventurers and explorers; who won for 
 her the world's waste places; and it is 
 because of this that the English-speaking 
 
270 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 race now shares with the Slav the fate of 
 the coming years. 
 
 THE WORTHLESS LEAVE NO LAST- 
 ING IMPRESS. 
 
 The unscrupulous speculator who rises 
 to enormous wealth by swindling his 
 neighbor; the capitalist who oppresses 
 the w^orkingman; the agitator who 
 wrongs the workingman yet more deeply 
 by trying to teach him to rely not upon 
 himself, but partly upon the charity of 
 individuals or of the state and partly 
 upon mob violence; the man in public 
 life who is a demagogue or corrupt, and 
 the newspaper writer who fails to attack 
 him because of his corruption, or who 
 slanderously assails him when he is hon- 
 est; the political leader who, cursed by 
 some obliquity of moral or of mental 
 vision, seeks to produce sectional or so- 
 cial strife — all these, though important 
 in their da^^, have hitherto failed to leave 
 any lasting impress upon the life of the 
 nation. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 271 
 
 YOUNG MEN NEED ENTHUSIASM. 
 For educated men of weak fibre, there 
 lies a real danger in that species of 
 literary work which appeals to their cul- 
 tivated senses because of its scholarly 
 and pleasant tone, but which enjoins as 
 the proper attitude to assume in public 
 life one of mere criticism and negation; 
 which teaches the adoption toward pub- 
 lic men and public affairs of that sneer- 
 ing tone which so surely denotes a mean 
 and small mind. If a man does not have 
 belief and enthusiasm, the chances are 
 small indeed that he will ever do a man's 
 work in the world; and the paper or the 
 college which, by its general course,tends 
 to eradicate this power of belief and en- 
 thusiasm, this desire for work, has ren- 
 dered to the young men under its in- 
 fluence the worst service it could possibly 
 render. Good can often be done by 
 criticising sharply and severely the 
 wrong; but excessive indulgence in 
 criticism is never anything but bad, and 
 no amount of criticism can in any way 
 
272 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 take the place of active and zealous war- 
 fare for the right. 
 
 WE HOLD IN OUR HANDS THE 
 FATE OF COMING YEARS. 
 
 Our nation is that one among all the 
 nations of the earth which holds in its 
 hands the fate of the coming years. We 
 enjoy exceptional advantages, and are 
 menaced by exceptional dangers; and all 
 signs indicate that we shall either fail 
 greatly or succeed greatly. I firmly be- 
 lieve that we shall succeed; but we must 
 not foolishly blink the dangers by which 
 we are threatened, for that is the way 
 to fail. On the contrary, we must soberly 
 set to work to find out all we can about 
 the existence and extent of every evil, 
 must acknowledge it to be such, and 
 must then attack it with unyielding reso- 
 lution. There are many such evils, and 
 each must be fought after a separate 
 fashion; yet there is one quality which 
 we must bring to the solution of every 
 
EOOSEVELT. 273 
 
 problem, — that is, an intense and fervid 
 Americanism. We shall never be suc- 
 cessful over the dangers that confront 
 us; we shall never achieve true greatness, 
 nor reach the lofty ideal which the found- 
 ers and preservers of our mighty Fed- 
 eral republic have set before us, unless 
 we are American in heart and soul, in 
 spirit and purpose, keenly alive to the 
 responsibility implied in the very name 
 of American, and proud beyond measure 
 of the glorious privilege of bearing it. 
 
 THE NATION'S DEBT TO WASHING- 
 TON AND LINCOLN 
 
 Without Washington we should prob- 
 ably never have won our independence 
 of the British crown, and we should al- 
 most certainly have failed to become a 
 great nation, remaining instead a cluster 
 of jangling little communities, drifting 
 toward the type of government prevalent 
 in Spanish America, Without Lincoln 
 
274 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 we might perhaps have failed to keep 
 the political unity we had won; and even 
 if, as is possible, we had kept it, both the 
 struggle by which it was kept and the 
 results of this struggle would have been 
 so different that the effect upon our na- 
 tional history could not have failed to 
 be profound. Yet the nation's debt to 
 these men is not confined to what.it owes 
 them for its material well-being, incal- 
 culable though this debt is. Beyond the 
 fact that we are an independent and 
 united people, with half a continent as 
 our heritage, lies the fact that every 
 American is richer by the heritage of 
 the noble deeds ajid noble words of 
 Washington and of Lincoln. Each of us 
 who reads the Gettysburg speech or the 
 second inaugural address of the greatest 
 American of the nineteenth century, or 
 who studies the long campaigns and 
 lofty statesmanship of that other Amer- 
 ican who was even greater, cannot but 
 feel within him that lift toward things 
 higher and nobler which can never be 
 
KOOSEVELT. 275 
 
 bestowed by the enjoyment of mere ma- 
 terial prosperity. 
 
 PRACTICAL POLITICS 
 
 But disinterestedness and honesty and 
 unselfish desire to do what is rij^ht are 
 not enough in themselves. A man must 
 not only be disinterested, but he must be 
 efficient. If he goes into politics he must 
 go into practical politics, in order to 
 make his influence felt Practical poli- 
 tics must not be construed to mean dirty 
 politics. On the contraiy, in the long 
 run the politics of fraud and treachery 
 and foulness are unpractical politics, and 
 the most practical of all politicians is the 
 politician who is clean and decent and 
 upright. But a man who goes into the 
 actual battles of the political world must 
 prepare himself much as he would for the 
 struggle in any other branch of our life. 
 He must be prepared to meet men of far 
 lower ideals than his own, and to face 
 things, not as he would wish them, but 
 as they are. 
 
27G KO0SEVELT. 
 
 THE EIGHT TO BE OPTIMISTS— 
 BUT! 
 
 We Americans have the right to be 
 optimists; but — it is mere folly to blind 
 ourselves to the fact that there are some 
 black clouds in the horizon of our coun- 
 try. 
 
 OUR CHIEF AMERICANS. 
 
 The Americans who stand highest on 
 the list of the world's worthies are 
 Washington, who fought to found the 
 country which he afterward governed, 
 and Lincoln, who saved it through the 
 blood of the best and bravest in the 
 land; Washington, the soldier and states- 
 man, the man of cool head, dauntless 
 heart, and iron will, the greatest of good 
 men and the best of great men; and Lin- 
 coln, sad, patient, kindly Lincoln, who 
 for four years toiled and suffered for the 
 people and when his work was done kiid 
 down his life that the flag which had 
 
EOOSEVELT. 277 
 
 been rent in sunder might once more be 
 made whole and without a seam. It is on 
 men such as these and not on the advo- 
 cates of peace at any price, or upon those 
 so short-sighted that they refuse to take 
 into account the possibility of war, that 
 we must rely in every crisis which deeply 
 touches the true greatness and true 
 honor of the republic. The United States 
 has never once in the course of its history 
 suffered harm because of preparation 
 for war. But we have suffered incal- 
 culable harm, again and again, from a 
 foolish failure to prepare for war, or from 
 reluctance to fight when to fight was 
 proper. 
 
 QUACK REMEDIES. 
 
 Quack remedies of the universal cure- 
 all type, are generally as noxious to the 
 body politic as to the body corporal. 
 
 OUR DUTY TO THE STATE. 
 
 We must do our duty by the State. 
 We must frown down dishonesty and 
 
278 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 corruption, and war for honesty and 
 righteousness. 
 
 THE MEN WHO HARM US. 
 
 The people that do harm in the end 
 are not the wrong-doers whom all ex- 
 ecrate; they are the men who do not do 
 quite as much wrong, but who are ap- 
 plauded instead of being execrated. The 
 career of Benedict Arnold has done us 
 no harm as a nation because of the uni- 
 versal horror it inspired. The men who 
 have done us harm are those who have 
 advocated disunion, but have done it so 
 that they have been enabled to keep their 
 political position; who have advocated 
 repudiation of debts, or other financial 
 dishonesty, but have kept their stand- 
 ing in the community; who preach the 
 doctrines of anarchy, but refrain from 
 action that will bring them within the 
 pale of the law; for these men lead thou- 
 sands astray by the fact that they go 
 unpunished or even rewarded for their 
 misdeeds. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 279 
 
 POLITICS AS PRACTICAL AS 
 BUSINESS. 
 
 College men must learn to be as prac- 
 tical in politics as they would be in busi- 
 ness or in law. It is surely unnecessary 
 to say that by "practical" I do not mean 
 anything that savors in the least of dis- 
 honesty. On the contrary, a college man 
 is peculiarly bound to keep a high ideal 
 and to be true to it; but he must work 
 in practical ways to try to realize this 
 ideal, and must not refuse to do anything 
 because he cannot get everything. One 
 especially necessary thing is to know 
 the facts by actual experience, and not to 
 take refuge in mere theorizing. There 
 are always a number of excellent and 
 well-meaning men whom we gTow to re- 
 gard with amused impatience because 
 they waste all their energies on some 
 visionary scheme which, even if it were 
 not visionary, would be useless. When 
 they come to deal with political ques- 
 tions, these men are apt to err from 
 sheer lack of familiarity with the work- 
 
280 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 ings of our government. No man ever 
 really learned from books how to man- 
 age a governmental system. Books are 
 admirable adjuncts, and tlie statesman 
 who has carefully studied them is far 
 more apt to do good work than if he had 
 not; but if he has never done anything 
 but study books he will not be a states- 
 man at all. 
 
 KNOW-NOTHINGISM IS UN-AMER- 
 ICAN. 
 But I wish to be distinctly understood 
 on one point. Americanism is a ques- 
 tion of spirit, conviction, and pui*pose, 
 not of creed or birthplace. The politician 
 who bids for the Irish or German vote, 
 or the Irishman or German who votes 
 as an Irishman or German, is despicable, 
 for all citizens of this commonwealth 
 should vote solely as Americans; but he 
 is not a whit less despicable than the 
 voter who votes against a good Amer- 
 ican, merely because that American hap- 
 pens to have been born in Ireland or Ger- 
 
KOOSEVELT. 281 
 
 many. Know-nothingism, in any form, is 
 as utterly un-American as foreignism. It 
 is a base outrage to oppose a man be- 
 cause of his religion or birthplace, and 
 all good citizens will hold any such ef- 
 fort in abhorrence. A Scandinavian, a 
 German, or an Irishman who has really 
 become an American has the right to 
 stand on exactly the same footing as any 
 native-born citizen in the land, and is 
 just as much entitled to the friendship 
 and support, social and political, of his 
 neighbors. 
 
 THE GRAND SECRET OF PER- 
 MANENT SUCCESS. 
 In our political and social life alike in 
 order to permanently succeed, we must 
 base our conduct on the Decalogue and 
 the Golden Rule. 
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 
 
 No amount of intelligence and no 
 amount of energy will save a nation 
 which is not honest, and no government 
 
282 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 can ever be a permanent success if ad- 
 ministered in accordance with base 
 ideals. The first requisite in the citizen 
 who wishes to share the work of our pub- 
 lic life, whether he wishes himself to hold 
 office or merely to do his plain duty as 
 an American by taking part in the man- 
 agement of our political machiner^% is 
 that he shall act disinterestedly and with 
 a sincere purpose to serve the whole com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 THE BEST SERVICE IS NOT REN- 
 DERED BY THE CRITIC. 
 The prime thing that every man who 
 takes an interest in politics should re- 
 member is that he must act, and not 
 merely criticise the actions of others. It 
 is not the man who sits by his fireside 
 reading his evening paper, and saying 
 how bad our politics and politicians are, 
 who will ever do anything to save us; it 
 is the man who goes out into the rough 
 hurly-burly of the caucus, the primary, 
 and the political meeting, and there faces 
 
ROOSEVELT. 283 
 
 bis fellows on equal terms. The real serv- 
 ice is rendered, not by the critic who 
 stands aloof from the contest, but by the 
 man who enters into it and bears his 
 part as a man should, undeterred by the 
 blood and the sweat. It is a pleasant 
 but dangerous thing to associate merely 
 with cultivated, refined men of high 
 ideals and sincere purpose to do right, 
 and to think that one has done all one's 
 duty by discussing politics with such 
 associates. It is a good thing to meet 
 men of this stamp; indeed it is a neces- 
 sary thing, for we thereby brighten our 
 ideals, and keep in touch with the people 
 who are unselfish in their purposes; but 
 if we associate with such men exclusively 
 we can accomplish nothing. The actual 
 battle must be fought out on other and 
 less pleasant fields. 
 
 MACHINE POLITICIANS. 
 Many a machine politician who is to- 
 day a most unwholesome influence in our 
 politics is in private life quite as respect- 
 
284 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 able as anyone else; only he has forgotten 
 that his business affer-ts the state at 
 large, and, regarding it as merely his own 
 private concern, he has carried into it the 
 same selfish spirit that actuates in busi- 
 ness matters the majority of the average 
 mercantile community. A merchant or 
 manufacturer works his business, as a 
 rule, purely for his own benefit, without 
 any regard whatever for the community 
 at large. The merchant uses all his in- 
 fluence for a low tariff, and the manufac- 
 turer is even more strenuously in favor 
 of protection, not at all from any theory 
 of abstract right, but because of self- 
 interest. Each views such a political 
 question as the tariff, not from the stand- 
 point of how it will affect the nation as 
 a whole, but merely from that of how it 
 will affect him personally. If a com- 
 munity were in favor of protection, but 
 nevertheless permitted all the govern- 
 mental machinery to fall into the hands 
 of importing merchants, it would be 
 small cause for wonder if the latter 
 
ROOSEVELT. 285 
 
 shaped the laws to suit themselves, and 
 the chief blame, after all, would rest with 
 the supine and lethargic majority which 
 failed to have enough energy to take 
 charge of their own affairs. Our machine 
 politicians, in actual life act in just this 
 same way; their actions are very often 
 dictated by selfish motives, with but lit- 
 tle regard for the people at large though, 
 like the merchants, they often hold, a very 
 high standard of honor on certain points; 
 they therefore need continually to be 
 watched and opposed by those who wish 
 to see good government: But, after all, 
 it is hardly to be wondered at that they 
 abuse power which is allowed to fall into 
 their hands owing to the ignorance or 
 timid indifference of those who by rights 
 should themselves keep it. 
 
 WHAT CAN AND WHAT CANNOT 
 BE DONE BY LAW, 
 
 The difference betvs^een what can and 
 what cannot be done by law is well ex- 
 emplified by our experience with the 
 
286 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 negro problem. The negroes were for- 
 merly keld in slavery. This was a wrong 
 which legislation could remedy, and 
 which could not be remedied except by 
 legislation. Accordingly they were set 
 free by law. This having been done, 
 many of their friends believed that in 
 some way, by additional legislation, we 
 could at once put them on an intellec- 
 tual, social, and business equality with 
 the whites. The effort has failed com- 
 pletely. In large sections of the country 
 the negroes are not treated as they 
 should be treated and politically in par- 
 ticular the frauds upon them have been 
 so gross and shameful as to awaken not 
 merely indignation but bitter wrath; yet 
 the best friends of the negro admit that 
 his hope lies, not in legislation, but in 
 the constant working of those often un- 
 seen forces of the national life which are 
 greater than all legislation. 
 
 KOOSEVELT'S FELLOW-WORKERS. 
 The men with whom I have worked 
 
ROOSEVELT. 287 
 
 and associated most closely, with whom 
 I have shared what is at least an earnest 
 desire to better social and civic condi- 
 tions (neither blinking what is evil nor 
 being misled by the apostles of a false 
 remedy), and with whose opinions as to 
 what is right and practical my own in 
 the main agree, are not capitalists, save 
 as all men who by toil earn, and with 
 prudence save, money are capitalists. 
 They include reporters on the daily pa- 
 pers, editors of magazines, as well as of 
 newspapers, principals in the public 
 schools, young lawyers, young architects, 
 young doctors, young men of business, 
 who are struggling to rise in their pro- 
 fession by dint of faithful work, but who 
 give some of their time to doing what 
 they can for the city, and a number of 
 priests and clergymen; but as it happens 
 the list does not include any man of great 
 wealth, or any of those men whose names 
 are in the public mind identified with 
 great business corporations. Most of 
 them have at one time or another in their 
 
288 EOOSEVELT. 
 
 lives faced poverty and know what it is; 
 none of them are more than well-to-do. 
 They include Catholics and Protestants, 
 Jews, and men who would be regarded 
 as heterodox by professors of most recog- 
 nized creeds; some of them were born on 
 this side, others are of foreign birth ; but 
 they are all Americans, heart and soul, 
 who fight out for themselves the battles 
 of their own lives, meeting sometimes 
 defeat and sometimes victory. They 
 neither forget that man does owe a duty 
 to his fellows, and should strive to do 
 what he can to increase the well-being of 
 the community; nor yet do they forget 
 that in the long run the only way to help 
 people is to make them help themselves. 
 They are prepared to try any properly 
 guarded legislative remedy for ills which 
 they believe can be remedied; but they 
 perceive clearly that it is both foolish 
 and wicked to teach the average man 
 who is not well off that some wrong or 
 injustice has been done him, and that he 
 should hope for redress elsewhere than 
 
ADMIEAL DEWEY. HEEO OF MANILA BAY 
 
ROOSEVELT. 289 
 
 in his own industry^ honesty, and intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 AN AMERICAN OR NOTHING. 
 
 Besides, the man who does not become 
 Americanized nevertheless fails to re 
 main a European, and becomes nothing 
 at all. The immigrant cannot possibly 
 remain what he was, or continue to be a 
 member of the Old World society. If he 
 tries to retain his old language, in a few 
 generations it becomes a barbarous jar- 
 gon; if he tries to retain his old customs 
 and ways of life, in a few generations he 
 becomes an uncouth boor. He has cut 
 himself off from the Old World, and can- 
 not retain his connection with it; and if 
 he wishes ever to amount to anything he 
 must throw himself heart and soul, and 
 without reservation, into the new life to 
 which he has come. It is urgently nec- 
 essary to check and regulate our immi- 
 gration, by much more drastic laws than 
 now exist; and this should be done both 
 to keep out laborers who tend to depress 
 
290 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 the labor market, and to keep out races 
 which do not assimilate readily with our 
 own, and unworthy individuals of all 
 races — not only criminals, idiots, and 
 paupers, but anarchists of the Most and 
 O 'Donovan Eossa type. 
 
 YOUNG REFORMERS REFORM TOO 
 MUOn. 
 
 An ardent young reformer is very apt 
 to try to begin by reforming too much. 
 He needs always to keep in mind that he 
 has got to serve as a sergeant before he 
 assumes the duties of commander-in- 
 chief. It is right for him from the be- 
 ginning to take a great interest in na- 
 tional, state and municipal affairs, and 
 to try to make himself felt in them if the 
 occasion arises; but the best work must 
 be done by the citizen working in his own 
 ward or district Let him associate him- 
 self with the men who think as he does, 
 and who, like him, are sincerely devoted 
 to the public good. 
 
EOOSEVELT. 291 
 
 WE WANT GOOD SHIPS AND GOOD 
 MEN. 
 W^ith poor ships, were an Admiral Nel- 
 son and Farragut rolled in one, he might 
 be beaten by any first-class fleet; and he 
 surely would be beaten if his opponents 
 were in any degree his equals in skill and 
 courage; but without this skill and cour- 
 age no perfection of material can avail, 
 and with them very grave shortcomings 
 in equipmenti may be overcome. The men 
 who command our ships must have as 
 perfect weapons ready to their hands as 
 can be found in the civilized world, and 
 they must be trained to the highest point 
 in using them. They must have skill in 
 handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill 
 in strategy, for ignorant courage can not 
 avail; but without courage neither will 
 skill avail. They must have in them the 
 dogged ability to bear punishment, the 
 power and desire to inflict it, the daring, 
 the resolution, the willingness to take 
 risks and incur responsibility which have 
 been possessed by the great captains of 
 
2U2 llOOSEVELT. 
 
 all ages and without which no man can 
 ever hope to stand in the front rank of 
 fighting men. 
 
 LABOR UNIONS. 
 There are certain labor unions, certain 
 bodies of organized labor — notably those 
 admirable organizations which include 
 the railway conductors, the locomotive 
 engineers and the firemen — which to my 
 mind embody almost the best hope that 
 there is for healthy national growth in 
 the future; but bitter experience has 
 taught men who work for reform that the 
 average labor leader, the average dema- 
 gogue who shouts for a depreciated cur- 
 rency, or for the overthrow of the rich, 
 will not do anything to help those who 
 honestly strive to make better our civic 
 conditions. There are immense numbers 
 of workingmen to whom we can appeal 
 with perfect confidence; but too often we 
 find that a large proportion of the men 
 "w^ho style themselves leaders of organ- 
 ized labor are influenced only by sullen 
 
ROOSEVELT. 293 
 
 short-sighted hatred of what they do not 
 understand, and are deaf to all appeals, 
 whether to their national or to their civic 
 patriotism. 
 
 GEMS. 
 
 We rightfully value success, but some- 
 times we overvalue it, for we tend to for- 
 get that success may be obtained by 
 means which should make it abhorred 
 
 and despised by every honorable man. 
 « * * 
 
 An educated man must not go into pol- 
 itics as such; he must go in simply as an 
 American; and when he is once in, he 
 will speedily realize that he must work 
 very hard indeed, or he will be upset by 
 some other American, with no education 
 
 at all. 
 
 ♦ ♦ * 
 
 We believe in every kind of honest and 
 lawful pleasure, so long as the getting it 
 is not made man's chief business; and we 
 believe heartily in the good that can be 
 
294 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 done by men of leisure who work hard in 
 their leisure, whether at politics or phil- 
 anthropy, literature or art But a leis- 
 ure class whose leisure simply means 
 
 idleness is a curse to the community. 
 
 * * * 
 
 When once a body of citizens becomes 
 thoroughly out of touch and out of tem- 
 per with the national life, its usefulness 
 is gone, and its power of leaving its mark 
 
 on the times is gone also. 
 
 * * * 
 
 No nation can achieve real greatness if 
 its people are not both essentially moral 
 and essentially manly; both sets of qual- 
 ities are necessary. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The duties of peace are always with us. 
 
 * * * 
 
 There are plenty of ugly things about 
 
 wealth. 
 
 * * » 
 
 Many working men look with distrust 
 on the laws which would really help 
 them. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 295 
 
 PRES. ROOSEVELT'S TRIBUTE 
 TO ADMIRAL DEWEY. 
 
 It has been said that it was a mere 
 accident that Dewey happened to be in 
 command of the Asiatic Squadron when 
 the war with Spain broke out. This is 
 not the fact. He was sent to command 
 it in the fall of 1897, because, to use the 
 very language employed at the time, it 
 was deemed wise to have there a man 
 "who could go into Manila if necessary." 
 He owed the appointment to the high 
 professional reputation he enjoyed, and 
 to the character he had established for 
 willingness to accept responsibility, for 
 sound judgment, and for entire fearless- 
 ness. 
 
 Admiral Dewey performed one of the 
 great feats of all time. At the very out- 
 set of the Spanish war he struck one of 
 the two decisive blows which brought the 
 
296 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 war to a conclusion, and as his was the 
 first fight, his success exercised an incal- 
 culable effect upon the whole conflict. He 
 set the note of the war. He had care- 
 fully prepared for action during the 
 months he was on the Asiatic coast. He 
 had his plans thoroughly matured, and 
 he struck the instant that war was de- 
 clared. There was no delay, no hesita- 
 tion. As soon as news came that he was 
 to move, his war steamers turned their 
 bows toward Manila Bay. There was 
 nothing to show whether or not Spanish 
 mines and forts would be eflficient; but 
 Dewey, cautious as he was at the right 
 time, had not a particle of fear of taking 
 risks when the need arose. In the tropic 
 night he steamed past the forts, and then 
 on over the mines to where the Spanish 
 vessels lay. In number of guns and 
 weight of metal thrown at a single dis- 
 charge, and in the number and aggre- 
 gate tonnage of the ships, the Spanish 
 squadron about equaled his, and what 
 material inferiority there was on the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 297 
 
 Spanish side was more than made up by 
 the forts and mines. The overwhelming 
 difference was moral, not material. It 
 was the difference in the two command- 
 ers, in the officers and crews of the two 
 fleets, and in the naval service, afloat 
 and ashore, of the trv^o nations. On the 
 one side there had been thorough prep- 
 aration; on the other, none that was ade- 
 quate. It would be idle to recapitulate 
 the results. Steaming in with cool stead- 
 iness, Dewey's fleet cut the Spaniards to 
 pieces, while the Americans were prac- 
 tically unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to 
 breakfast, satisfied himself that he had 
 enough ammunition, and returned to 
 stamp out what embers of resistance 
 were still feebly smouldering. 
 
 The victory insured the fall of the 
 Philippines, for Manila surrendered as 
 soon as our land forces arrived and were 
 in position to press their attack home. 
 The work, however, was by no means 
 done, and Dewey^s diplomacy and firm- 
 ness were given full scope for the year he 
 
298 KOOSEVELT. 
 
 remained in Manila waters; not only in 
 dealing with Spaniards and insurgents, 
 but in making it evident that we would 
 tolerate no interference from any hostile 
 European power. It is not yet the time 
 to show how much he did in this last 
 respect. Suffice it to say that by his 
 firmness he effectually frustrated any at- 
 tempt to interfere with our rights, while 
 by his tact he avoided giving needless 
 offense, and he acted in hearty accord 
 with our cordial well-wishers, the Eng- 
 lish naval and diplomatic representa- 
 tives in the Islands. 
 
 Admiral Dewey comes back to his na- 
 tive land having won the right to a 
 greeting such as has been given to no 
 other man since the Civil War. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 299 
 
 ON EXPANSION. 
 
 President Roosevelt in his speech in the 
 Liberal Arts Building at St. Louis April 30, 
 1903 paid a glowing tribute to the far sight- 
 edness of the statesmen who advocated the 
 Louisiana purchase, saying that expansion 
 was the sign of any growing, progressive na- 
 tion. His speech follows: 
 
 "Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: — 
 At the outset of my address let me recall to 
 the minds of my hearers that the soil upon 
 which we stand, before it w^as ours, was suc- 
 cessively the possession of two mighty em- 
 pires. Spain and France, whose sons made a 
 deathless record of heroism in the early annals 
 of the New World. No history of the western 
 country can be written without paying heed 
 to the wonderful part played therein in the 
 early days by the soldiers, missionaries, ex- 
 plorers and traders, who did their work for 
 the honor of the proud banners of France and 
 Castile. 
 
 "While the settlers of English-speaking 
 stock, and those of Dutch, German and Scan- 
 dinavian origin who were associated with 
 
300 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 them, were still clinging close to the eastern 
 seaboard, the pioneers of Spain and of France 
 had penetrated deep into the hitherto un- 
 known wilderness of the West and had wan- 
 dered far and wide within the boundaries of 
 what is now our mighty country. The very 
 cities themselves— St. Louis, New Orleans, 
 Santa Fe, New Mexico — bear witness by their 
 titles to the nationalities of their founders. 
 It was not until the revolution had begun that 
 the English-speaking settlers pushed west 
 across the Alleghenies, and not until a cen- 
 tury ago that they entered in to possess the 
 land upon which we now stand. 
 
 LESSON IN EXPANSION. 
 
 "We have met here to-day to commem- 
 orate the hundredth anniversary of the event 
 which more than any other, after the founda- 
 tion of the government and always expecting 
 its preservation, determined the character of 
 our national life— determined that we should 
 be a great expanding nation instead of rela- 
 tively a small and stationary one. 
 
 "Of course, it was not with the Louisiana 
 purchase that our career of expansion began. 
 
ROOSEVELT. 301 
 
 In the middle of the revolutionary war the 
 IlHnois region, including the present states 
 of Illinois and Indiana, was added to our 
 domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the 
 adventurous expedition of George Rogers 
 Clarke and his frontier-riflemen. Later the 
 treaties of Jay and Pinckney materially ex- 
 tended our real boundaries to the West. But 
 none of these events was of so striking a 
 character as to fix the popular imagination. 
 The old thirteen colonies had always claimed 
 that their rights stretched westward to the 
 Mississippi, and, vague and unreal, though 
 these claims were until made good by con- 
 quest, settlement and diplomacy, they will 
 serve to give the impression that the earli- 
 est westward movements of our people were 
 little more than the filling in of already ex- 
 isting national boundaries. 
 
 "But there could be no illusion about the 
 acquisition of the vast territory beyond the 
 Mississippi, stretching westward to the Pa- 
 cific, which in that day was known as Lou- 
 isiana. This immense region was admittedly 
 the territory of a foreign power, of an Euro- 
 
302 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 pean kingdom. None of our people had ever 
 laid claim to a foot of it. Its acquisition 
 could in no sense be treated as rounding out 
 any existing claims. When we acquired it 
 we made evident once for all that consciously 
 and of set purpose we had embarked on a 
 career of expansion, that we had taken our 
 place among those daring and hardy nations 
 who risk much with the hope and desire of 
 winning high position among the great pow- 
 ers of the earth. As is so often the case in 
 nature, the law of development of a living 
 organism showed itself in its actual work- 
 ings to be wiser than the wisdom of the 
 wisest. 
 
 "This work of expansion was by far the 
 greatest work of our people during the years 
 that entervened between the adoption of the 
 Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil 
 War. There were other questions of real 
 moment and importance, and there were 
 many which at the time seemed such to 
 those engaged in answering them, but the 
 greatest feat of our forefathers of those gen- 
 erations was the deeds of the men who, with 
 
ROOSEVELT. 303 
 
 pack train or wagon train, on horseback 
 on foot, or by boat upon the waters, pushed 
 the frontier ever westward across the conti- 
 nent. 
 
 GAIN FOR IXSTITUTIONS. 
 
 "Never before had the world seen the kind 
 of national expansion which gave our people 
 all that part of the American continent 
 lying west of the thirteen original states, 
 the greatest landmark in which was the 
 Louisiana purchase. Our triumph in this 
 process of expansion was indissolubly bound 
 up with the success of our peculiar kind of 
 federal government, and this success has 
 been so complete that because of its very 
 completeness we now sometimes fail to ap- 
 preciate not only the all-importance but the 
 tren-iendous difficulty of the problem with 
 which our nation was originally faced. 
 
 "When our forefathers joined to call into 
 being this nation, they undertook a task for 
 which there was but little encouraging prece- 
 dent. The development of civilization from 
 the earliest period seemed to show the truth 
 of two propositions: In the first place, it 
 
304 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 had always proved exceedingly difficult to 
 secure both freedom and strength in any 
 government, and in the second place, it had 
 always proved well-nigh impossible for a 
 nation to expand without either breaking up 
 or becoming a centralized tyranny. With 
 the success of our effort to combine a strong 
 and efficient national union, able to put 
 down disorder at home and to maintain our 
 honor and interest abroad, I have not now to 
 deal. This success was signal and all-im- 
 portant, but it was by no means unprece- 
 dented in the same sense that our type of 
 expansion was unprecedented. 
 
 WEAKNESS OF GREECE. 
 
 "The History of Rome and of Greece illus- 
 trates very well the two types of expansion 
 which had taken 'place in ancient time and 
 which had been universally accepted as the 
 only possible types up to the period when as 
 a nation we ourselves began to take posses- 
 sion of this continent. The Grecian states 
 performed remarkable feats of colonization, 
 but each colony as soon as created became 
 entirely independent of the mother state, and 
 
ROOSEVELT. 305 
 
 in after years was almost as apt to prove its 
 enemy as its friend. Local self-government, 
 local independence, was secured, but only 
 by the absolute sacrifice of anything resem- 
 bling national unity. 
 
 "In consequence, the Greek world, for all 
 its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordi- 
 nary artistic, literary and philosophical de- 
 velopment which has made all mankind its 
 debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable 
 to withstand a formidable foe, save spasmod- 
 ically. As soon as powerful, permanent em- 
 pires arose on its outskirts, the Greek states 
 in the neighborhood of such empires fell un- 
 der their sway. National power and great- 
 ness were completely sacrificed to local lib- 
 erty. 
 
 MISTAKES OF ROME. 
 
 "With Rome the exact apposite occurred. 
 The imperial city rose to absolute dominion 
 over all the peoples of Italy, and then ex- 
 panded her rule over the entire civilized 
 world by a process which kept the nation 
 strong and united, but gave no room what- 
 ever for local liberty and self-government. 
 
306 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 All other cities and countries were subject 
 to Rome. In consequence this great and 
 masterful race of warriors, rulers, road 
 builders and administrators stamped their 
 indelible impress upon all the after life of 
 our race, and yet let an over-centralization 
 cat out the vitals of their empire until it 
 became an empty shell; so that when the 
 barbarians came they destroyed only what 
 had already become worthless to the world. 
 "The underlying viciousness of each type 
 of expansion was plain enough and the rem- 
 edy now seems simple enough. But when 
 the fathers of the republic first formulated 
 the Constitution under which we live this 
 remedy was untried, and no one could foretell 
 how it would work. They themselves began 
 the experiment almost immediately by add- 
 ing new states to the original thirteen. Ex- 
 cellent people in the East viewed this initial 
 expansion of the country with great alarm. 
 Exactly as during the colonial period many 
 good people in the mother country thought it 
 highly important that settlers should be kept 
 out of the Ohio Valley in the interest of the 
 
ROOSEVELT. 307 
 
 fur companies, so after we had become a na- 
 tion many good people on the Atlantic coast 
 felt grave apprehension lest they might 
 somehow be hurt by the westward growth of 
 the nation. 
 
 "These good people shook their heads over 
 the formation of states in the fertile Ohio 
 Valley, which now forms part of the heart of 
 our nation, and they declared that the de- 
 struction of the republic had been accom- 
 plished when through the Louisiana pur- 
 chase we acquired nearly half of what is now 
 that same republic's present territory. Nor 
 was their feeling unnatural. Only the ad- 
 venturous and the far-seeing can be expected 
 heartily to welcome the process of expan- 
 sion, for the nation that expands is a nation 
 which is entering upon a great career, and 
 with greatness there must of necessity come 
 perils which daunt all save the most stout- 
 hearted. 
 
 "We expanded by carving the wilderness 
 into territories and out of these territories 
 building new states when once they had re- 
 ceived as permanent settlers a sufficient num- 
 
308 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 ber of our own people. Being a practical na- 
 tion, we have never tried to force on any 
 section of our new territory an unsuitable 
 form of government merely because it was 
 suitable for another section under different 
 conditions. Of the territory covered by the 
 Louisiana purchase a portion was given 
 statehood within a few years. Another por- 
 tion has not been admitted to statehood, al- 
 though a century has elapsed — although 
 doubtless it soon will be. In each case we 
 showed the practical government genius 
 of our race by devising methods suitable to 
 meet the actual existing needs, not by in- 
 sisting upon the application of some abstract 
 shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, 
 no matter how incongruous this application 
 might sometimes be. 
 
 BUILDING OF STATES. 
 
 "Over by far the major part of the terri- 
 tory, however, our people spread in such 
 numbers during the course of the nineteenth 
 century that we were able to build up state 
 after state, each with exactly the same con- 
 plete local independence in all matters af- 
 
ROOSEVELT. 309 
 
 fecting purely its own domestic interests as 
 in many of the original thirteen states — each 
 owing the same absolute fealty to the 
 Union of all the states which each of the 
 original thirteen states also owes— and finally, 
 each having the same proportional right to 
 its share in shaping and directing the com- 
 mon policy of the Union which is possessed 
 by any other state, whether of the original 
 thirteen or not. 
 
 "This process now seems to us part of the 
 natural order of things, but it was wholly un- 
 known until our o\\'n people devised it. It 
 seems to us a mere matter of course, a mat- 
 ter of elementary right and justice, that in 
 the deliberations of the national representa- 
 tive bodies the representatives of a state 
 which came into the Union but yesterday 
 stand on a footing of exact and entire equality 
 with those of the commonwealths whose sons 
 once signed the Declaration of Independence. 
 But this way of looking at the matter is 
 purely modern, and in its origin purely Amer- 
 ican. When Washington during his presi- 
 dency saw new states come into the Union 
 
310 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 on a footing of complete equality with the 
 old, every European nation which had 
 colonies still administered them as depend- 
 encies, and every other mother country 
 treated the colonist not as self-governing 
 equal but as a subject. 
 
 FOLLOWED BY OTHERS. 
 
 "The process which we began has since 
 been followed by all the great peoples who 
 were capable both of expansion and of self- 
 government, and now the world accepts it as 
 the natural process, as the rule; but a cen- 
 tury and a quarter ago it was not merely ex- 
 ceptional; it was unknown. 
 
 "This, then, is the great historic signifi- 
 cance of the movement of continental expan- 
 sion in which the Louisiana purchase was the 
 most striking single achievement. It stands 
 out in marked relief even among the feats of 
 a nation of pioneers, a nation whose people 
 have from the beginning been picked out by 
 a process of natural selection from among 
 the most enterprising individuals of the na- 
 tions of western Europe. 
 
 "The acquisition of the territory is a credit 
 
ROOSEVELT. 311 
 
 to the broad and far-sighted statesmanship 
 of the great statesmen to whom it was im- 
 mediately due, and, above all, to the ag- 
 gressive and masterful character of the 
 hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy 
 these statesmen gave expression and direc- 
 tion, whom they followed rather than led. 
 The history of the land comprised within the 
 limits of the purchase is an epitome of the 
 entire history of our people. 
 
 WORK OF PIONEERS. 
 
 "Within these limits we have gradually 
 built up state after state until now they 
 many times over surpass in wealth, in popu- 
 lation and in many-sided developments the 
 original thirteen states as they were when 
 their delegates met in the continental con- 
 gress. The people of these states have shown 
 themselves mighty in war with their fellow 
 man, and mighty in strength to tame the 
 rugged wilderness. They could not thus 
 have conquered the forest and the prairie, 
 the mountain and the desert, had they not 
 possessed the great fighting virtues, the 
 
312 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 qualities which enable a people to overcome 
 the forces of hostile men and hostile nature. 
 "On the other hand, they could not have 
 used aright their conquest had they not in 
 addition possessed the qualities of self- 
 mastery and self-restraint, the power of act- 
 ing in combination with their fellows, the 
 power of yielding obedience to the law and of 
 building up an orderly civilization. Courage 
 and hardihood are indispensable virtues in a 
 people, but the people which possesses no 
 others can never rise high in the scale either 
 of power or of culture. Great peoples must 
 have in addition the governmental capacity 
 which comes only when individuals fully 
 recognize their duties to one another and to 
 the whole body politic, and are able to join 
 together in feats of constructive statesman- 
 ship and of honest and affective administra- 
 tion. 
 
 CHANGE IN CONDITIONS. 
 
 "The old pioneer days are gone, with their 
 roughness and their hardship, their incredi- 
 ble toil and their wild half -savage romance. 
 But the need for the pioneer virtues remains 
 
ROOSEVELT. 313 
 
 the same as ever. The pecuhar frontier con- 
 ditions have vanished, but the manhness and 
 stalwart hardihood of the frontiersmen can 
 be given even freer scope under the condi- 
 tions surrounding tlie complex industrialism 
 of the present day. 
 
 "In this great region acquired for our peo- 
 ple under the presidency of Jefferson, this 
 region stretching from the gulf to the Cana- 
 dian border, from the Mississippi to the 
 Rockies, the material and social progress has 
 been so vast that alike for weal and for woe 
 its people now share the opportunities and 
 bear the burdens common to the entire civil- 
 ized world. The problems before us are 
 fundamentally the same east and west of the 
 Mississippi, in the new states and in the 
 old, and exactly the same qualities are re- 
 quired for their successful solution. 
 
 "We meet here to-day to commemorate a 
 great event, an event which marks an area in 
 statesmanship no less than in pioneering. It 
 is fitting that we should pay our homage in 
 words, but we must in honor make our words 
 good by deeds. AVe have every right to take 
 
314 ROOSEVELT. 
 
 a just pride in the great deeds of our fore- 
 fathers, but we show ourselves unworthy to 
 be their descendants if we make what they 
 did an excuse for our lying supine instead of 
 an incentive to the effort to show ourselves 
 by our acts worthy of them. In the admin- 
 istration of city, state, and nation, in the 
 management of our home life and the con- 
 duct of our business and social relations, we 
 are bound to show certain high and fine 
 qualities of character under penalty of seeing 
 the whole heart of our civilization eaten out 
 while the body still lives. 
 
 NEED OF HIGHER LIFE. 
 
 "We justly pride ourselves on our mar- 
 velous material prosperity, and such pros- 
 perity must exist in order to establish a 
 foundation upon which a higher life can be 
 built, but unless we do in every fact build 
 this higher life thereon the material pros- 
 perity itself will go for but very little. Now, 
 in 1903, in the altered conditions, we must 
 meet the changed and changing problems 
 with the spirit shown by the men who in 
 
ROOSEVELT. 315 
 
 1803 and in the subsequent years gained, ex- 
 plored, conquered and settled this vast terri- 
 tory, then a desert, now filled with thriving 
 and populous states. 
 
 "The old days were great because the 
 men who lived in them had mighty qualities, 
 and we must make the new days great by 
 showing these same qualities. We must 
 insist upon courage and resolution, upon 
 hardihood, tenacity, and fertility in resource; 
 we must insist upon the strong virile virtues, 
 and we must insist no less upon the virtues 
 of self-restraint, self-mastery, regard for 
 the rights of others; we must show our ab- 
 horrence of cruelty, brutality and corruption 
 in public and in private life alike. If we 
 come short in any of these qualities we shall 
 measurably fail; and if, as I believe we 
 surely shall, we develop these qualities in 
 the future to an even greater degree than 
 in the past, then in the century now begin- 
 ning we shall make of this republic the freest 
 and most orderly, the most just and most 
 mighty nation which has ever come forth 
 from the womb of time." 
 
LIFE, ^^ JW T> 
 
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