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jm a PROPERTTOF — ■

A:Jl T E S SCIENTIA VERITAS

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THEODORE
ROOSEVELT

THE CITIZEN

BY TME SAME AUTHOB

THB UAXma OF JlS amebioan

THB BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
CHILDBEN OF THE TENEMENTS

THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
THE CITIZEN

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THE II

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NEW YORK

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1912

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00PTII6HT 1903, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPAMT
OOPTUGRT 1904, BY THB OUTLOOK COMPANY
PUBU8HBD MARCH, I904
■XPRINTKD MARCH, I9O4
8PBCIAL EDITION JUNE, I9O4
REPRINTED JANUARY, I9O7
REPRINTED MAY, I9O7
REPRINTED MARCH, I9I2

VntoooH 9n§9 1
Berwick & Smidi Co., Norwood, Mass., UJS.A.

(Mefgradmcf

3-Vo -'?':;^

To the Young Men
of America

CONTENTS

I, Boyhood Ideals 1

n. What He Got Out of College . 20

QL Early Lessons in Politics • • 45
IV. The Horse and the Gun Have

Their Day 71

W. The Fair Play Department . . 97

in. In Mulberry Street .... 127

ira. The Clash of War .... 156

(em. Roosevelt and His Men • • . 177

Ruling by the Ten Commandments 201

The Summons on Mount Marcy . 281

What He Is Like Himself . • 251

The Despair of Politicians . . 279

xin. At Home and at Play . . . 809

Children Trust Him .... 889

The President's Policies ... 868

A Young Men's Hero . . . S98

[Ix]

CONTENTS

PAOB

XVII. Roosevelt as a Speaker and Writer 411
xvni. Theodore Roosevelt's Father . • 481

The Roosevelt Chronology . • 451
Books by Theodore Roosevelt . 456
Index 405

I«l

BOYHOOD IDEALS

A LL summer I have been fighting for
Z^ leeway to sit down and write about
■^ -^ Theodore Roosevelt, and glad am I
that I have come to it at last. For there is no-
thing I know of that I would rather. But let us
have a clear understanding about it. I am not
going to write a " life " of him. I have seen it
said in print that that was my intention. Well,
it was. That was the shape it took in my mind
at the start ; but not for long. Perhaps one of
the kindest things the years do for us as they
pass is to show us what things we can not do.
In that way they have been very kind to me.
When I was twenty, there was nothing I could
not do. Now I am glad that there are stronger
and fitter hands than mine to do many things
I had set my heart on. They must do this, then.

[31

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

And, besides, it is both too early and too late
for a life of Theodore Roosevelt. Too late
for the mere formal details of his career ; every-
body knows them. Much too early to tell the
whole story of what that strong, brave life will
mean to the American people, his people of
whom he is so proud, when the story is all told.
No one can know him and believe in the people
without feeling sure of that.

There remains to me to speak of him as the
friend, the man. And this is what I shall do,
the more gladly because so may it be my privi-
lege to introduce him to some who know him
only as the public man, the President, the par-
tisan perhaps— and a very energetic partisan
he is — and so really do not know him at all, in
the sense which I have in mind. The public
man I will follow because he is square, and
will do the square thing always, not merely
want to do it. With the partisan I will some-
times disagree, at least I ought to, for I was
before a Democrat and would be one now if
the party would get some sense and bar Tam-
many out in the cold for its monstrous wicked-
ness.* Of the President I am proud with rea-

^ I am bound to say that I see no signs of it, and also that I am
rather relieved, with Roosevelt to run in another year.

BOYHOOD IDEALS

son, but the friend I love. And if I can make
you see him so, as a friend and a man, I hare
given you the master-key to him as a statesman
as well. You will never need to ask any ques-
tions.

For still another reason I am glad that it
is to be so: I shall be speaking largely to the
young whose splendid knight he is, himself yet
a young man filled with the high courage and
brave ideals that make youth the golden age
of the great deeds forever. And I want to show
them the man Roosevelt, who through many a
fight in which hard blows were dealt never once
proved unfaithful to them; who, going forth
with a young man's resolve to try to " make
things better in this world, even a little better,
because he had lived in it," * through fair days
and foul, through good report and evil ( and of
this last there was never a lack) , sounded his
battle-cry, " Better faithful than famous," and
won. A hundred times the mercenaries and
the spoilsmen whom he fought had him down
and " ruined " in the fight. At this moment,
as I write, they are rubbing their hands with
glee because at last he has undone himself,

^His speech to the Long Island Bible Society, June 11, 1901.

[5]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

by bidding organized labor halt where it was
wrong. Last winter, when it was right, he
" killed himself " when he made capital stop
and think. They were false prophets then as
they are now. Nothing can ruin Theodore
Roosevelt except his proving unfaithful to his
own life, and that he wiU never do. If I know
anything of him, I know this, that he would
rather be right than be President any day, and
that he will never hesitate in his choice.

That is the man I would show to our young
people just coming into their birthright, and
I can think of no better service I could render
them. For the lying sneers are thick all about
in a world that too often rates success as " what
you can make." And yet is its heart soimd;
for when the appeal is made to it in simple faith
for the homely virtues, for the sturdy man-
hood, it is never made in vain. This is Theo-
dore Roosevelt's message to his day, that honor
goes before profit, that the moral is greater
than the material, that men are to be trusted
if you believe in the good in them ; and though
it is an old story, there is none greater. At
least there is none we have more need of learn-
ing, since the world is ours, such as it is, to fit

[6]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

for the kingdom that is to come, and nowhere
is there another plan provided for doing it.

So, then, it is imderstood that I am absolved
from routine, from chronology, and from sta-
tistics in writing this story. I am to have full
leave to " put things in as I think of them,"
as the critics of my books say I do anyhow.
A more absxu*d charge was never made against
any one, it has always seemed to me; for how
can a man put things in when he does n't think
of them? I am just to write about Theodore
Roosevelt as I know him, of my own know-
ledge or through those nearest and dearest to
him. And the responsibility will be mine alto-
gether. I am not going to consult him, even if
he is the President of the United States. For
one thing, because, the only time I ever did,
awed by his office, he sent the copy back unread
with the message that he would read it in print.
So, if anything goes wrong, blame me and me
only.

And now, when I cast around for a starting-
point, there rises up before me the picture of a
little lad, in stiff white petticoats, with a curl
right on top of his head, toiling laboriously
along with a big fat volvune under his arm,

[7]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" David Livingstone's Travels and Researches
in South Africa," and demanding of every
member of the family to be told what were
" the foraging ants " and what they did. It
was his sister, now Mrs. Cowles, who at last
sat down in exasperation to investigate, that
the business of the household might have a
chance to proceed, for baby Theodore held it
up mercilessly until his thirst for information
was slaked. Whereupon it developed that the
supposedly grim warriors of the ant-hill were
really a blameless tribe — " the foregoing ants "
in fact. We are none of us infallible. The
« foraging ants " are a comfort to me when
their discoverer is disposed to laugh at my
ee-wee lamb that but for my foreign speech
should have been a plain ewe. But, then, I
dwelt content in the bliss of ignorance. He,
explorer in baby petticoats, could not be ap-
peased till he found out.

I suppose they called him Ted in those days.
In my own time I have never found any one
to do it who knew him, and the better they
knew him the less liable were they to. You can
tell for a certainty that a man does not know
him when he speaks of him as " Teddy." Not

[8]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

that he frowns upon it ; I do not helieve that he
has often had the chance. But, somehow, there
is no temptation to that kind of familiarity,
which does not imply any less affection, but
just the reverse. He may call me Jake and I
like nothing better. But though I am ten years
older than he, he was always Mr. Roosevelt
with me. His rough-riders might sing of him
as Teddy, but to his face they called him Colo-
nel, with the mixture of affection and respect
that makes troopers go to death as to a dance
in the steps of a leader. The Western plains-
men quickly forgot the tenderfoot in the man
who could shoot and ride though he came out of
the East and wore eye-glasses, and who never
bragged or bullied but knew his rights and
dared maintain them. He was Mister Roose-
velt there from the second day on the ranch.
But in those old days at home he was Ted with
the boys, no doubt. For he was a whole boy
and got out of it all that was going, after he
got it going. He has told me that it took
some time, that as a little fellow he was timid,
and that when bigger boys came along and
bullied him he did not know what to do
about it. I have a notion that he quickly

19]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

found out and that they did not come back
often.

A woman who lived next door to the Roose-
velts in East Twentieth Street told me of how,
passing in the street, she saw young Theodore
hanging out of a second-story window and ran
in to tell his mother.

" If the Lord," said she, as she made off to
catch him, " had not taken care of Theodore,
he would have been killed long ago."

In after years the Governor of New York
told me, with a reminiscent gleam in his eye,
how his boy, the third Theodore in line, had
" swarmed down " the leader of the Executive
Mansion to go and hear the election returns,
rather than go out through the door. There
was no frightened neighbor to betray his ex-
ploit then, for it was dark, which made it all
the more exciting. It was the Governor him-
self who caught him. The evidence is, I think,
that the Theodores were cut out pretty much
on the same pattern.

Of that happy childhood's home, with the
beautiful mother of blessed memory and the
father who rode and played with the children,
and was that, alas! rarest of parents, their

[10]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

chum and companion as well as their just
judge when occasion demanded, I have caught
many a glimpse I wish I might reveal here,
but that shall be theirs to keep. The family
romps at home, the strolls on forest paths
which their father taught them early to
love; their gleeful dashes on horseback, he
watchfully leading on, the children scampering
after, a merry crew; of how at his stem sum-
mons to breakfast, " Children 1 " they one and
all fell downstairs together in their haste to be
there, they speak yet with a tenderness of love
that discloses the rarely strong and beautiful
soul that was his. It was only the other day
that, speaking with an old employee of the
Children's Aid Society, of which the elder
Roosevelt was a strong prop, I learned from
him how deep was the impression made by his
gentle courtesy toward his wife when he
brought her to the lodging-house on his visits.
" To see him put on her wraps and escort her
from room to room was beautiful," he said.
" It seemed to me that I never knew till then
what the word gentleman meant." How little
we, any of us, know what our example may
mean for good or for ill! Here, after thirty

[11]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

years, the recollection of Mr. Roosevelt's sim-
ple courtesy was a potent force in one man's
life.

With such ties of love binding the home
together, the whirlwind of anger and passion
that swept over the country in the years of the
war had no power to break or to embitter,
even though the mother was of the South, with
roots that held, while his life and work were
given to the Union cause as few men's were.
Rather, it laid the foundations broad and
deep of that abiding Americanism that is to-
day Theodore Roosevelt's most distinguishing
trait. It is no empty speech of his that caresses
the thought of the men who wore the blue and
those who wore the gray standing at last shoul-
der to shoulder. It was an uncle of Theodore
Roosevelt who built the privateer Alabama,
and another uncle, Irwin S. Bulloch, who fired
the last gun aboard her when she weijt down
before the fire of the Kearaarge, shifting it
from one side of the ship to the other as she
sank, to let it have the last word. The while at
home his f atHer raised and equipped regiments
and sent them to the war, saw to it that they
were fed and cared for and that those they left

[12]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

behind did not suffer. I have never been able
to make up my mind which was most hke the
Theodore of to-day. I guess they both were.
I know that as he grew, the devotion of the
one, the daring of the other, took hold of his
soul and together were welded into the man,
the patriot, to whom love of country is as a
living fire, as the very heart's blood of his
being.

For play there was room in plenty in the
home in which Theodore grew up; for idleness
none. His father, though not rich in the sense
of to-day, had money enough to enable them
all to live without working if they so chose.
That they should not so choose was the constant
aim and care of his existence. In his scheme
of life the one man for whom there was no
room was the useless drone. Whether he
needed it or not, every man must do some hon-
est, decent work, and do it with his might : the
community had a right to it. We catch echoes
of this inheritance in his son's writings from
the very beginning, and as the years pass they
ring out more clearly. I remember his inter-
view with Julian Ralph, when as a Police Com-
missioner he was stirring New York up as it

[13]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

had not been stirred in many a long day. I can
see him now striding up and down the bare
gray office.

" What would you say to the young men
of our city, if you could speak to them with
command this day? " asked Mr. Ralph.

" I would order them to work," said Mr.
Roosevelt, stopping short and striking his
hands together with quick emphasis. " I would
teach the young men that he who has not
wealth owes his first duty to his family, but
he who has means owes his to the State. It
is ignoble to go on heaping money on money.
I would preach the doctrine of work to all, and
\ to the men of wealth the doctrine of unre-
munerative work."

It was hardly unremunerative work that first
enhsted young Theodore's energies. Looking
at him now, I should think that nothing ever
paid a better interest on the investment. He
was not a strong child— from earliest infancy
liable to asthmatic attacks that sapped his vi-
tality and kept back his growth. Probably
that accounts for the temporary indecision in
the matter of bullies which he remembers. But
in the frail body there lived an indomitable

1 14 ]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

spirit before which had risen already visions
of a man with a horse and a gun, of travel and
adventure. Mayne Reid's books had found
their way to East Twentieth Street, and they
went with the lad wherever the family tent was
pitched to ease the little sufferer. One winter
they spent in Egypt, floating down the Nile
amid the ruins of empires dead and gone. But
the past and its dead got no grip on the young
American. He longed to go back to his own
country of the mighty forests and the swelling
plains where men worked out their own destiny.
He would be a pathfinder, a hunter. But a
hunter has need of strong thews; of a sound
body. And to become strong became presently
the business of his life.

It was one of the things that early attracted
me to Theodore Roosevelt, long before he had
become famous, that he was a believer in the
gospel of wiU. Nothing is more certain, hu-
manly speaking, than this, that what a man
wills himself to be, that he will be. Is he will-
ing to put in all on getting rich, rich he will get,
to find his riches turning to ashes in his dead
hand ; will he have power, knowledge, strength
—they are aU within his grasp. The question

[15]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

for him to decide is whether they are worth giv-
ing up a life to, and, having decided, to give
it to his amhition. The boy Theodore saw that
to do anything he must first be strong, and
chose that. There were many things he might
have chosen which would have been easier, but
if you are concerned about that, you will not
have your way. He was not. He set about
resolutely removing the reproach of his puny
body, as it seemed to him. He ran, he rode, he
swam, he roamed through the hills of his Long
Island home, the same to which he yet comes
back to romp with his children on his sununer
holiday. He rowed his skiff intrepidly over
the white-capped waters of the Bay —that once,
when I had long been a man, carried mine, de-
spite all my struggles, across to Center Island
and threw me, skiff and all, upon the beach,
a shipwrecked mariner doomed to be ignomini-
ously ferried across on the yacht club's launch.
I thought of it the other day when I came
ashore from the Sylph, and half a mile from
shore met young Kermit battling alone with
the waves, hatless and with the salt spray in
his eyes and hair, tossed here and there as in a
nutshell, but laughing and undaunted. I do

[16]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

not know where he was going. I douht if he
did. His father and mother were ashore and
on their way home. He was just having it out
and haying a good time. It was his father over
again, and we cheered him on and let him go.
I don't suppose we could have stopped him had
we tried.

No more could you have stopped Theodore
in his day. What he did he did with the wiU
to win, yet never as a task. He got no end of
fun out of it, or it would have been of little use,
and one secret of that was that he made what
he did serve an end useful in itself. On his
tramps through the woods he studied and clas-
sified the neighborhood birds. He knew theu-
song, their plumage, and their nests. So he
learned something he wanted to know, and
cultivated the habits of study, of concentration,
at the time when all boys are impatient of these
things and most of them shirk them when they
can, leaving every task unfinished. And aU,
as I said, along of a healthy, outdoor, romping
life. The reward of that was not long in com-
ing. Presently strong muscles knit themselves
about his bones, the frail frame broadened and
grew tough. The boy held his own with his

[17]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

fellows. He passed them, and now he led in
then* games. The horse was his ; the gun
loomed in the prospect. CoUege was at hand,
and then— life- The buffaloes yet roamed
the plains. One might unite the calling of a
naturalist, a professor, with the interest of a
hunter. So ran his dreams. It is the story
of one American boy who won against odds,
and though he did not become professor he be-
came President; and it is a good story for
aU American boys to read. For they can do
the same, if they choose to. And if they do
not all become Presidents, they can all be right,
and so be like him in that which is better still.
I said he had his dreams. Every boy has,
and if he does not stop at that, it is good for
him. Into young Theodore's there had come
a new element that spoke loudly for the plains,
for the great West. The Leatherstocking
stories had been added to his reading. It was
with something of fear almost that I asked
him once if he liked them. For I loved them.
I had lived them aU in my Danish home. They
first set my eyes toward the west, and in later
years, when I have heard it said, and read in
reviews that Cooper is out of date; that he

[18]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

never was a first-class writer, I have felt it
as a personal injury and as if something had
come between me and the day that cannot love
Natty Bumppo and Uncas and Mabel Dun-
ham. And so I say it was with a real pang
that I asked him if he did not also like them.

He whirled round with kindling eyes.

" Like them/' he cried, " like them! Why,
man, there is nothing like them. I could pass
examination in the whole of them to-day.
Deerslayer with his long rifle, Jasper and
Hurry Harry, Ishmael Bush with his seven
stalwart sons— do I not know them? I have
bunked with them and eaten with them, and I
know their strength and their weakness. They
were narrow and hard, but they were mighty
men and they did the work of their day and
opened the way for ours. Do I like them?
Cooper is imique in American literature, and
he will grow upon us as we get farther away
from his day, let the critics say what they wiD.'*
And I was made happy.

Afterward I remembered with sudden ap-
prehension that he had spoken only of the white
men in the books, for it came to me that he had
lived in the West, where the only good Indian is

[19]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

esteemed to be the dead Indian. But it was
needless treachery of my thought. The red
man has no better friend than the Great White
Father of to-day, none who bums with hotter
indignation at the shame our dealings with him
have brought upon the American name. Un-
cas and Chingachgook, beloved friends of my
boyhood, were safe with him.

I have told you of Theodore Roosevelt's boy-
hood as from time to time I have gathered
glimpses of it from himself and from his sis-
ter, and as I like to think of it. I did not meet
him till long after both horse and gun had be-
come Uving reaUties. When he was drifting
and dreaming on the Nile I was sailing across
the Atlantic to have my &st tussle with the
slum which in after years we fought together.
And now you know one reason why I love him:
it was when that same strong will, that honest
endeavor, that resolute purpose to see right and
justice done to his poorer brothers — ^it was
when they joined in the battle with the slum
that all my dreams came true, all my ideals be-
came real. Why should I not love him?

The boy had grown into a man. Since I
have here spoken to the boys of his country

190]

BOYHOOD IDEALS

and, thank God, of mine, let him speak now,
and judge yoiu^self how perfonnance has
squared with promise, practice with preaching:

" Of coiu^se what we have a right to expect
of the American boy is that he shall turn out to
be a good American man. Now, the chances
are strong that he won't be much of a man un-
less he is a good deal of a boy. He must not
be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or
a prig. He must work hard and play hard.
He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and
able to hold his own under all circumstances
and against all comers. It is only on these con-
ditions that he will grow into the kind of a
man of whom America can really be proud.

" In life, as in a football game, the principle
to follow is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and
don't shirk, but hit the line hard."

I«]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF

COLLEGE

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

RATHER a delicate-looking young fel-
low yet, not over a hundred and
^ thirty pounds on the scales, slender of
frame and slim of waist, was the Theodore
Roosevelt who made his entry into Harvard
while the country yet rang with the echoes of
the Electoral Commission and of the destruc-
tive railroad riots of the summer that followed.
They were troublous times to begin life in, and
one would naturally think that they would
leave their mark upon a spirit like Roosevelt's.
I know that they did, but the evidence of it
does not lie on the surface. Neither in the
memory of his classmates nor in his record as
an editor of the " Advocate " is there anything
to suggest it. I was in Pennsylvania during
those riots, when militiamen were burned like

[95]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

rats in a railroad round-house. I saw what
they meant, and I have no difficulty in making
out their stamp upon his ardent spirit when I
read such comments as this on the draft riots
in his history of New York, though written
more than a dozen years after :

" The troops and police were thoroughly
armed, and attacked the rioters with the most
wholesome desire to do them harm; ... a
lesson was inflicted on the lawless and disor-
derly which they never entirely forgot. Two
milUons of property had been destroyed aad
many valuable lives lost. But over twelve hun-
dred rioters were slain — an admirable object-
lesson to the remainder."

Perhaps they had more to do with shaping
his later career, those cruel riots, than even he
has realized, for I should not be surprised if,
unconsciously, he acted upon their motion in
joining the militia in his own State, and so
got the first grip upon the soldiering that stood
him in such good stead in Cuba. '' I wanted,"
he said to me after he had become President,
" to coimt for one in the fight for order and for
the Republic, if the crisis were to come. I
wanted to be in a position to take a man's stand

[961

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

in sudi a case, that was why." Counting for
one in the place where he stood, when that was
the thing to do, then and always, he has got to
the place where he counts for all of us, should
sudi days come hack, as please God they will
not; and nowhere, I think, in the land is there
any one who douhts that " order and the Re-
public '' are safe in his hands.

But in his youthful mind these things were
working yet, unidentified. His was a healthy
nature without morbid comers. The business
of his boyhood had been to make himself strong
that he might do the work of a man, by which
he had in mind chiefly, no doubt, the horse and
the gun — the bully, perhaps, whom he had not
forgotten — ^but the hunt, the life in the open.
Now, among his fellows, it was to get the most
out of what their companionship ojffered. He
became instantly a favorite with his class of a
hundred and seventy-odd. They laughed at
his oddities, at his unrepressed enthusiasm, at
his liking for Elizabethan poetry, voted him
" more or less crazy " with true Harvard con-
servatism, respected him highly for his scholar-
ship on the same solid ground, and fell in even
with his notions for his own sake, as afterward

[97]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

some of them fell in behind him in the rush
up San Juan hill, leaving lives of elegance and
ease to starve with him in the trenches and do
the chores of a trooper in camp under a tropi-
cal sun. It is remembered that Theodore
Roosevelt set Harvard to skipping the rope,
a sport it had abandoned years before with
knickerbockers; but it suited this student to
keep up the exercise as a means of strengthen-
ing the leg muscles, and rope-skipping became
a pastime of the class of 1880. In the gym-
nasium they wore red stockings with their
practice suits. Roosevelt had happened upon
a pair that were striped a patriotic red and
white, and he wore them, at first to the amaze-
ment of the other students. He did not even
know that they had attracted attention, but
when some one told him he laughed and kept
them on. It was what the legs could do in the
stockings he was there to find out. Twenty
years after I heard a policeman call him a dude
when he walked up the steps of police head-
quarters with a silk sash about his waist, some-
thing no man had been known to wear in Mul-
berry Street in the memory of the oldest there t
N^ and I saw the same officer looking after him

[28]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

down the street, as long as he was in sight, the
day he went, and turn back with a sigh that
made him my friend forever: "There won't
such another come through that door again in
my time, that there won't." And there did not.
The old man is retired long since.

He joined the exclusive " Pork " Club, and
forthwith smashed all its hallowed traditions
and made the Porcellian blood run cold, by
taking his fiancee to lunch where no woman
ever trod before. He simply saw no reason
why a lady should not lunch at a gentlemen's
club; and when the shocked bachelor minds of
the " Pork " Club searched the horizon for one
to confront him with, they discovered that there
was none. Accordingly the world still stood,
and so did the college. He played polo, did
athletic stunts with the fellows, and drove a
two-wheeled gig badly, having no end of good
times in it. When he put on the boxing-gloves,
he hailed the first comer with the more delight
if he happened to be the champion of the class,
who was twice his size and heft. The pum-
meling that ensued he took with the most
hearty good will ; and though his nose bled and
his glasses fell off, putting him at a disadvan-

[39]

THEODOKJE ROOSEVELT

tage, he refused grimly to cry quarter, and
pressed the fight home in a way that always
reminds me of that redoubtable Danish sea-
fighter, Peter Tordenskjold, who kept up the
fight, firing pewter dinner-plates and mugs
from his one gun, when on his little smack
there was left but a single man of the crew,
" and he wept." Tordenskjold killed the cap-
tain of the Swedish frigate with one of his
mugs and got away. Roosevelt was bested in
his boxing-matches often enough, but, how-
ever superior, his opponents bore away always
the impression that they had faced a fighter.
But the battle was not always to the strong
in those days. I have heard a story of how
Roosevelt beat a man with a reputation as a
fighter, but not, it would appear, with the in-
stincts of a gentleman. I shall not vouch for it,
for I have not asked him about it ; but it is typi-
cal enough to be true, except for the wonder
how the fellow got in there. He took, so the
story runs, a mean advantage and struck a
blow that drew blood before Roosevelt had
got his glove on right. The bystanders cried
foul, but Roosevelt smiled one of his grim
smiles.

[SO]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

" I guess you made a mistake. We do not
do that way here," he said, offering the other
his gloved hand in formal salutation as a sign
to begin hostihties. The next moment his right
shot out and took the man upon the point of the
jaw, and the left followed suit. In two min-
utes he was down and out. Roosevelt was " in
form " that day. AU the fighting blood in him
had been roused by the unfairness of the blow.
I have seen him when his blood was up for
good cause once or twice, and I rather think
the story must be true. If I were to fight him
and wanted to win, I should shun a foul blow
as I would the pestilence. I am sure I would
not run half the risk from the latter.

Play was part of the college life, and he
took a hand in it because it belonged. Work
was the bigger part, and he did not shirk it, or
any of it. I am not sure, but I have a notiop
that he did not like arithmetic. I feel it in my
bones, somehow. Perhaps the wish is father to
the thought. I know I hated it. But I will
warrant he went through with it all the same,
which I did not. I think he was among the first
twenty in his class, which graduated a hundred
and forty. He early picked out as his special-

[Sll

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ties the history of men and things, animals in-
cluded. The ambition to be a naturalist and a
professor clung to him still, but more and more
the doings of men and of their concerns began
to attract him. It was so with all he did in col-
lege, whether at work or play — it was the life
that moved in it he was after. Unconsciously
yet, I think, his own life began to shape itself
upon its real lines. He read the " Federalist "
with the entire absorption that was and is his
characteristic, and lived and thought with the
makers of our government. There are few
pubUc men to-day who are more firmly
grounded in those fundamentals than he, and
the airy assimiption of shallow politicians and
critics who think they have in Roosevelt to do
with a man of their own kind sometimes makes
me smile. The faculty of forgetting all else
but the topic in hand is one of the great se-
crets of his success in whatever he has under-
taken as an official. It is the faculty of getting
things done. They tell stories yet, that go
around the board at class dinners, of how he
would come into a fellow-student's room for a
visit, and, picking up a book, would become
immediately and wholly absorbed in its con-

13B]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

tents, then wake up with a guilty start to con-
fess that his whole hour was gone and hurry
away while they shouted after him. It was the
student in him which we in our day are so apt.
to forget in the man of action, of deeds. But
the two have always gone together in him ; they
belong together. In all the wild excitement
of the closing hours of the convention that set
him in the Vice-President's chair he, alone in
an inner room, was reading Thucydides, says
Albert Shaw, who was with him. He was rest-
ing. I saw him pick up a book, in a lull in the
talk, the other day, and instantly forget all
things else. He was not reading the book as
much as he was Uving it. So, men get all there
is out of what is in hand, and they are few who
can do it. However, of that I shall have more
to say later, when I have him in Mulberry
Street, where he was mine for two years.

His college chums, sometimes, seeing the
surface drift and judging from it, thought him
" quite unrestrained," as one of them put it to
me, meaning that he lacked a strong grip on
himself. It was a natural mistake. They saw
the enthusiasm that gave seemingly full vent
to itself and tested men by the contact, not

[83]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

the cautious, almost wary, deliberation which
in tiie end guided action, though he himself
but half knew it. They laughed a little at his
jump at the proposition to go to Greenland
with a classmate and study the fauna there— he
was planning the trip before it had been fairly
suggested — and at the preparations he made
for a tiger-hunting expedition to India with his
brother Elliott. The fact that in both cases he
acted upon the coolest judgment and stayed
home occurred to them only long afterward.
To me at this end, with his later life to interpret
its beginning, it seems clear enough that al-
ready the perfect balance that has distin-
guiied hfa, mental proc«« since was begin-
rg to assert itself' Howeve, he naight Z.
to be speeding toward extremes, he never got
there. He buried himself in his books, but he
woke up at the proper seasons, and what he
had got he kept. He went in for the play,
all there was of it, but he never mistook the
means for the end and let the play run away
with him. Long years after, when the thing
that was then taking shape in him had ripened,
he wrote it down in the record of his Western
hunts: " In a certain kind of fox-hunting lore

ISi]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

there is much reference to a Warwickshire
squire who, when the Parliamentary and Roy-
alist armies were forming for the battle at
Edgehill, was discovered between the hostile
lines, unmovedly drawing the covers for a fox.
Now, this placid sportsman should by rights
have been slain oif hand by the first trooper who
reached him, whether Cavalier or Roundhead.
He had mistaken means for ends, he had con-
founded the healthful play which should fit
a man for needful work with the work itself,
and mistakes of this kind are sometimes crim-
inal. Hardy sports of the field oif er the best
possible training for war ; but they become con-
temptible when indulged in while the nation
is at death-grips with her enemies."

One factor in this mental balance, his un-
hesitating moral courage which shirked no dis-
agreeable task and was halted by no false pride
of opinion, had long been apparent. He was
known as a good hand for a disagreeable task
that had to be done, a reproof to be adminis-
tered in justice and fairness — ^I am thinking
of how the man kept that promise of the youth,
before Santiago, when for the twentieth time
he " wrecked a promising career " with his f a-

[35]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

mous round-robin— and also for the generous
speed with which he would hasten to undo a
wrong done by word or act. There were no
half-way measures with him then. He owned
right up. " He was fair always," said one of
his classmates who was close to him. " He
never tried to humbug others, or himself either,
but spoke right out in meeting, telling it all."
No wonder some within reach thought him
erratic. There has never been a time in the
history of the world when such a course would
conmaend itself to all men as sane. It com-
mended itself to him as right, and that was
enough.

A distinguishing trait in his father had been
—he died while Theodore was at college—
devotion to duty, and the memory of it and
of him was potent with the son. He tried
to walk in his steps. " I tried faithfully to do
what father had done," he told me once when
we talked about him, " but I did it poorly. I
became Secretary of the Prison Reform Asso-
ciation (I think that was the society he spoke
of) , and joined this and that committee. Fa-
ther had done good work on so many; but in
the end I found out that we have each to work

[36]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

in his own way to do our best; and when I
struck mine, though it differed from his, yet
I was able to follow the same lines and do
what he would have had me do."

It was thus natural that Theodore Roosevelt
should have sought out a Sunday-school and a
chance to teach as soon as he was settled at
Harvard, and that his choice should have fallen
upon a mission school. He went there in pur-
suit of no scheme of philanthropy. Provi-
dence had given hun opportunities and a train-
ing that were denied these, and it was simple
fairness, that he should help his neighbor who
was less fortunate through no fault of his own.
The Roosevelts were Dutch Reformed. He
found no Dutch Reformed church at Cam-
bridge, but there were enough of other denom-
inations. The handiest was Episcopal. It
happened that it was of high church bent.
Theodore Roosevelt asked no questions, but
went to work. With characteristic directness
he was laying down tibe way of life to the
boys and girls in his class when an untoward
event happened. One of his boys came to
school with a black eye. He owned up that
he had got it in a fight, and on Sunday. His

[3T]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

teacher made stem inqtiiry. "Jim" some-
body, it appe^. who L Lde his sister, had
been pinching her all through the hour, and
when they came out they had a stand-up fight
and he punched him good, bearing away the
black eye as his share. The verdict was prompt.
" You did perfectly right," said his teacher,
and he gave him a dollar. To the class it was
ideal justice, but it got out among the officers
of the school and scandalized them dreadfully.
Roosevelt was not popular with them. Unfa-
miliar with the fonns of the service, he had
failed at times to observe them all as they
thought he should. They wished to know if he
had any objection to any of them. No, none
in the world; he was ready to do anything
required of him. He himself was Dutch Re-
formed—he got no farther. The idea of a
" Dutch Reformed " teaching in their school,
superimposed upon the incident of the black
eye, was too much. They parted with some-
what formal expressions of mutual regard.
Roosevelt betook himself to a Congregational
Sunday-school near by and taught there the
rest of his four years' course in college. How
it fared with Jim's conqueror I do not know.

[38]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

Before he had finished the course, Roosevelt
had started upon his literary career. It came in
the day's work, without conscious purpose on
his part to write a book. They had at his Club
James' history, an English work, and he found
that it made detailed misstatements about tiic
war of 1812. Upon looking up American au-
thorities, it turned out that they gave no de-
tailed contradictions of these statements. The
reason was not wholly free from meanness: in
nearly all the sea-fights of that war the Ameri-
can forces had outnumbered the British, often
very materially ; but the home historians, wish-
ing not to emphasize this fact, had contented
themselves with the mere statement that the
" diif erence was trifling," thus by their fool-
ish vaunts opening the door to exaggeration
in the beaten enemy's camp. The facts which
Roosevelt brought out from the official files
with absolute impartiality grew into his
first book, " The Naval War of 1812," which
took rank at once as an authority. The
British paid the young author, then barely
out of college, the high compliment of
asking him to write the chapter on this
war for their monumental work on " The

[39]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Royal Navy," and there it stands to-day,
unchallenged.

So with work and with play and with the
class politics in which Theodore took a vigorous
hand, the four years wore away as one. He
f..i.,^as, by the way, not a good speaker in those
days, I am told ; but such speeches as he made
— and he never farmed the duty out when it
was his to do— were very much to the point.
One is remembered yet with amusement by
a distinguished lawyer in this city. He had
been making an elaborate and as he thought
lucid argument in class-meeting, and sat down,
properly proud of the impression he must have
made ; when up rose Theodore Roosevelt.

" I have been listening, Mr. Chairman," he
poke, " and, so far as I can see, not one word

f what Mr. has said has any more to do

ith this matter than has the man in the moon,
t is—" but the class was in a roar, and what
it was " the indignant previous speaker never
arned.

But, as I said, the years passed, and, having
graduated, Roosevelt went abroad to spend a
year with alternate study in Germany and
mountain-climbing in Switzerland by way of

[40]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

letting off steam. Probably the verdict men
might have set down against his whole col-
lege career would have been that it was in no
way remarkable. Here and there some one
had taken notice of the young man, as hav-
ing quite unusual powers of observation and
of concentration, but nothing had happened
of any extraordinary nature, though things
enough happened where he was around. Later
on, when the fact had long compelled public
attention, I asked him how it was. His an-
swer I recommend to the close attention and
study of young men everywhere who want to
get on.

" I put myself in the way of things happen-
ing," he said, " and they happened."

It may be that the longer they think of it,
like myself, the more they will see in it. A
plain and homely prescription, but so, when
you look at it, has been the man's whole life so
far — a plain talk to plain people, on plain is-
sues of right and wrong. The extraordinary
thing is that some of us should have got up such
a heat about it. Though, come to think of it,
that is n*t so extraordinary either; the issues
are so very plain. " Thou shalt not steal " is

[41]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

not exactly revolutionary preaching, but it is
apt to stir up feelings when it means what it
says. No extraordinary ambitions, no other
thought than to do his share of what there was
to do, and to do it well, stirred in this young
student now sailing across the seas to begin life
in his native land, to take up a man's work in a
man's country. None of his college chums
had been found to predict for him a brilliant
public career. Even now they own it.

What, then, had he got out of his five years
of study? They were having a reimion of his
class when he was Police Conmoissioner, and
he was there. One of the professors told of a
student coming that day to bid him good-by.
He asked him what was to be his work in the
world.

" Oh ! " said he, with a little yawn. " Really,
do you know, professor, it does not seem to me
that there is anything that is much worth
while."

Theodore Roosevelt, who had been sitting,
listening, at the other end of the table, got up
suddenly and worked his way round to the pro-
fessor's seat. He struck the table a blow that

was not meant for it alone.

[4a]

WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE

" That fellow," said he, " ought to have been
knocked in the head. I would rather take my
chances with a blackmailing policeman than
with such as he."

That was what Theodore Roosevelt got out
of his years at Harvard. And I think, upon
the whole, that he could have got nothing bet-
ter, for himself, for us, or for the college.

[4S]

Ill

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

Ill

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

IN the year when President Garfield died.
New Yorlj: saw the unusual sight of two
young " silk-stockings," neither of whom
had ever been in poUtics before, running for
office in a popular election. One was the rep-
resentative of vast inherited wealth, the other
of the bluest of the old Knickerbocker blood:
William Waldorf Astor and Theodore Roose-
velt. One ran for Congress, pouring out
money like water, contemptuously confident
that so he could buy his way in. The news-
papers reported his nightly progress from sa-
loon to saloon, where " the boys " were thirstily
waiting to whoop it up for him, and the size
of ** the wad " he left at each place, as with iU-
suppressed disgust he fled to the next. The
other, nominated for the State Legislature on

[4T]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

an issue of clean streets and clean politics,
though but a year out of college, made his can-
vass squarely upon that basis, and astounded
old-time politicians by the fire he put into the
staid residents of the brownstone district, who
were little in the habit of bothering about elec-
tions. He, too, was started upon a round of the
saloons, under management. At the first call
the management and that end of the canvass
gave out together. Thereafter he went it alone.
He was elected, and twice re-elepted to his seat,
with ever-increasing majorities. Astor was
beaten, and, in anger, quit the country. To-
day he lives abroad, a self -expatriated Ameri-
can. Theodore Roosevelt, who believes in the
people, is President of the United States.

There was no need of my asking him how he
came to go into politics, for how he could have
helped it I cannot see ; but I did. He thought
awhile.

" I suppose for one thing ordinary, plain,
every-day duty sent me there to begin with.
But, more than that, I wanted to belong to the
governing class, not to the governed. When
I said that I wanted to go to the Republican
Association, they told me that I would meet

[48]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

the ^oom and the saloon-keeper there; that
politics were low, and that no gentleman both-
ered with them. ' Then/ said I, ' if that is so,
the groom and the saloon-keeper are the gov-
erning class and you confess weakness. You
have all the chances, the education, the position,
and you let them rule you. They must be
better men ; ' and I went.

" I joined the association, attended the meet-
ings, and did my part in whatever was going.
We did n't always agree, and sometimes they
voted me down and sometimes I had my way.
They were a jolly enough lot and I had a good
time. The grooms were there, some of them,
and some of their employers, and we pulled
together as men should if we are to make any-
thing out of our country, and by and by we had
an election."

There had been a fight about the dirty
streets. The people wanted a free hand given
to Mayor Grace, but the machine opposed.
The Assemblyman from Roosevelt's district,
the old Twenty-first, was in disgrace on that
account. The Republican boss of the district,
" Jake " Hess, was at odds with his lieuten-
ants, " Joe " Murray and Major Bullard, and

[40]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

in making up the list of delegates to the As-
sembly Convention they outgeneraled him,
naming fifteen of the twenty-five. Thus they
had the nomination within their grasp, but
they had no candidate. Roosevelt had taken an
active part in opposing the machine man, and
he and Murray had pulled together. There
is something very characteristic of Theodore
Roosevelt in this first political alliance as re-
lated by Murray. " When he found we were
on the same side, he went to Ed Mitchell, who
had been in the Legislature, and asked what
kind of a man I was, and when he was told
he gave me his confidence/^ It is another
of the simple secrets of his success in dealing
with men: to make sure of them and then to
trust them. Men rarely betray that kind of
trust. Murray did not.

Presently he bethought himself of Theodore
Roosevelt, who was fighting but didn't yet quite
know how. As a candidate he might bring out
the vote which ordinarily in that silk-stocking
district came to the polls only in a Presidential
year. He asked him to run, but Roosevelt
refused. It might look as if he had come there
for his personal advantage. Murray reasoned

[50]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

with him, but he was finn. He suggested
several candidates, and one after another
they were turned down. Roosevelt had an-
other batch. Murray promised to look them
over.

" And if I can't find one to suit, will you
take it then? " he asked. Yes, he would do
that, as a last resort.

" But I did n't look for no other candidate
when I had his promise," says " Joe," placidly,
telling of it. " Good reason : I could n't find
any better, nor as good."

" Joe " Murray is a politician, but that day
he plotted well for his country.

Roosevelt was nominated and began the can-
vass at once- The boss himself took him around
to the saloons that night, to meet "the peo-
ple." They began at Valentine Young's place
on Sixth Avenue. Mr. Hess treated and in-
troduced the candidate. Mr. Young was
happy. He hoped he was against high license ;
he, Young, hated it. Now, Roosevelt was at-
tracted by high license and promptly said so
and that he would favor it all he could. He
gave his reasons. The argument became
heated, the saloon-keeper personal. The boss

[61]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

looked on, stunned. He did not like that way
of making votes.

Neither did Mr. Roosevelt. He sent "Jake"
Hess home and quit the saloon canvass then
and there. Instead he went among his neigh-
bors and appealed to them. The " brown-
stone " vote came out. " Joe " Murray rubs his
hands yet at the thought of it. Such a follow-
ing he had not dreamed of in his wildest flights*
Men worth millions solicited the votes of their
coachmen and were glad to get them. Dean
Van Amringe peddled tickets with the Co-
lumbia professors. Men became suddenly
neighbors who had never spoken to one another
before, and pulled together for the public good.
Murray was charged with trading his candi-
date off for Astor for Congress ; but the event
vindicated him triumphantly. Roosevelt ran
far ahead of the beaten candidate for Con-
gress. He took his seat in the Legislature,
the youngest member in it, just as he is now
the youngest President.

He was not received with enthusiasm by the
old wheel-horses, and the fact did credit to their
discernment, if not to their public spirit. I
doubt if they would have understood what was

[52]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

meant by this last- They were there on the
good old plan— good so far always for the
purpose it served— that was put in its plainest,
most brutal form, years after, by the champion
of spoilsmen forever: " I am in politics work-
ing for my own pocket all the time— same as
you." The sneer told of their weak spot. The
man who has lost faith in man has lost his grip.
He may not know it, but he has. I fancy they
felt it at the coming of this young man who
had taught the Commandments in Sunday-
school because he believed in them. They
laughed a little uneasily and guessed he would
be good, if he were kept awhile.

Before half the season had passed he had
justified their fears, if they had them. There
was an elevated railroad ring that had been
guilty of unblushing corruption involving the
Attorney-General of the State and a Judge of
the Supreme Court. The scandal was flagrant
and foul. The people were aroused, petitioned
respectfully but chafed angrily under the
yawn with which their remonstrances were
received in the Assembly. The legislators
" referred '' the petition and thought it dead.
But they had forgotten Roosevelt.

[53]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

He had been watching and wondering. To
him an unsullied judiciary was the ground
fabric of society. Here were charges of the
most serious kind against a judge smothered
unheard. He asked his elders on the Republi-
can benches what was to be done about it.
Nothing. Nothing? Then he would inquire
publicly. They ran to him in alarm. Nothing
but harm could come of it, to him and to the
party. He must not ; it was rank folly. The
thing was loaded.

It was," wrote an unnamed writer in the

Saturday Evening Post," whose story should
be framed and hung in the Assembly Cham-
ber as a chart for young legislators of good
intentions but timid before sneers, " it was ob-
viously the counsel of experienced wisdom. So
far as the clearest judgment could see, it was
not the moment for attack. Indeed, it looked
as if attack would strengthen the hands of cor-
ruption by exposing the weakness of the oppo-
sition to it. Never did expediency put a
temptation to conscience more insidiously.

" It was on April 6, 1882, that young Roose-
velt took the floor in the Assembly and de-
manded that Judge Westbrook, of Newburg,

[54]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

be impeached. And for sheer moral courage
that act is probably supreme in Roosevelt's life
thus far. He must have expected failure.
Even his youth and idealism and ignorance of
public affairs could not blind him to the ap-
parently inevitable consequences. Yet he drew
his sword and rushed apparently to destruc-
tion—alone, and at the very outset of his ca-
reer, and in disregard of the pleadings of his
closest friends and the plain dictates of po-
litical wisdom.

" That speech— the deciding act in Roose-
velt's career — is not remarkable for eloquence.
But it is remarkable for fearless candor. He
called thieves thieves regardless of their mil-
lions; he slashed savagely at the Judge and
the Attorney-General; he told the plain, un-
varnished truth as his indignant eyes saw it.

"When he finished, the veteran leader of
the Republicans rose and with gently contemp-
tuous raillery asked that the resolution to take
up the charges be voted down. He said he
wished to give young Mr. Roosevelt time to
think about the wisdom of his course. ^ I,' said
he, * have seen many reputations in the State
broken down by loose charges made in the

[55]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Legislature/ And presently the Assembly
gave * young Mr. Roosevelt time to think ' by
voting not to take up his ' loose charges/

" Ridicule, laughter, a ripple— apparently it
was all over, except the consequences to the
bumptious and dangerous young man which
might flow from the cross set against his name
in the black books of the ring.

" It was a disheartening defeat — almost all
of his own party voted against him; the most
earnest of those who ventured to support him
were Democrats; perhaps half of those who
voted with him did so merely because their
votes were not needed to beat him.

" That night the young man was once more
urged to be ' sensible,' to ' have regard to his
future usefulness,' to ' cease injuring the
party.' He snapped his teeth together and
defied the party leaders. And the next day he
again rose and again lifted his puny voice and
his puny hand against smiling, contemptuous
corruption. Day after day he persevered on
the floor of the Assembly, in interviews for the
press; a few newspapers here and there joined
him ; Assemblymen all over the State began to
hear from their constituents. Within a week

[561

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

his name was known from Bujffalo to Montauk
Point, and everywhere the people were ap-
plauding him. On the eighth day of his bold,
smashing attack the resolution to take up the
charges was again voted upon at his demand.
And the Assemblymen, with the eyes of the
whole people upon them, did not dare longer
to keep themselves on record as defenders of a
judge who feared to demand an investigation.
The opposition ooUapsed. Roosevelt won by
104 to 6."

In the end the corruptionists escaped. The
committee made a whitewashing report. But
the testimony was damning and more than vin-
dicated the attack. A victory had been won;
open corruption had been driven to the wall.
Roosevelt had met his party on a moral issue
and had forced it over on the side of right.
He had achieved backing. Out of that fight
came the phrase " the wealthy criminal class "
that ran through the country. In his essay on
" true American ideals " he identifies it with
"the conscienceless stock speculator who ac-
quires wealth by swindling his fellows, by de-
bauching judges and legislatures," and his
kind. "There is not," he exclaims, "in the

[67]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

world a more ignoble character than the mere
money-getting American^ insensible to every
duty, regardless of every principle, bent only
on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune
only to the basest uses— whether these uses be
to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads him-
self, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish
and expensive idleness and gross debauchery,
or to purchase some scoundrel of high social
position, foreign or native, for his daughter."

" Young Mr. Roosevelt " went into the next
Legislature re-elected with a big majority in
a year that saw his party go down in defeat all
along the line, as its leader on the floor of the
house. At twenty-four he was proposed for
Speaker. Then came his real test. Longafter,
he told me of it.

"" I suppose,'' he said, '' that my head was
swelled. It would not be strange if it was.
I stood out for my own opinion, alone. I took
the best mugwmnp stand : my own conscience,
my own judgment, were to decide in all things.
I would listen to no argument, no advice. I
took the isolated peak on every issue, and my
people left me. When I looked around, before
the session was well under way, I f oimd my-

[58]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

self alone. I was absolutely deserted. The
people did n't understand. The men from
Erie, from Suffolk, from anywhere, would not
work with me. * He won't listen to anybody,'
they said, and I would not. My isolated peak
had become a valley; every bit of influence I
had was gone. The things I wanted to do I
was powerless to accomplish. What did I do?
I looked the ground over and made up my
mind that there were, several other excellent
people there, with honest opinions of the right,
even though they differed from me. I turned
in to help them, and they turned to and gave
me a hand. And so we were able to get things
done. We did not agree in all things, but we
did in some, and those we pulled at together.
That was my first lesson in real politics. It
is just this: if you are cast on a desert island

to make a boat with, why, go make the best one
you can. It would be better if you had a saw,
but you have n't. So with men. Here is my
friend in Congress who is a good man, a strong
man, but cannot be made to believe in some
things which I trust. It is too bad that he
does n't look at it as I do, but he does notj and

[69]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

we have to work together as we can. There is
a point, of course, where a man must take the
isolated peak and break with it all for clear
principle, but until it comes he must work, if he
would be of use, with men as they are. As long
as the good in them overbalances the evil, let
him work with that for the best that can be
got/'

One can hardly turn a page of his writings
even to this day without coming upon evidence
that he has never forgotten the lesson of the
isolated peak.

The real things of life were getting their
grip on him more and more. The old laissez
faire doctrine that would let bad enough alone
because it was the easiest way still pervaded
the teaching of his college days, as applied to
social questions. The day of the Settlement
had not yet come; but his father had been a
whole social settlement and a charity organiza-
tion society combined in his own person, and
the son was not content with the bookish view
of affairs that so intimately concerned the wel-
fare of the republic to which he led back all
things. The bitter cry of the virtually enslaved
tenement cigarmakers had reached Albany,

[60]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

and Roosevelt went to their rescue at once. He
was not satisfied with hearsay evidence, but
went through the tenements and »saw for him-
self. The conditions he found made a pro-
found impression upon him. They were after-
ward, when I wrote " How the Other Half
Lives,'* an introduction to him and a bond of
sympathy between us. He told the Legisla-
ture what he had seen, and a bill was passed
to stop the evil, but it was declared unconsti-
tutional in the courts. The time was not yet
ripe for many things in which he was after-
ward to bear a hand. A dozen years later, as
Health Commissioner, he helped destroy some
of the very tenements in which at that earlier
day industrial slavery in its worst form was
intrenched too strongly to be dislodged by law.
The world " do move,'' with honest hands to
help it.

It was so with the investigation of the city
departments he headed. There was enough to
investigate, but we had not yet grown a con-
science robust enough to make the facts tell.
Parkhurst had first to prepare the ground.
The committee sat for a couple of weeks, per-
haps three, at the old Metropolitan Hotel, and

[61]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

it was there I first met Theodore Roosevelt,
when the police officials were on the stand. I
remember distinctly but one incident of that
inquiry. It was when lawyer George Bliss,
who could be very cutting when it suited his
purpose, made an impertinent remark, as coun-
sel for the Police Commissioners. I can see
"young" Mr. Roosevelt yet, leaning across
the table with the look upon his face that al-
ways compelled attention, and saying with
pointed politeness : " Of course you do not
mean that, Mr. Bliss ; for if you did we should
have to have you put out in the street." Mr.
Bliss did not mean it.

It was at that session, too, I think, that he
struck his first blow for the dvil service re-
form which his father contended for when it
had few friends; for which cause the RepubU-
can machine rejected his nomination for Col-
lector of the Port of New York. I know how
it delighted the son's heart to carry on his fa-
ther's work then and when afterward as Gov-
ernor he clinched it in the best civil service law
the State has ever had. But, more than that»
he saw that this was one of the positions to be
rushed if the enemy were to be beaten out.

[691

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

Another was the power of confirmation the
Aldermen had over the Mayor's appointments
in New York. Thus even the best administra-
tion would be helpless with a majority of Tam-
many members on the Board of Aldermen.
Such a thing as the election of a reform Board
of Aldermen was then unthinkable. He
wrested that power from them and gave it to
the Mayor, and, in doing it, all unconsciously
paved the way for himself to the office in which,
under Mayor Strong, he leaped into National
importance. There are many striking coind-
dences of the kind in Theodore Roosevelt's
career. I have noticed that they are to be
found in the life of every man who goes straight
ahead and does what he knows is right, taking
the best counsel he can and learning from life
as it shapes itself under his touch* All the
time he is laying out grappUng-hooks, without
knowing it, for the opportunity that comes
only to the one who can profit by it, and, when
it passes, he lays hold of it quite naturally. It
is only another way of putting Roosevelt's phi-
losophy that things happen to those who are
in the way of it. It is the idlers who prate
of chance and luck. Luck is lassoed by the

[63]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

masterful man, by the man who knows and who
can. And it is well that it is so, or we should
be in a pretty mess.

I have spoken at considerable length about
Theodore Roosevelt's early legislative expe-
rience because I am concerned about showing
how he grew to what he is. Men do not jump
up in a night like mushrooms, some good cred-
ulous people to the contrary notwithstanding,
or shoot up like rockets. If they do, they are
apt to come down like sticks. At least Mr.
Roosevelt stays up a long time, they will have
to admit. I have heard of him being " dis-
covered " by politicians as Civil Service Com-
missioner, as Police Commissioner, as fitter-out
of the navy for the Spanish fight, as Rough-
Rider— almost as often as he has been ruined
by his vagaries which no one could survive ; and
I have about made up my mind that politicians
are the most credulous of beings, instead of
the reverse. The fact is that he is a perfectly
logical product of a certain course of conduct
deliberately entered upon and faithfully ad-
hered to all through life, as all of us are who
have any character worth mentioning. For
that is what character means, that a man wiU

[64]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

do so and so as occasions arise demanding
action. Now here is a case in point. When
President Roosevelt speaks nowadays about
the necessity of dropping all race and creed dis-
tinctions, if we want to be good Americans,
some one on the outskirts of the crowd winks
his left eye and says " politics." When he
promoted a Jew in the Police Department or
in his regiment, it was politics, politics. WeU,
this incident I am going to tell you about he
had himself forgotten. When I asked him
about it, he recalled it slowly and with diffi-
culty, for it happened in the days before he had
entered the Legislature. I had it from a friend
of his, the head of one of our great institutions
of learning, who was present at the time.

It was at the Federal Club, a young Repub-
lican club started to back up the older organ-
ization and since merged with it. A young
Jew had been proposed for membership. He
was of good family, personally unobjection-
able, had no enemies in the club. Yet it was
proposed deliberately to blackball him. There
was no pretense about it; it was a perfectly
bald issue of Gentile against Jew in a club
where it was easy to keep him out, at least so

[65]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

they thought— till Roosevelt heard of it at
the meeting. Then and there he got up and
said what he thought of it. It was not com-
plimentary to the conspirators. They were
there as Republicans, as American citizens, he
said, to work together for better things on the
basis of being decent. The proposition to
exclude a man because he was a Jew was not
decent. For him, the minute race and creed
were brought into the club, he would quit, and
at once.

" He flayed them as I never heard a body of
men flayed in my life," said my informant
" Roosevelt was pale with anger. The club sat
perfectly still under the lashing. When he sat
down amid profound silence, the vote was
taken. There were no black balls. The Jew
never knew how narrowly he missed getting
in." He had a chance to vote for Roosevelt
three times for the Legislature in settlement of
the account he did not know he owed, and I
hope he did.

When Mr. Roosevelt's third term was out,
he had earned a seat in the National covmcil
of his party. He went to Chicago in 1884 as a
delegate to the convention which nominated

[6«1

EAKLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

Blaine. He was strongly in opposition, and
fought hard to prevent the nomination. The
outcome was a sore thrust to him. Some of his
associates never forgave him that he did not
bolt with them and stay out. Roosevelt came
back from the far West, where he had gone
to wear off his disappointment, and went into
the fight with his party. His training was
bearing fruit. " At times," I read in one of
his essays, ^' a man must cut loose from his as-
sociates and stand for a great cause; but the
necessity for such action is almost as rare as
the necessity for a revolution." He did not
join in the revolution ; the time had not come,
in his judgment, to take the isolated peak.

There came to me just now a letter from
one of his classmates in college who has heard
that I am writing about Mr. Roosevelt. He
was one of those who revolted, but I shall set
his testimony down here as quite as good an
explanation of Theodore Roosevelt's course as
Mr. Roosevelt could furnish himself.

" He was," he writes, speaking of his college
friend, "next to my own father, the purest-
minded man I ever knew. . . . He was free
from any tinge of self-seeking. Indeed, he

[67]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

was free, as I knew him, from self -conscious-
ness. What he said and did was simply the
unstudied expression of his true self. . . . Al-
though I very rarely see him, I have naturally
followed his career with close interest. I am
convinced that the few of his acts that I find it
hard to condone {e.g., his advocacy of Mr.
Blaine's election to the Presidency, and his own
acceptance of nomination for the Vice-Presi-
dency) are explained by the fact that he has
from the start been a party man, not merely a
believer in party government and a faithful
party member, but a devout believer, appar-
ently, in the dogma that the success of his party
is essential to the welfare of the country."

At that convention George William Cur-
tis was also a delegate from New York. In
a newspaper I picked up the other day were
some reminiscences of the great fight by a
newspaper man who was there. He told of
meeting the famous Easy Chair at luncheon
when the strife was fiercest. He expressed
some surprise at the youth of Mr. Roosevelt,
of whom the West then knew little. What
followed sounds so like prophecy that I quote
it here. The reporter wrote it down from mem-

[68]

EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS

ory that night, so he says, and by accident came
across his notes, hence the item:

Mr. Curtis moved his chair back from the table,
threw his napkin beside his plate, and was silent for a
few seconds. Then he said, in his quiet, modulated
tones:

"You'll know more, sir, later; a deal more, or I
am much in error. Young? Why, he is just out of
school almost, yet he is a force to be reckoned with
in New York. Later the Nation will be criticising or
praising him. While respectful to the gray hairs and
experience of his elders, none of them can move him
an iota from convictions as to men and measures once
formed and rooted. He has integrity, courage, fair
scholarship, a love fpr public life, a comfortable amount
of money, honorable descent, the good word of the
honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to
court opposition to the point of being somewhat pug-
nacious. His political life will probably be a turbu-
lent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead, in
future development — or, if not, it will be because
he gives up politics altogether."

Such a verdict from such a man upon three
years of the strife and sweat of very practical
politics I should have thought worth all it cost,
and I know so does Mr. Roosevelt.

[691

THE HORSE AND THE GUN
HAVE THEIR DAY

PERHAPS no more striking description
of a landscape was ever attempted than
when Mr. Roosevelt said that in the
Bad Lands he always felt as if they somehow
looked just as Poe's tales and poems somid.
It is with this as I said before: we sometimes
forget the man of words in the man of deeds.
Mr. Roosevelt's writings occasionally suffer
from a lack of patience to edit and to polish,
but they are always full of vigor and direct-
ness; in other words, he is himself when he
writes as when he talks ; and never more so than
when he writes of the great West to which I
often think he belongs more than to the East
where he was born. His home ranch in western
North Dakota was among the Bad Lands of

[73]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

the Little Missouri. To grasp fully the mean-
ing of the comparison with Poe, read this from
his account of an elk-hunting trip out there :

" The tracks led into one of the wildest and
most desolate parts of the Bad Lands. It was
now the heat of the day, the brazen sun shining
out in a cloudless sky and not the least breeze
stirring. At the bottom of the valley, in the
deep narrow bed of the winding watercourse,
lay a few tepid little pools, almost dried up.
Thick groves of stunted cedars stood here and
there in the glen-like pockets of the high buttes,
the peaks and sides of which were bare, and
only their lower, terrace-like ledges thinly dad
with coarse, withered grass and sprawling sage-
b™.h; the parched hiSde, we«='rive„ by dip,
twisted gorges, with brushwood on the bot-
toms; and the cliffs of coarse day were cleft
and seamed by sheer-sided, canon-like inillies.
In the narrow '.vines, dosed in by b^Xl-
baked walls, the hot air stood still and sultry;
the only living things were the rattlesnakes,
and of these I have never elsewhere seen so
many. Some basked in the sun, stretched out
at their ugly length of mottled brown and yel-
low. Others lay half under stones or twined

[74]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

in the roots of the sage-brush, and looked
straight at me with that strange, sullen, evil
gaze, never shifting or moviug, that is the
property only of serpents and of certain men;
while one or two coiled and rattled menacingly
as I stepped near."

Fit setting, that kind of a landscape, for a
man who had come out of the sort of fight he
had just been in, and lost. Many of those who
had fought with hun went out of the Republi-
can party and did not return. Roosevelt had
it out with the bucking bronchos on his ranch
and with the grizzlies in the mountains, and
came back to fight in the ranks for the man
he had opposed and to go down with him to
defeat. He had come to the bitter waters of
which men must drink to grow to then- full
stature— his most ambitious defeat, that of
the Mayoralty campaign of 1886, was yet to
come-and, according to his sturdy way, he
looked the well through and through, and
drank deep.

There stands upon a shelf in my library a
copy of the " Wilderness Hunter," which he
gave me when once I was goiug to the woods.
On the fly-leaf he wrote: " May you enjoy the

[75]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

north woods as much as I enjoyed the great
plains and the Rockies." It was during that
fall that I received the first news from him, up
there in the Canadian wilderness, of the sad and
terrible doings at BuflPalo, when William
McKinley was already in his grave. I read in
that letter that had been waiting many days for
our canoe to come down the lake, even though
he wrote hopefully of the President's recovery ;
that a shadow had fallen across his path, be-
tween him and those youthful days, through
which he would never cross again the same man.
He was himself going away to the woods, he
wrote, with the children. The doctors had as-
sured him all was well. There was even a note
of glad relief that the dreadful suspense was
over. Yet with it all there was a something,
undefinable, that told me that the chase he loved
so weU, the free wild life of the plain, had lost
one that understood them as few did; and the
closing words of the preface of the book, on
which the ink of his name was hardly yet dry,
sounded to me like saddening prophecy:

" No one but he who has partaken thereof
can understand the keen delight of hunting in
lonely lands. For him is the joy of the horse

[76]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

well ridden and the rifle well held; for him the
long days of toil and hardship, resolutely en-
dured, and crowned at the end with triumph.
In after years there shall come forever to his
mind the memory of endless prairies shimmer-
ing in the bright sun ; of vast snow-clad wastes
lying desolate under gray skies ; of the melan-
choly marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers;
of the breath of the evergreen forest in sum-
mer ; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the
touch of the winds of winter ; of cataracts roar-
ing between hoary mountain masses ; of all the
innumerable sights and sounds of the wilder-
ness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the
silences that brood in its still depths."

So all things pass. To the careless youth
succeeds the man of the grave responsibiUties.
He would not have it different, himself. But
out there, there are men to-day who cannot
forgive the White House for the loss of the
ranch ; who camp nightly about forgotten fires
with their lost friend, the hunter and ranch-
man, Theodore Roosevelt.

When the world was young he came among
them and straightway took their hearts by
storm, as did they his, men " hardy and self-

[77]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

reliant, with bronzed, set faces and keen eyes
that look all the world straight in the face with-
out flinching." I know how it is. ' You can-
not help taking to them, those Western fel-
lows, and they need not be cowboys either.
The farther you go, the better you like them.
My oldest son, who spent a year on a ranch,
never wanted to come back. He was among
Roosevelt's men, whose talk was still of his
good'^fellowship in camp and on the hunting
traa, his unflinching courage, his even-handed
justice that arraigned the sheriff of the county
as stoutly before his f eUows when he failed in
his duty, as it led him in the bitter winter wea-
ther on a month's hunt down-stream through
the pack-ice after cattle thieves— a story that
reads like the record of an Arctic expedition.
But he got the thieves, and landed them in jail,
much to the wonderment of the ranchman at
Killdeer Mountains, who was unable to under-
stand why aU this fuss " instead of hanging
them offhand." The vigilantes had just had
a cleaning up in the cattle country, and had
despatched some sixty-odd suspects, some of
them, Mr. Roosevelt says, through misappre-
hension or carelessness. One is reminded of

[78]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

the apology of the captain of such a band to
the widow of a victim of their " carelessness " ;
" Madam, the joke is on us,"

Every land has its ways. They have theirs
out there, and if they are sometimes a trifle
hasty, life bowls along with them at a pace we
do not easily catch up with. On his recent
trip across the continent, the President was
greeted in a distant State by one of his old
men, temporarily out of his latitude. He ex-
plained that he had had '' a difficulty '' ; he had
'^sat into a poker game with a gentleman
stranger," who raised a row. He used awful
language, and he, the speaker, shot him down.
He had to.

"And did the stranger draw?" asked the
President, who had been listening gravely.

" He did not have time, sir."

The affair with the sheriff sounds as though
it were a chapter of Mulberry Street in his
later years. It was the outcome of the struggle
to put law and order in the place of the rude
lynch justice of the frontier. There was rea-
son to beUeve that the sheriff leaned toward
the outlaws. Men talked of it in bar-rooms;
the cattle-thieves escaped. A meeting was

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

called of ranch-owners, the neighbors for half
a hundred miles around, and in the meeting
Mr. Roosevelt rose and confronted the sheriff
squarely with the charges. He looked straight
at him through his gold-rinmied eye-glasses,
himself unarmed, while from the otiier's
pockets stuck out the handles of two big six-
shooters, and told him without mincing words
that they believed the charges to be true and
that he had forfeited their confidence and good
will. A score of grave frontiersmen sat si-
lently expectant of the reply. None came.
The man made no defense. But he was not
without sympathizers, and his reputation would
have made most men think twice before beard-
ing him as Roosevelt did. I asked him once
why he did it.

" There was no other way," he said, " and
it had exactly the effect we desired. I do
not think I was in any danger. I was unarmed,
and if he had shot me down he knew he could
not have escaped swift retribution. Besides,
I was right, and he knew itl ''

How often since have I heard him weigh,
with the most careful scrutiny of every argu-
ment for and against, some matter to be de-

IflOJ

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

cided in the public interest, and wind up with
the brisk " There is no other way, and it is
right; we will do it;" and heard his critics,
who had given the matter no attention or the
most superficial, and were taking no risks, cry
out about snap judgments, while Roosevelt
calmly went ahead and brought us through.

Whether it was over this cattle matter or
some other local concern that his misunder-
standing with the Marquis de Mores arose, of
which there have been so many versions, I have
forgotten. It does not matter. In the nature
of things it would have come sooner or later,
on some pretext or another. The two were
neighbors, their ranches being some ten or fif-
teen miles apart. The Marquis was a gallant
but exaggerated Frenchman, with odd feudal
notions still clinging in his brain. He took it
into his head to be offended by something
Roosevelt was reported to have said, before he
had yet met him, and wrote him a curt note
telling him what he had heard and that " there
was a way for gentlemen to settle their differ-
ences," to which he invited his attention. Mr.
Roosevelt promptly replied that he had heard
a lie ; that he, the Marquis, had no business to

[81]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

believe it true upon such evidence, and that he
would follow his note in person within the hour.
He despatched the letter to Medora, where the
Marquis was, by one of his men, and, true to
his word, started himself immediately after.
Before he came in sight of the little cow-town
he was met by a courier traveling in haste from
the Marquis with a gentleman's apology and
a cordial invitation to dine with him in town.
And that was all there was of the sensational
"duel" with the French nobleman.

How small this world is, to be sure, that we
make so much of I It was only yesterday that
a woman whom I had never seen spoke to me
on a Third Avenue street-car and told me that
she had been in the house of the Marquis de
Mores at that very time. She was with the
family as a trained nurse, she told me. Of
coiu-se she knew Roosevelt. " The cowboys
loved him," she said, and added : " Poor Mar-
quis, he was a nice gentleman, but he was not
so level-headed a man as Mr. Roosevelt."

The physical vigor for which he had longed

and labored had come to him in full measure

now, and with it the confidence that comes of

being prepared to defend one's rights. The

[

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

bully and the brawler knew well enough that
they had small chance against such an equip-
ment, and kept out of the way. In all Mr.
Roosevelt's life on the frontier, sometimes in
unfamiliar towns keyed up to mischief, he was
molested but once, and then by a drunken
rowdy who took him for a tenderfoot and with
a curse bade him treat, at the point of his two
revolvers, enforcing the invitation with a lit-
tle exhibition of '' gun-play," while a roomful
of men looked stolidly on. Roosevelt was a
stranger in the town and had no friends there.
He got up apparently to yield to the inevitable,
practicing over mentally the while a famous
left-hander that had done execution in the old
Harvard days. The next instant the bully
crashed against the wall and measured his
length on the floor. His pistols went off
harmlessly in the air. He opened his eyes to
find the " four-eyed tenderfoot " standing over
him, bristling with fight, while the crowd nod-
ded calmly, '' Served him right." He surren-
dered then and there and gave up his guns,
while Mr. Roosevelt went to bed immolested.
Such things carry far on the plains. No one
was ever after that heard to express a wish to

[88]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

fill this tenderfoot " full of holes," even though
he did wear gold spectacles and fringed angora
" chaps " when on a hunt.

And now that I have made use of my priv-
ilege to put things in as I think of them, let
me say that brawling was no part of his life in
the West. I thought of it first partly because of
some good people who imagine that there was
nothing else on the frontier; partly because it
was a test the frontier life put to a man, always
does, that he shall not be afraid, seeing that in
the last instance upon his personal fearlessness
depends his fitness to exist where at any mo-
ment that alone may preserve his life and the
hves of others. There was room in plenty for
that quality in the real business that brought
him West, the quest of adventure. It was the
dream of the man with the horse and the gun
that was at last being realized. There was yet a
frontier ; there were unknown wilds. The very
country on the Little Missouri where he built
his log house was almost untrodden to the
north of him. Deer lay in the brush in the
open glade where the house stood, and once
he shot one from his door. The fencing in of
cattle lands had not begun. The buffalo

[84]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

grazed yet in scattered bands in the mountain
recesses far from beaten trails; the last gi'eat
herd on the plains had been slaughtered, but
five years later Mr. Roosevelt tracked an old
bull and his family of cows and calves in the
wilderness on the Wisdom River near where
Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana come together.
He trailed them all day and at last came upon
them in a glade shut in by dark pines. As
he gazed upon the huge, shaggy beasts, behind
which towered the mountains, their crests crim-
soned by the sinking sun, there mingled witH
the excitement of the hunter a " half -melan-
choly feeling at the thought that they were the
last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished
race." It did not prevent him, however, from
eating the grilled meat of the old bull that
night at the camp-fire, with a hungry hunter's
relish. The great head of the mighty beast
hangs over the fire-place at Sagamore Hill,
an object of shuddering awe to the little ones.
None of them will in their day ever bring home
such a trophy from the hunt.

I looked past it into the room where the piano
stands, the other day, and saw two of them
there, Ethel giving Archie, with the bewitching

[85]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

bangs and the bare brown boyish legs, his music
lesson. One groping foot— for the lesson
would n't come— dangled within reach of the
ugliest grizzly's head a distorted fancy could
conceive of. I know it, for I stumble over it
regularly when I come there, until I have got
it charted for that particular trip. The skin
to which it is attached is one Mr. Roosevelt sets
great store by. It is a memento of the most
thrilling moment of his life, when he was hunt*
ing alone in the foothills of the Rockies. He
had made his camp ^' by the side of a smallt
noisy brook with crystal water,'* and had
strolled off with his rifle to see if he could pick
up a grouse for supper, when he came upon the
grizzly and wounded it. It took refuge in a
laiurel thicket, where Roosevelt laid siege to
it. While he was cautiously skirting the edge,
peering in, in the gathering dusk, the bear
suddenly came out on the hillside: " Scarlet
strings of froth hung from his lips; his eyes
burned like embers in the gloom."

Roosevelt fired, and the bullet shattered the
point of the grizzly's heart. " Instantly the
great bear turned with a harsh roar of fiuy
and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

his mouth) so that I saw the 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 f aUen tree, raking him as
he topped it with a ball which entered his chest
and went through the cavity of his body, 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
his 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%round; but he re-
covered himself, and made two or three jumps
onwards, whUe I hurriedly jammed a couple of
cartridges into the magazine — 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 droopedt

[871

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit.
Each of my first three bullets had inflicted a
mortal wound."

That was hunting of the kind that calls for a
stout heart. When I think of it, there comes
to me by contrast the echo of the laugh we had,
when he lay with his Rough-Riders at Mon-
tauk Point, over my one unlucky experience
with a " silver-tip." I have a letter yet, dated
Camp Wikofi^, Montauk, September 9, 1898,
in which he has scribbled after the business on
hand, an added note : '^ Good luck on your
hunt! Death to grizzly-bear cubs." I can
hear his laugh now. I am not a mighty hunter,
but I know a bear when I see it — at least so I
thought-and when, wandering in the forest
primeval, far from camp, with only a fowling-
piece, I beheld a movement in the top of a big
pine, I had no difficulty in making out a bear-
cub there with the last rays of the sun silvering
the tip of its brief tail— a " silver-tip " then;
and likewise my knowledge of the world in
general, if not of wood-craft, told me that
where the cub was the mamma bear would not
be far away. It was therefore, I insist, proof
of fearless courage that I deliberately shot

[86]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

down the cub with one of my two No. 12 car-
tridges, even if I made great haste to pick it
up and carry it away before Madam Bruin
should appear. It is all right to be bold, but
when it comes to maddened she-bears— I
made a wild grab for my cub, and had my hand
impaled upon a hundred porcupine quills. It
was that kind of a cub. It is well enough to
laugh, but it took me a little while before I
could join in, with all those quills sticking in
my fist, just like so many barbed fish-hooks.

I remember we shot together once at the
range, and that I made nearly as good a score
as he. It was in the beginning of our ac-
quaintance, when I had been staying at Saga-
more Hill and the question was put by Mrs.
Roosevelt at the breakfast-table whether I
would rather go driving with her or " go with
Theodore on the range." And I remember
the perfidious smile with which he repeated the
question, as if he should be so glad to have me
go driving when he really wanted to try the
new rifle on the range. He cannot dissemble
worth a cent, and Mrs. Roosevelt laughed and
sent us away, to my great relief; for going
driving with her is a privilege one might weU

[W]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

hse proud of, and I— well, we had looked at
the rifle together the night before. Really,
it is no use for me to try, either.

But about the score; that was shooting at a
target. Hitting a running animal is a differ-
ent story, as I know to my sorrow. Though
Mr. Roosevelt is near-sighted and wears
glasses, and though his hand, he says himself,
is none too steady, yet he has acquired a very
formidable reputation as a hunter, and this,
he adds with characteristic touch, because he
has " hunted very perseveringly, and by much
practice has learned to shoot about as well at
a wild animal as at a target.'' It is the story
of everything he undertook: his opportunities
were in nothing unusually great, except in his
marvelous mastery over his own mind, his rare
faculty of concentration; sometimes he was at
a clear disadvantage, as in the matter of physi-
cal strength and promise at the outset; yet he
won by sheer perseverance. He has killed in
his day every kind of large game to be found
on the North American continent.

The " horse and the gun " were having their
day. And while he hunted, with the instinct
of the naturalist, who lets nothing escape that

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

can contribute to our knowledge of the world
about us, he made notes of the habits and habi-
tats of the game he hunted. His hunting-
books have been extensively quoted by the sci-
entific periodicals* Which brings to my mind
another Presidential sportsman who occasion-
ally makes notes of his exploits with the rod.
He will forgive me for telling of it, for never
did man draw a clearer picture of himself than
did Mr. Cleveland when over the dinner-table
in a friend's house he told the story of the egg
the neighbor's hen laid in his yard. We had
been discussing the way of conscience— whe-
ther it was bom in men, or whether it grew, and
he supported his behef that it was born with
the child by telling of how when he was a little
chap the hen made the mistake aforesaid.

" I could n't have been over five or six at
most," said Mr. Cleveland, '* but I remember
the awful row I made until they brought back
that egg to the side of the fence where it be-
longed."

That was Grover Cleveland, sure enough.
My own conscience suffered twinges he knew
not of during the recital, for I also had an egg
to my account, but on the other side of the

[91]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ledger, though it was never laid. I remem-
bered well the half of an idle forenoon I spent,
when I was nearer fifteen than five, treacher-
ously trjdng to decoy my neighbor's hen across
the fence to lay her egg in my yard. The door-
knob I pohshed a most alluring white and hid
in some hay for a nest-egg, and the trail of
corn I made— they all rose up and spurned me.
Who says the world is not getting better?
Look upon this picture and upon that. No one
would ever think of making me President.
And when I thought of Mr. Roosevelt's proba-
ble action with the hen cackling on his side of
the fence, who can doubt that he would return
the egg with a stern reprimand to its owner
not to lead his neighbor into temptation again?
Mr. Cleveland might have registered the
weight of the egg before returning it ; the fish-
erman would not be denied. Mr. Roosevelt,
had the hen been a wild fowl, would have taken
note of its plumage and its futile habit of hid-
ing its nest from mankind, even righteous
mankind.

A cat may look at a king. One may have a
joke even with a President. I know they won't
mind. They are two men alike in the best

[99]

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

there is in man, sturdy, courageous, splendid
tjrpes of American manhood, however they dif-
fer. And though they do differ, Cleveland
gave Roosevelt his strongest backing in the
civil service fight, while the younger man holds
the ex-President, even though his political op-
ponent, in the real regard in which one true
man holds another. And I who write this have
had the good luck to vote for them both. The
Republic is all right.

But I was speaking just now of the western
land he loved; whether in the spring, when
" the flowers are out and a man may gallop
for miles at a stretch with his horse's hoofs
sinking at every stride into the carpet of prai-
rie roses, . . . and where even in the waste
places the cactuses are blooming, . . . their
mass of splendid crimson flowers glowing
against the sides of the gray buttes like a splash
of flame"; when "the thickets and groves
about the ranch house are loud with bird
music from before dawn tiU long after sunrise
and all through the night " ; or in the hot noon-
tide hours of midsummer, when the parched
land lies shimmering in the sunlight and " from
the upper branches of the cottonwoods comes

[93]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

every now and then the soft, melancholy coo-
ing of the mourning dove, whose voice always
seems far away and expresses more than any
other sound in nature the sadness of gentle,
hopeless, never-ending grief. The other birds
are still. • • . Now and then the black shadow
of a wheeling vulture falls on the sun-scorched
ground; the cattle that have strung down in
long files from the hills lie quietly on the sand-
bars." Whether in the bright moonlight that
" turns the gray buttes into glimmering silver,
the higher chffs standing out in weird gro-
tesqueness while the deep gorges slumber in
the black shadows, the echoing hoof -beats of
the horses and the steady metallic clank of the
steel bridle-chains the only sounds " ; or when
the gales that blow out of the north have
wrapped the earth in a mantle of death ; when
"in the still, merciless, terrible cold . • . all
the land is Kke granite; the great rivers stand
in their beds as if turned to frosted steel. In
the long nights there is no sound to break the
lifeless silence. Under the ceaseless, shifting
play of the Northern Lights the snow-clad
plains stretch out into dead and endless wastes
of glimmering white.*'

THE HORSE AND THE GUN

So he saw it, and so he loved it ; loved it when
the work was hard and dangerous ; when on the
ranchman's occasional holiday he lay stretched
before the blazing log-fire reading Shake-
speare to the cowboys and eliciting the patro-
nizing comment from one who followed bron-
cho-busting as a trade, that " that 'ere f eUer
Shakespeare saveyed human nature some/*
Loved the land and loved its people, as they
loved him, a man among men. He has drawn
a picture of them in his " Ranch Life and the
Hunting Trail," from which I have quoted,
that Mali stand as a monument to them in the
days that are to come when they shall be no
more. In that day we will value, too, the book,
as a marvelous picture of a vanished day.

" To appreciate properly his fine, manly
qualities, the wild rough-rider of the plains
should be seen in his own home. There he
passes his days; there he does his life-work;
there, when he meets death, he faces it as he
faces many other evils, with quiet, uncom-
plaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy
and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our
race; he prepares the way for the civilization
from before whose face he must himself dis-

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

appear. Hard and dangerous though his ex-
istence is, it has yet a wild attraction that
strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit. He
lives in the lonely land where mighty rivers
twist in long reaches between the barren blujff s ;
where the prairies stretch out into billowy
plains of waving grass, girt only by the blue
horizon— plains across whose endless breadth
he can steer his course for days and weeks, and
see neither man to speak to nor hill to break
the level; where the glory and the burning
splendor of the simsets kindle the blue vault
of heaven and the level brown earth till they
merge together in an ocean of flaming fire."

Working there, resting there, growing there,
in that wonderland under the spell of which
these words of his were written, there came to
him, unheralded, the trumpet call to another
life, to duty. Over the camp-fire he read in a
newspaper sent on from New York that by
a convention of independent citizens he had
been chosen as their standard-bearer in the
fight for the mayoralty, then impending. They
needed a leader. And that night he himg up
the rifle, packed his trunk, and, bidding his
life on the plains good-by, started for the East.

[96]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

THE citizens had picked Roosevelt be-
cause they needed a young man with
fighting grit, a man with a name to
trust, a Republican who was not afraid— of
the machine for one thing. The machine took
him because there was nothing else left for it
to do, and it did that. The thing has happened
since: evidence that there is life in our theory
and practice of government. When such
things cease to happen, popular government
will not be much more than a name. The ma-
chine is useful— indeed, it is indispensable— as
a thing to be run for a purpose. When the
purpose becomes merely the running of the
machine, however perfect that, the soul is gone
out of it. And without a soul a man or a party
is dead.

[99]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Something had occurred in New York fit
abnost to wake the dead. Henry George had
been nominated for Mayor, and the world that
owned houses and lands and stocks was in a
panic. The town was going to be sacked, at
the very least. And, in wild dread of the dis-
aster that was coming, men forsook party,
principles, everything, and threw themselves
into the arms of Tammany, as babies run in
fear of the bogy man and hide their heads in
their mother's lap. Nice mother, Tammany!
—even with Abram S. Hewitt as its candi-
date. He lived to subscribe to that statement.
I have sometimes wondered what the town
thought of itself when it came to, and con-
sidered Henry George as he really was. I
know what Roosevelt thought of it. He
laughed, rather contemptuously, married, and
went abroad, glad of his holiday.

But he had contributed something to that
campaign that had life in it. Long years after
it bore fruit ; but at that time I suppose people
shrugged their shoulders at it, and ran on to
their haven of refuge. It was just two para-
graphs in his letter of acceptance to the Com-
mittee of One Hundred, the briefest of that
kind of documents I ever saw.

[1001

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

" The worst evils that affect our local gov-
ernment," he wrote to R. Fulton Cutting and
his colleagues (even the names sound as if it
were yesterday, not nearly twenty years ago) ,
" arise from and are the inevitable results of the
mixing up of city affairs with the party poli-
tics of the Nation and of the State. The lines
upon which National parties divide have no
necessary connection with the business of the
city; . • . such connection opens the way to
countless schemes of public plunder and civic
corruption. I very earnestly deprecate all at-
tempts to introduce any class or caste feeling
into the mayoralty contest. Laborers and cap-
italists alike are interested in having an honest
and economical city government, and if elected
I shall certainly strive to be the representative
of all good citizens, paying heed to nothing
whatever but the general well-being."

He was not elected, as I said. We were not
yet grown to that. Non-partisanship in mu-
nicipal politics was a poet's dream, nice but so
unsubstantial. It came true all the same in
time, and it will stay true when we have dQzed_
off a few times more and been roused up
with the Tammany nightmare astride of us.
Maybe then my other dream will come true,

[101]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

too. It is my own, and I have never told even
him of it ; but I have seen stranger things hap-
pen. It is this, that Theodore Roosevelt shall
sit in the City Hall in New York as Mayor of
his own city, after he has done his work in
Washington. That would be an object-lesson
worth while, one we need and that would show
all the world what democracy really means. I
shall never be satisfied till I see it. That year I
would write the last chapter of my " battle with
the slum," and in truth it would be over. For
that which really makes the slum is not the
foul tenement, not the pestilent alley, not the
want and ignorance they stand for; but the
other, the killing ignorance that sits in ease and
plenty and knows not that it is the brother
who suffers, and that, in one way or other, he
must suffer with him unless he will suffer for
him. Of that there must be an end. Roosevelt
in the City Hall could mean only that.

Witness his plea in the letter I quoted :
" Laborers and capitalists alike are interested."
Of course they are, or our country goes to the
dofifs. In that day we shall see it, all of us. He
saw it always. When I hear any one say that
Roosevelt is doing this, or saying that, for ef-

[109]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

feet, I know I have to do with a man who
does not read or reason; or he would have
made out how straight has been his course from
the beginning. What he said then to the
electors of New York, he did as President
when he appomted the Coal Strike Commis-
sion, when he blocked the way of illegal trust
combinations, and when he killed the power
of " puU " in the Police Department and kept
the peace of the city. He said it again the
other day in his Labor Day speech at Syracuse.

" They will say, most likely, that it is made
up of platitudes," he told me when he had fin-
ished it, referring to his newspaper critics;
" and so I suppose it is. Only they need to be
said just here and now."

They did need to. The Ten Command-
ments are platitudes, I expect; certainly they
have been repeated often enough. And yet
even the critics wiU hardly claim that we have
had enough of them. I noticed, by the way,
that they were dumb for once. Perhaps it oc-
curred to them that it took a kind of courage
to insist, as he did, on the elementary virtues in
the dealings of man with man as the basis of all
human fellowship, against which their shafts

[108]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

fell powerless. If so, it did more credit to
their discernment than I expected ever to have
to accord them.

Two years of travel and writing, of work-
ing at the desk and, in between, on the ranch,
where the cowboys hailed him joyously; of
hunting and play which most people would
have caQed hard work; years during which his
" Winning of the West " took shape and grew
into his great work. Then, in the third, Wash-
ington and the Civil Service Commission.

I suppose there is scarcely one who knows
anything of Theodore Roosevelt who has not
got the fact of his being once a Civil Service
Commissioner fixed in his mind. That was
where the coimtry got its eye upon him; and
that, likewise, was where some good people
grew the notion that he was a scrapper first,
last, and all the time, with but little regard for
whom he tackled, so long as he had him. There
was some truth in that ; we shall see how much.
But as to civil service reform, I have some-
times wondered how many there were who knew
as little what it really meant as I did until
not so very long ago. How many went about
with a more or less vague notion that it was

[104]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

some kind of a club to knock out spoils politics
with, good for the purpose and necessary, but
in the last Analysis an alien kind of growth, of
aristocratic tendency, to set men apart in classes.
Instead of exactly the reverse, right down on
the hard pan of the real and only democracy:
every man on his merits ; what he is, not what he
has ; what he can do, not what his pull can do for
him. And do you know what jfirst shocked me
into finding out the truth? I have to own it,
if it does make me blush for myself. It was
when I saw a report Roosevelt had made on
political blackmail in the New York Custom-
House. That was what he called it, and it was
meaner than the meanest, he added, because
it hit hardest the employees who did n't stand
poUticaUy with the party in power and were
afraid to say so lest they lose their places.
Three per cent, of his salary, to a clerk just
able to get along, might mean " the difference
between having and not having a winter coat
for himself, a warm dress for his wife, or a
Christmas-tree for his children— a piece of
cruel injustice and iniquity." It was the
Christmas-tree that settled it with me. The
rest was bad, but I could n't allow that. Not

[105]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

with my Danish pedigree of blessed Christmas-
trees reaching 'way back into the day of frocks
and rag dolls, and my own children's tree to re-
mind me of it -never !

So I overcame my repugnance to schedules
and tables and examinations, and got behind
it all to an understanding of what it really
meant. And there I found the true view of
this champion of civil service reform as I might
have expected; fighting the spoilsman, yes I
dragging the sting from his kind of politics;
hitting him blow after blow, and with the whole
pack of politicians, I came near saying good
and bad together, in front hitting back for very
life. That was there, all of it. But this other
was there too: the man who was determined
that the fellow with no pull should have an even
chance with his rival who came backed; that
the farmer's lad and the mechanic's son who
had no one to speak for them should have the
same show in competing for the public service
as the son of wealth and social prestige. That
was really what civil service reform meant to
Roosevelt. The other was good, but this was
the kernel of it, and the kernel was sound. It
was, as he said in his first Presidential mes-

[106]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

sage, " as democratic and American as the com-
mon-school system itself."

And as for the country's end of it : " This is
my rule," said he, speaking of it at the time:
" if I am in such doubt about an applicant's
character and fitness for ofiice as would lead me
not to put my private affairs in his hands, then
I shall not put public affairs in his hands."
Simple and plain enough, is it not?

For all that they called it a " first-class
trouble job " and the wise, or those who thought
they were wise, laughed in their sleeves when
Roosevelt tackled it. For at last they had him
where he would be killed off sure, this bump-
tious young man who had got in the way of the
estabUshed order in everything. And they
wished him luck. President Harrison was in
the White House, well disposed, but not ex-
actly a sympathetic court of appeals for a
pleader like Roosevelt. In fact, he would have
removed him within a year or two of his ap-
pointment for daring to lay down the law to
a Cabinet officer, had it been expedient. It
was not expedient; by that time Theodore
Roosevelt had made his own court of appeals
-the country and pubHc opinion.

[lOT]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Contrary to the general belief, Roosevelt
was never President of the Civil Service Com-
mission, though I am strongly inclined to think
that where he sat was the head of the table.
Until he came the Board had been in hard
luck. Unpopular everywhere, it had tried the
ostrich game of hiding its head, hoping so to
escape observation and the onset of its enemies.
Things took a sudden turn with Roosevelt in
the Board. He was there to do a work he thor-
oughly believed in, that was one thing. In the
Legislature of New York he had forced
through a civil service law that was substan-
tially the same as he was here set to enforce;
hence he knew. And when a man knows a
thing and believes in it, and it is the right thing
to do anyway, truly "thrice armed is he.'*
The enemies of the cause found it out quickly.
For every time they struck, the Commission hit
back twice. Nor was the new Commissioner
very particular where he hit, so long as the
blow told. " The spectacle," wrote Edward
Cary in reviewing his work when it was done,
" of a man holding a minor and rather non-
descript office, politically unimportant, taking
a Cabinet officer by the neck and exposing him

[108]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

to the amused contempt of all honest Ameri-
cans, was what the late Horace Greeley would
have called ' mighty interesting/ It was also
very instructive."

It was that. The whole country took an in-
terest in the show. Politics woke right up and
got the ear of the White House. Mr. Roose-
velt respectfully but firmly refused to back
down. He was doing his sworn duty in en-
forcing the law. That was what he was there
for. He urged his reform measures once,
twice, three times, then went to the people,
telling them all about it. The measures went
through. Surveying the clamoring crowd that
railed at him and his work, he flung this chal-
lenge to them in an address in the Madison
Street Theater in Chicago in March, 1890, the
year after he was appointed :

" Every ward heeler who now ekes out a mis-
erable existence at the expense of ofiice-holders
and candidates is opposed to our policy, and
we are proud to acknowledge it. Every poli-
tician who sees nothing but reward of ofiice
in the success of a party or a principle is op-
posed to us, and we are not sorry for it. . . •
We propose to keep a man in ofiice as long as

[109]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

he serves the public faithfully and courteously.
• . . We propose that no incumbent shall be
dismissed from the service unless he proves un-
trustworthy or incompetent, and that no one
not specially qualified for the duties of the po-
sition shall be appointed. These two state-
ments we consider eminently practical and
American in principle."

Again, a year later, when the well-worn lies
that stiU pass current in certain newspapers
had got into the Senate, this was his answer:

" One of the chief false accusations which
are thrown at the Commission is that we test
applicants by puzzling questions. There is a
certain order of intellect— sometimes an order
of Senatorial intellect— which thinks it funny
to state that a first-class young man, thor-
oughly qualified in every respect, has been
rejected for the position of letter-carrier be-
cause he was unable to tell the distance from
Hongkong to the mouth of the Yangtsekiang,
or answer questions of similar nature.

" I now go through a rather dreary, monot-
onous illustration of how this idea becomes
current. A Senator, for instance, makes state-
ments of that character. I then write to him,

[110]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

and ask him his foundation for such an asser-
tion. Presumably, he never receives my letter,
for he never answers it I write him again,
with no better results. I then publish a contra-
diction in the newspapers. Then some enter-
prising correspondent interviews him, and he
states the question is true, but it is below his
dignity to reply to Mr. Roosevelt. As a matter
of fact, he either does know or ought to know
that no such question has ever been asked."

I wonder now, does any one of the editors
who loudly wail over the " weak surrender "
of the President, these days, to malign forces
of their imagination, really believe that of the
man who single-handed bade defiance to the
whole executive force of the Government,
when the knowledge that he was right was his
only weapon; or is it just buncombe like the
Senator's dignity?

And yet, on the other hand, when he had to
do with a different element, honest but not yet
persuaded, note the change from blow to argu-
ment. I quote from a speech he nuide to a club
of business men in the thick of the fight :

^'We hear much of the question whether
the Government should take control of the

ini]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

telegraph lines and railways of the country.
Before that question can be so much as dis-
cussedy it ought to be definitely settled that,
if the Government takes control of either tele-
graph line or railway, it must do it to manage it
purely as a business undertaking, and must
manage it with a service wholly unconnected
with politics. I should like to call the special
attention of the gentlemen in bodies interested
in increasing the sphere of State action — in-
terested in giving the State control more and
more over railways, over telegraph lines, and
over other things of the sort— to the fact that
the condition precedent upon success is to es-
tablish an absolutely non-partisan govern-
mental system. When that point is once set-
tled, we can discuss the advisability of doing
what these gentlemen wish, but not before."

Single-handed, I said. At least we heard
from him only in those days. But afterward
there came to join him on the Commission a
Kentuckian, an old Confederate veteran, a
Democrat, and withal as fine a fellow as ever
drew breath— John R. Procter— and the two
struck hands in a friendship that was for
Ufe.

[119]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

" Every day," said Mr. Procter as we lay
in the grass up in the Berkshires last sununer
and looked out over the peaceful valley, " every
day I went to the oflSce as to an entertainment.
•I knew something was sure to turn up to make
our work worth while, with him there. When
he went away, I had heart in it no longer."

The thing that turned up at regular inter-
vals was an investigation by Congress. Some-
times it was charges of one kind or another;
sometimes the weapon was ridicule; always at
the bottom the purpose was the same: to get
rid of this impudent thing that was interposing
itself between the legislator and the patronage
that had been to him the sinews of war till then,
costly sinews as he often enough had found
out, but still the only ones he knew how to use.
Mr. Roosevelt met every attack with his un-
varying policy of candor ; blow for blow where
that was needed; at other times with tact so
finished, a shrewdness of diplomacy at which
the enemy stared in helpless rage. For the
country was visibly falling in behind this
wholesome, good-humored fighter. I remember
yet with amusement the " withering charge,"
as he called it, which one of the Washington

pl8]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

papers brought against him. It published
one of his letters in facsimile and asked scorn-
fully if this man could pass an examination in
penmanship for the desk of a third-rate clerk
in his own office; yet he sat in judgment on the
handwriting of aspirants. Now, I have always
thought Mr. Roosevelt's handwriting fine. It
is n't ornate. Indeed, it might be called very
plain, extra plain, if you like. But his char-
acter is all over it : a child could read it. There
can never be any doubt as to what he means,
and that, it seems to me, is what you want
of a man's writing. Here is a line of it now
which I quoted before, still lying on my table.
Squeezed in between lines of typewriting it is
not a fair sample, but take it as it is :

2 faarea't bsarA « «ord.«>>oat It from cQr^suptrior offloert* lAo lutrH

However, Roosevelt made no bones about it.
He owned up that he could n't pass for a clerk-
ship, which was well, he said, for he would have
made but a poor clerk, while he thought he

[114]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

could make a good Commissioner. " And,"
he added, " there it is. Undtr our system of
civil service examinations I eouhi n't get in,
whereas under the old spoils system you ad-
vocate I would have had pull enough to get
the appointment to the clerkship I was n't fit
for. Don't you see? "

I presume the editor saw, for nothing more
was said about it.

In the hottest of the fighting, Mr. Roosevelt
executed a flank movement of such consum-
mate strategic skill and shrewdness that it
fairly won him the battle. He ordered exami-
nations for department positions at Washing-
ton to be held in the States, not at the Capital.
When the successful candidates came to take
the places they had won— when Congressman
Smith met a young fellow from his county
whom he knew in Washington, holding ofiice
under an administration hostile in politics as
he knew, a great Kght dawned upon him. He
felt the fetters of patronage, that had proved a
heavier and heavier burden to him, falling from
his own limbs, and from among the Congress-
men who had hotly opposed Roosevelt came
some of the warmest advocates of the new

[115]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

salvation. The policy of fairness, of perfect
openness, had won. But it was a fight, sure
enough. Mr. Roosevelt's literary labors in
the cause alone were immense. Besides the six
annual reports of the Commission during his
incumbency— the sixth to the eleventh, inclu-
sive-which were written largely by him, his
essays and papers in defense of the reform cov-
ered a range that would give a clerk, I was told
at the Congressional Library, a good week's
work if he were to make anything like a com-
plete list of them.

There never yet was a perfect law, and the
civil service law was no exception. It did not
put saints in office. It gave men a fair show,
helped kill political blackmail, and kept some
scoundrels out. Sometimes, too, it kept the
best man out; for no system of examination
can be devised to make sure he gets in. Roose-
velt was never a stickler for the letter of any-
thing. I know that perhaps better than any-
body. If I were to tell how many times we
have sat down together to devise a way of get-
ting through the formal husk, even at the risk
of bruising it some, to get at the kernel, the
spirit of justice that is the soul of every law,

[116]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

however undeveloped, I might frighten some
good people needlessly. I think likely it was
the recognition of this quality in the man, the
entire absence of pedantry in his advocacy of
the reform, that won the people over to him as
much as anything. Some good stories are told
about that, but perhaps one he told himself
of his experience as a regimental commander
in the Spanish war sheds more light on that
side of him than anything else. He had a man
in his regiment, a child of the frontier, in
whom dwelt the soul of a soldier— in war, not
in peace. By no process of reasoning or dis-
cipline could he be persuaded to obey the camp
regulations, while the regiment lay at San An-
tonio, and at last he was court-martialed, sen-
tenced to six months' imprisonment— a tech-
nical sentence, for there was no jail to put him
in. The prison was another Rough-Rider f ol-
lowing him around with a rifle to keep him in
bounds. Then came the call to Cuba, and the
Colonel planned to leave him behind as useless
baggage. When the man heard of it, his soul
was stirred to its depths. He came and pleaded
as a child to be taken along. He would always
be good ; never again could he show up in Kan-

1117]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

sas if the regixBcnt went to the war without
him. At sight of his real agony Mr. Roose-
velt's heart relented.

" All right," he said. " You deserve to be
shot as much as anybody. You shall go." And
he went, flowing over with gratitude, to prove ,
himself in the field as good a man as his prison
of yore who fought beside him.

Then came the mustering out. When the
last man was checked off and accounted for,
the War Department official, quartermaster
or general or something, fumbled with his
papers.

" Where is the prisoner? " he asked.

" The prisoner? " echoed Colonel Roosevelt;
■•what prisoners

" Why, the man who got six months at a
court-martial."

" Oh, he I He is all right. I remitted his
sentence."

The official looked the Colonel over curi-
ously.

" You remitted his sentence," he said. " Sen-
tenced by a court-martial, approved by the
commanding general, you remitted his sen-
tence. Well, you Ve got nerve."

[118]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

Perhaps the Civil Service Commissioner's
** nerve " had something to do with winning his
fight. I like to think it had. With that added,
one could almost feel like hugging civil ser-
vice reform.

One phase of this " Six Years' War " I can-
not pass by, since it may serve as a chart to
some inquiring minds much troubled to find
out where the President will stand in matters
of recent notoriety. They may give up their
still-hunt for information and assume with per-
feet confidence that he will stand where he al-
ways has stood, on the square platform of fair
dealing between man and man. Here is the
letter that made me think of it. It was written
to the Chairman of the Conmiittee on Reform
in the Civil Service of the Fifty-third Con-
gress, in the spring of 1894, the year before he
left the Commission:

Congressman Williams, of Mississippi, attacked the
Commission in substance because under the Commis-
sion white men and men of color are treated with ex-
act impartiality. As to this, I have to say that so
long as the present Commissioners continue their of-
ficial existence they will not] make, and, so far as in
their power lies, will refuse to allow others to make,
anj diflcrimination whatsoever for or against any man

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

because of his color, any more than because of his
politics or religion. We do equal and 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 Missouri as being one in which negroes are
employed. The books of the Railway Mail Service for
the division including South Carolina, Florida, Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi were shown me yesterday,
and according to these books about three-fourths of
the employees are white and one-fourth 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
hundreds of them entered the classified service, although
under a Republican administration. 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 capable white
men. I esteem this reproach a high compliment to
the Commission, for it is an admission that the Com-
mission 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.

"You cannot change him unless you con-
vince him," said Mr, Procter to me, as we got
up to go down into the valley, whence the gray
evening shadows were reaching up toward us.

[190]

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

If you think you can convince Theodore Roose-
velt that a square deal is not the right thing,
you can look for a change in him when he has
taken a stand on a moral question; else you
need n't trouble.

President Cleveland was in oflSce by that
time, and the Democratic party was in. But
Roosevelt stayed as Civil Service Commis-
sioner, and abated not one jot of his zeal. I do
not know what compact was made between the
two men, but I can guess from what I knew of
them both. An incident of the White House
shows what kind of regard grew up between
them as they came to know one another. It
was the day President McKinley was buried.
President Roosevelt had come in alone.
Among the mourners he saw Mr. Cleveland.
Now, the etiquette of the White House, which
is in its way as rigid as that of any court in
Europe, requires that the President shall be
sought out; he is not to go to any one. But
Mr. Roosevelt waved it all aside with one im-
pulsive gesture as he went straight to Mr.
Cleveland and took his hand. An official who
stood next to them, and who told me, heard
him say:

[131]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

*^ It will always be a source of pride and
pleasure to me to have served under President
Cleveland." Mr. Cleveland shook hands, mute
with emotion.

I learned afterward that among all the
countless messages of sympathy and cheer that
came to him in those hard days, the one of
them all he prized highest and that touched
him most deeply was from Grover Cleveland.

The Six Years' War was nearly over when
the summons came to him to take the helm in
the Police Department in New York City, the
then storm-center in the fight for civic regen-
eration. He and his colleague, Mr. Procter,
had their first and only falling out over his
choice to go into the new fight. They quar-
reled over it until Roosevelt put his arm over
the other's shoulder and said: " Old friend I I
have made up my mind that it is right for me
to go."

Mr. Procter shook him off almost roughly,
and got up from the table. " All right," he
said, " go I You always would have your way,
and I suppose you are right, blank it and blank
blank it!" and the grizzled old veteran went
out and wept like a child.

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

The outcome of it all? Figures convey no
idea of it. To say that he found 14,000 govern-
ment officers under the civil service rules, and
left 40,000, does not tell the story ; not even in
its own poor way, for there are 125,000 now,
and when the ransomed number 200,000 it wiD
still be Roosevelt's work. President Cleveland
put it more nearly right in his letter to Mr.
Roosevelt regretfully accepting his resigna*
tion.

" You are certainly to be congratulated," he
wrote, " upon the extent and permanency of
civil service 'reform methods which you have
so substantially aided in bringing about. The
struggle for its firm establishment and recogni-
tion is past. Its faithful application and rea-
sonable expansion remain, subjects of deep in-
terest to all who really desire the best attainable
public service."

That was what the country got out of it.
The fight was won— wait, let me put that a
little less strongly: the way to the victory is
cleared. Just now, as I was writing that sen-
tence, a man, an old friend, a teacher in Israel,
came into my office and to him I read what I
had just written. " That 's right," he said ; " I

[128]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

came in to ask you if you would n't help a
young man who wants to get into the public
employment. He is a fine fellow, has got all
the qualifications. All he needs is influence to
get him a place. Without influence you cannot
do anything."

The fight will be over the day the American
people get that notion out of their heads, not
before. They can drop it now, for it is aU that
really is left. Roosevelt won them the right to
do that. He won his father's fight that he had
made his own. I know how much that meant
to him.

The country got more out of it : it got a man
to whom great tasks and great opportunities
were to come with the years, trained in the
school of all schools to perfect skill in dealing
with men, in making out their motives and
their worth as fighting units. The devious
paths of diplomacy have no such training-
school for leadership as he found in Washing-
ton fighting for a great principle, touching el-
bows every day with men from all over the
country, with the leaders in thought and action,
in politics, in every phase of public life. He
went there, a fearless battler for the right, and

THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT

came away with all his ideals bright and unsul-
lied. It was in the Civil Service Commission's
office the cunning was fashioned which, without
giving offense, put the Kishineff petition into
the hands of the Czar and his Ministers be-
fore they had time to say they would not receive
it, and gave notice to the Muscovite world that
there was a moral sense across the sea to be
reckoned with ; of which fact it took due notice.
Still more did the country get out of that
Six Years' War: from end to end of the land
the men with ideals, young and old, the men
and women who would help their fellows, help
their cities, took heart from his example and his
victory. Perhaps that was the greatest gain,
the one that went farthest. It endures to this
day. Wherever he fights, men fall in behind
and fight on with new hope; they know they
can win if they keep it up. And they will, let
them be sure of it. All the little defeats are
just to test their grit. It is a question of grit,
that is all.

[196]

VI
IN MULBERRY STREET

IN MULBERRY STREET

A DOZEN years had wrought their
changes since Roosevelt took his leg-
^ islative committee down from Albany
to investigate the Police Department of New
York City. The only change they had brought
to Mulberry Street * was that of aggravating
a hundredfold the evils which had then at-
tracted attention. He had put an unerring
finger upon politics as the curse that was eat-
ing out the heart of the force once called the
finest in the world. The diagnosis was cor-
rect; but the prescription written out by the
spoilsmen was more politics and ever more poli-
tics; and the treatment was about as bad as
could have been devised. With the police be-
come an avowedly political body with a bi-par-

^ The Police Headquarters of the city is in Mulberry Street.

[139]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

tisdn in stead of a non-partisan Board of Com-
missioners, there grew up, primarily through
the operation, or non-operation, of the Sunday
saloon-closing law, a system of police blackmail
unheard of in the world before. It was the
disclosure of its slimy depths through the
labors of Dr. Parkhurst and of the Lexow
Committee which brought about the political
revolution out of which came reform and
Roosevelt. But in Mulberry Street they were
hailed as freaks. The " system " so far had
been invincible. It had broken many men who
had got in its way.

" It will break you," was the greeting with
which Byrnes, the Big Chief, who had ruled
Mulberry Street with a hard hand, but had
himself bowed to " the system," received Mr.
Roosevelt. "You will yield. You are but
human."

The answer of the new President of the
Board was to close the gate of the politicians
to police patronage.

" We want," he said, " the civil service law
applied to appointments here, not because it is
the ideal way, but because it is the only way
to knock the political spoilsmen out, and you

11301

IN MULBERRY STREET

have to do that to get anywhere." And the
Board made the order.

Next he demanded the resignation of the
chief, and forbade the annual parade for which
preparations were being made. " We will
parade when we need not be ashamed to show
ourselves." And then he grappled with the
saloons.

Here, before we go into that fight, let me
turn aside a moment to speak of myself; then
perhaps with good luck we shall have less of
me hereafter. Though how that can be I don't
really know; for now I had Roosevelt at last
in my own domain. For two years we were
to be together all the day, and quite often most
of the night, in the environment in which I had
spent twenty years of my life. And these two
were the happiest by far of them alL Then
was life really worth living, and I have a pretty
robust enjoyment of it at all times. Else-
where I have told how we became acquainted;
how he came to my ofiice one day when I was
out and left his card with the simple words
written in pencil upon it: "I have read your
book, and I have come to help." That was the
beginning. The book was " How the Other

[131]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Half Lives," in which I tried to draw an in-
dictment of the things that were wrong, piti-
fully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement
homes of our wage-workers. It was like a man
coming to enlist for a war because he believed
in the cause, and truly he did. Now had come
the time when he could help indeed. Decency
had moved into the City Hall, where shame-
less indifference ruled before. His first
thought was to have me help there. I preserve
two letters from him, from the time between
the election in 1894 that put Tammany out
and the New Year when Mayor Strong
and reform moved in, in which he urges this
idea.

" It is very important to the city," he writes,
" to have a business man's mayor, but it is more
important to have a workingman's mayor, and
I want Mr. Strong to be that also. ... I am
exceedingly anxious that, if it is possible, the
Mayor shall appoint you to some position
which shall make you one of his official ad-
visers. ... It is an excellent thing to have rapid
transit, but it is a good deal more important,
if you look at matters with a proper perspec-
tive, to have ample playgrounds in the poorer

[132]

IN MULBERRY STREET

quarters of the city, and to take the ehildreif
off the streets to prevent them from growing
up toughs. In the same way it is an admirable
thing to have clean streets; indeed,it is an essen-
tial thing to have them ; but it would be a better
thing to have our schools large enough to give
ample accommodation to all should-be pupils,
and to provide them with proper play-
grounds."

You see, he had not changed. His was the
same old plan, to help the man who was down ;
and he was right, too. It was and is the es-
sential thing in a country like ours : not to prop
him up forever, not to carry him; but to help
him to his feet so he can go himself. Else the
whole machine won't go at length in the groove
in which we have started it. The last letter
concludes with regret that he had not seen his
way clear to accept the street-cleaning com-
missionership that was offered him by the
Mayor, for " I should have been delighted to
smash up the corrupt contractors and put the
street-cleaning force absolutely out of the do-
main of politics." No doubt he would; but
it was well he did n't, for so Colonel Waring
came into our city's life, and he was just such

[133]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

another, and an engineer besides, who knew
how.

As to the share he wanted me to take in it,
we had it out at the time over that; and, though
we had little tugs after that, off and on, it was
settled then that I should not be called upon
to render that kind of service— to Mayor
Strong's rather bewildered relief, I fancy. I
think, to the end of his official life he did not
get quite rid of a notion that I was nursing
some sort of an unsatisfied ambition and reserv-
ing my strength for a sudden raid upon him.
I know that when I asked him to appoint an
imofficial Small Parks Committee, and to put
me on it, it took him a long time to make up his
mind that there was not a nigger in that wood-
pile somewhere. He was the only man, if I am
right in that, who ever gave me credit for po-
litical plotting. For when, afterward, as I re-
corded in " The Making of an American," I
marched the Christian Endeavorers and the
Methodist ministers to the support of Roose-
velt in the fight between him and his wicked
partners in the Police Board, that was not plot-
ting, though they called it so, but just war; a

[134]

IN MULBERRY STREET

kind of hold-up, if you like, in the plain in-
terests of the city's welfare.

But " the system " Roosevelt was called to
break up. I shall not attempt to describe it.
The world must be weary of it to the point
of disgust. We fought it then ; we fight it now.
We shall have to fight it no one can tell how
often or how long; for just as surely as we let
up for ever so little a while, and Tammany,
which is always waiting without, gets its foot
between the door and the jamb, the old black-
mail rears its head once more. It is the form
corruption naturally takes in a city with twelve
or thirteen thousand saloons, with a State law
that says they shall be closed on Sundays, and
with . deftmt thirst which puts a preJum on
violating the law by making it the most profit-
able day in the week to the saloon-keeper who
will take the chances. Those chances are the
opportunities of the politician and of the police
where the two connect. The politicians use the
law as a club to keep the saloons in line, all
except the biggest, the keepers of which sit in
the inner councils of "the Hall"; the police
use it for extorting blackmail. " The result

[135]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

was," said Roosevelt himself, when he had got
a bird's-eye view of the situation, " that the
officers of the law and the saloon-keepers be-
came inextricably tangled in a network of
crime and connivance at crime. The most pow-
erful saloon-keepers controlled the politicians
and the police, while the latter in turn terror-
ized and blackmailed all the other saloon-keep-
ers." Within the year or two that preceded
Roosevelt's coming to Mulberry Street, this
system of " blackmail had been brought to such
a state of perfection, and had become so op-
pressive to the liquor-dealers themselves, that
they conmiunicated first with Governor Hill
and then with Mr. Croker." I am quoting now
from a statement made by the editor of their
organ, the " Wine and Spirit Gazette," the
correctness of which was never questioned.
The excise law was being enforced with " gross
discrimination." " A committee of the Cen^
tral Association of Liquor Dealers took the
matter up and called upon Police Commis-
sioner Martin (Mr. Roosevelt's Tanmiany pre-
decessor in the presidency of the Board) • An
agreement was made between the leaders of
Tammany Hall and the Uquor-dealerSj accord-

[136]

IN MULBERRY STREET

ing to which the monthly blackmail paid to the
police should be discontinued in return for po-
litical support/^ The strange thing is that they
did not put it on the books at headquarters in
regular form. Probably they did not think
of it

But the agreement was kept only with those
who had " pull." It did not hurt them to see
their smaller, helpless rivals bullied and black-
mailed by the police. As for the police, they
were taking no chances. They had bought ap-
pointment, or promotion, of Tammany with
the imderstanding that they were to reimburse
themselves for the outlay. Their hunger only
grew as they fed, until they blackmailed every-
thing in sight, from the push-cart peddler in
the street, who had bought his license to sell, but
was clubbed from post to post imtil he " gave
up," to the brothel, the gambling-house, and
the policy-shop, for which they had regular
rates: so much for "initiation" everv time a
new captain came to the precinct, and so much
per month for permission to run. The total
ran up in the millions. New York was a wide-
open town. The bosses at " the Hall " fairly
rolled in wealth ; the police had lost all decency

[137]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

and sense of justice. That is, the men who ran
the force had. The honest men on the patrol
posts, the men with the night-sticks as Roose-
velt called them when he spoke of them, had
lost courage and hope.

This was the situation that confronted him in
Mulberry Street, and with characteristic di-
rectness he decided that in the saloon was the
tap-root of the mischief. The thing to do was
to enforce the Simday-dosing law. And he
did.

The storm that rose lives in my memory as
the most amazing tempest— I was going to
say in a teapot— that ever was. But it was a
capital affair to those whose graft was at stake.
The marvel was in the reach they had. It
seemed for a season as if society was struck
through and through with the rottenness of it
all. That the politicians, at first incredulous,
took the alarm was not strange. They had an
interest. But in their tow came half the com-
munity, as it seemed, counseling, praying, be-
seeching this man to cease his rash upturning
of the foundations of things, and use discre-
tion. Roosevelt replied grimly that there was
nothing about discretion in his oath of office,

[138]

IN MULBERRY STREET

and quoted to them Lincoln's words, " Let rev-
erence of law be taught in schools and colleges,
be written in primers and spelling-books, be
published from pulpits and proclaimed in leg-
islative houses, and enforced in the courts of
justice— in short, let it become the political
religion of the nation." He was doing nothing
worse than enforcing honestly a law that had
been enforced dishonestly in all the years.
Still the clamor rose. The yellow newspapers
pursued Roosevelt with malignant lies. They
shouted daily that the city was overrun with
thieves and murderers, that crime was rampant
and unavenged, because the police were worn
out in the Sunday-closing work. Every thief,
cut-throat, and blackmailer who had place and
part in the old order of things joined in the
howl. Roosevelt went deliberately on, the only
one who was calm amid all the hubbub. And
when, after many weeks of it, the smoke cleared
away ; when the saloon-keepers owned in court
that they were beaten; when the warden of
Bellevue Hospital reported that for the first
time in its existence there had not been a
" case," due to a drunken brawl, in the hospi-
tal all Monday; when the police courts gave

[139]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

their testimony, while savings-banks recorded
increased deposits and pawn-shops hard times ;
when poor mothers flocked to the institu-
tions to get their children whom they had
placed there for safe-keeping in the "wide-
open" days— then we knew what his victory
meant.

These were the things that happened. They
are the facts. Living in this cosmopolitan city,
where, year after year, the Smiday-closing law
turns up as an issue in the fight for good gov-
ernment,— an issue, so we are told, with the
very people, the quiet, peace-loving Germans,
upon whom we, from every other point of view,
would always count as allies in that struggle,
—I find myself impatiently enough joining in
the demand for freedom from the annoyance,
for a " liberal observance " of Sunday that
shall rid us of this ghost at our civic banquet.
And then I turn around and look at the facts
as they were then ; at that Sunday which Roose-
velt and I spent from morning till night in the
tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what
went on; at the happy children and contented
mothers we met whose homes, according to their
self-styled defenders, were at that verv time

[140]

IN MULBERRY STREET

being " hopelessly desolated by the enforce-
ment of a tyrannical law surviving from the
dark ages of religious bigotry " ; and I ask my-
self how much of all the clamor for Sunday
beer comes from the same pot that spewed
forth its charges against Roosevelt so venom-
ously. It may be that we shall need another
emancipation, before we get our real bearings :
the delivery of the honest Germans from their
spokesmen who would convince us that with
them every issue of family life, of good govern-
ment, of manhood and decency, is subordinate
to the one of beer, and beer only.

Blackmail was throttled for a season; but
the clamor never ceased. Roosevelt shut the
poUce-station lodging-rooms, the story of
which I told in " The Making of an Ameri-
can." Greater service was never rendered the
city by any man. For it he was lampooned and
caricatured. He was cruel!— he who spent his
waking and sleeping hours planning relief
for his brother in distress. So Uttle was he
understood that even the venerable chairman
of the Charter Revision Committee asked him
sternly if he " had no pity for the poor." I
can see him now, bending contracted brows

[141]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

upon the young man who struck right and
kf t where he saw wrong done. Roosevelt an-
swered patiently enough, with respect for the
gray hairs, that it was poor pity for the tramp
to enable him to go on tramping, which was all
the lodging-houses did; and he went right
ahead and shut them up.

We had a law forbidding the sale of Kquor
to children, which was a dead letter. I stood
in front of one East Side saloon and watched
a steady stream of little ones with mugs and
bottles going through the door, and I told
Roosevelt. He gave orders to seize the worst
offender, and had him dragged to court ; but to
do it he had to permit the use of a boy to get
evidence, a regular customer who had gone
there a hundred times for a bad purpose, and
now was sent in once for a good one. A howl of
protest arose. The magistrate discharged the
saloon-keeper and reprimanded the poUceman.
Like a pax^k of hungry wolves they snarled
at Roosevelt. He was to be legislated out of
office. He tum^ to the decent people of the
city. " We shall not have to employ such
means," he said, " once a year, but when we

need to we shaU not shrink from it. It is idle

[14a]

IN MULBERRY STREET

to ask us to employ against law-breakers only
such means as those law-breakers approve.
We are not playing ' puss in the comer ' with
the criminals. We intend to stamp out these
vermin, and we do not intend to consult the
vermin as to the methods we shall employ."
And the party managers at Albany he warned
publicly that an attack upon the Police Board,
on whatever pretext, was an attack upon its
members because they had done their duty,
and that the politicians must reckon with de-
cent sentiment, if they dared pimish them for
declining to allow the police force to be used
for political purposes, or to let law-breakers go
unpunished.

Roosevelt won. He conquered politics and
he stopped law-breaking; but the biggest vic-
tory he won was over the cynicism of a peo-
ple so steeped in it all that they did not dream
it could be done. Tammany came back, but
not to stay. And though it may come back
many times yet for our sins, it will be merely
like the thief who steals in to fill his pockets
from the till when the store-keeper is not look-
ing. That was what we got out of having
Roosevelt on the Police Board. He could not

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

set us free. We have got to do that ourselves.
But he cut our bonds and gave us arms, if we
chose to use them.

Of the night trips we took together to see
how the poKce patrolled in the early hours of
the morning, when the city sleeps and police-
men are most needed, I told in the story of my
own life, and shall not here repeat it. They
earned for him the name of Haroun-al-Roose-
velt, those trips that bore such sudden good
fruit in the discipline of the force. They were
not always undertaken solely to wake up the
police. Roosevelt wanted to know the city by
night, and the true mwardness of some of the
problems he was struggling with as Health
Commissioner ; for the President of the Police
Board was by that fact a member of the Health
Board also. One might hear of overcrowd-
ing in tenements for years and not grasp
the subject as he could by a single midnight
inspection with the sanitary poKce. He
wanted to understand it all, the smallest with
the greatest, and sometimes the information he
brought out was unique, to put it mildly. I
can never think of one of those expeditions
without a laugh. We had company that night :

[144]

IN MULBERRY STREET

Hamlin Garland and Dr. Alexander Lambert
were along. In the midnight hour we stopped
at a peanut-stand in Rivington Street for
provender, and while the Italian made change
Roosevelt pumped him on the economic prob-
lem he presented. How could he make it pay?
No one was out ; it did not seem as if his sales
could pay for even the fuel for his torch that
threw its flickering Ught upon dark pavements
and deserted streets. The peanut-man groped
vainly for a meaning in his polite speech, and
turned a bewildered look upon the doctor.

"How," said he, coming promptly to the
rescue, — " how you make him pay— cash —
pan out— monish? "

The Italian beamed with sudden under-
standing. " Nahl " he said, with a gesture elo-
quent of resentment and resignation in one:
" Wat I maka on de peanut I losa on de dam'
banan'."

Did the police hate Roosevelt for making
them do their duty? No, they loved him. The
crooks hated him; they do everywhere, and
with reason. But the honest men on the force,
who were, after all, in the great majority, even
if they had knuckled under in discouragement

[145]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

to a system that could break them, but against
which they were powerless, came quickly to
accept him as their hope of delivery. For the
first time in the history of the department every
man had a show on his merits. Amazing as
it was, " pull " was dead. Politics or religion
cut no figure. No one asked about them. But
did a policeman, pursuing a burglar through
the night, dive running into the Park Avenue
railroad tunnel, risking a horrible death to
catch his man, he was promptly promoted ; did
a bicycle policeman lie with broken and bruised
bones after a struggle with a runaway horse
that meant his life or the lives of helpless wo-
men and children if he let go, he arose from his
bed a roundsman with the medal for bravery
on his breast. Did a gray-haired veteran swim
ashore among grinding ice-floes with a drown-
ing woman, he was called to headquarters and
made a sergeant. I am speaking of cases that
actually occiu'red. The gray-haired veteran of
the Civil War had saved twenty-eight lives at
the risk of his own,— his beat lay along the river
shore,— had been twice distinguished by Con-
gress with medals for valor, bore the Kf e-sav-
ing medal, and had never a complaint against

[146]

IN MULBERRY STREET

him on the discipline-book; but about all the
recognition he had ever earned from the Police
Board was the privilege of buying a new uni-
form at his own expense when he had ruined
the old one in risking his life. Roosevelt had
not been in Mulberry Street four weeks when
the board resolved, on his motion, that clothes
ruined in risking life on duty were a badge of
honor, of which the board was proud to pay the
cost.

That the police became, from a band of
blackmailers' tools, a body of heroes in a few
brief months, only backs up my belief that the
heart of the force, with which my lines were
cast half a lifetime, was and is all right, with
the Deverys and the Murphys out of the way.
Led by a Roosevelt, it would be the most mag-
nificent body of men to be foimd anywhere.
Two years under him added quite a third to the
roll-of -honor record of forty years under Tam-
many politics. However, the enemy was quick
to exploit what there was in that. When I
looked over the roll the other day I found page
upon page inscribed with names I did not
know, behind one of a familiar sound, though I
could not quite make it out. Tammany or

[147]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Toomany— either way would mean the same
thing : it was no longer a roll of honor.

These were some of the things Roosevelt did
in Mulberry Street. He did many more, and
they were all for its good. He did them all so
simply, so frankly, that in the end he disarmed
criticism, which in the beginning took it all for
a new game, an " honesty racket," of which it
had not got the hang, and could not,— con-
founded his enemies, who grew in nimiber as
his success grew and sat up nights hatching out
plots by which to trip him. Roosevelt strode
through them aU, kicking their snares right and
left, half the time not dreaming that they were
there, and laughing contemptuously when he
saw them. I remember a mischief-maker whose
mission in life seemed to be to tell lies at head-
quarters and carry tales, setting people at odds
where he could. He was not an official, but an
outsider, an idler with nothing better to do,
but a man with a " pull " among politicians.
Roosevelt came upon some of his lies, traced
them to their source, and met the man at the
door the next time he came nosing around. I
was there and heard what passed.

" Mr. So-and-so." said the President of the

[148]

IN MULBERRY STREET

Board, " I have heard this thing, and I am
told you said it. You know, of course, that it
is a lie. I shall send at once for the man who
says he heard you tell it, so that you may meet
him; because you know if you did say it we
cannot have you around here any more." The
man got out at once and never came back while
Roosevelt was there.

It was all as simple as that, perfectly open
and aboveboard, and I think he was buncoed
less than any of his " wise " predecessors.
There was that in his trust in uncorrupted hu-
man nature that brought out a like response.
There always is, thank heaven ! You get what
you give in trust and affection. The man who
trusts no one has his faith justified; no one will
trust him, and he will find plenty to try their
wits upon him. Once in a while Roosevelt's
sympathies betrayed him, but not to his dis-
credit. They laugh yet in the section-rooms at
the police stations over the trick played upon
him by a patrolman whose many peccadilloes
had brought him at last to the " jimiping-off
place.'' This time he was to be dismissed. The
President said so; there was no mercy. But
the policeman had " piped him off." He knew

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

his soft spot. In the morning, when the Com-
missioner came fresh from his romp with his
own babies, there confronted him eleven yoimg-
sters of all ages, howling dolefully. The
doomed policeman mutely introduced them
with a sorrowful gesture,— motherless all.

Mr. Roosevelt's stem gaze softened. What,
no mother? all these children! Go, then, and
take one more chance, one last chance. And
the policeman went out with the eleven chil-
dren which were not his at all. He had bor-
rowed them, all but two, from the neighbors
in his tenement.

But there is no malice in the joking at his
expense, rather affection. It is no mean trib-
ute to human nature, even in the policeman's
uniform, that for the men who tricked Roose-
velt in the Police Board — his recreant col-
leagues — and imdid what they could of his
work, there survives in the Department the ut-
most contempt and detestation, while Roose-
velt is held in the heartiest regard that is not in
the least due to his exalted station, but to a
genuine reverence for the man's character as
Mulberry Street saw it when it was put to the
severest test.

[150]

IN MULBERRY STREET

I shall have, after all, to ask those who would
know him at this period of his life, as I
knew him, to read " The Making of an Ameri-
can," because I should never get through were
I to try to tell it all. He made, as I said, a
large part of my life in Mulberry Street, and
by far the best part. When he went, I had no
heart in it. Of the strong hand he lent in the
battle with the slirni, as a member of the Health
Board, that book will tell them. We had all
the ammunition for the fight, the law and all,
but there was no one who dared begin it till he
came. Then the batteries opened fire at once,
and it is largely due to him and his unhesitat-
ing courage that we have got as far as we have.
And ihat means something beyond the ordi-
nary, for we we,, acting Jder L untried law,
the failure of which might easily involve a man
in suits for very great damages. Indeed, Mr.
Roosevelt was sued twice by landlords whose
tenements he destroyed. One characteristic in-
cident survives in my memory from that day.
An important office was to be filled in the
Health Department, about which I knew.
There were two candidates: one the son of a
janitor, educated in the public schools, faithful

1 141 1

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

and able, but without polish or special fitness;
the other a college man, a graduate of how many
foreign schools of learning I don't know, a gen-
tleman of travel, of refinement. He was the
man for the position, which included much con-
tact with the outer world,— so I judged, and so
did others. Roosevelt had the deciding vote.
We urged our man strongly upon him. He
saw the force of our arguments, and yielded,
but slowly and most reluctantly. His out-
spoken preference was for the janitor's son,
who had fought himself up to the point where
he could compete. And he was right, after all.
The other was a failure ; he was over-educated.
I was glad, for Roosevelt's sake as well as for
my own, when in after years the janitor's son
took his place and came to his own.

One incident, which I have told before, I
cannot forbear setting down here again, for
without it even this fragmentary record would
be too incomplete. I mean his meeting with
the labor men who were having constant trou-
ble with the police over their strikes, then-
pickets, etc. They made me much too proud
of them, both he and they, for me ever to for-
get that. Roosevelt saw that the trouble was

[159]

IN MULBERRY STREET

in their not understanding one another, and he
asked the labor leaders to meet him at Claren-
don Hall to talk it over. Together we trudged
through a blinding snow-storm to the meeting.
This was at the beginning of things, when the
town had not yet got the bearings of the man.
The strike leaders thought they had to do with
an ambitious poUtician, and they tried bluster.
They would do so and so unless the police were
compliant; and they watched to get him
placed. They had not long to wait. Roose-
velt called a halt, short and sharp.

" Gentlemen! " he said, " we want to under-
stand one another. That was my object in
coming here. Remember, please, that he who
counsels violence does the cause of labor the
poorest service. Also, he loses his case. Under-
stand distinctly that order will be kept. The
police will keep it. Now, gentlemen I "

There was a moment's amazed suspense, and
then the hall rang with their cheers. They had
him placed then, for they knew a man when
they saw him. And he,— he went home proud
and happy, for his trust in his fellow-man was
justified.

He said, when it was all over, that there was

[158]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

no call at all for any genius in the work of
administering the police force, nor, indeed, for
any unusual qualities, but just common sense,
common honesty, energy, resolution, and readi-
ness to learn; which was probably so. They
are the qualities he brought to everything he
ever put his hands to. But if he learned some-
thing in that work that helped round off the
man in him,-though it was not aU sweetness or
light,— he taught us much more. His plain per-
formance of a plain duty, the doing the right
because it was the right, taught us a lesson we
stood in greater need of than of any other.
Roosevelt's campaign for the reform of the
police force became the moral issue of the day.
It swept the cobwebs out of our civic brains,
and blew the dust from our eyes, so that we saw
clearly where all had been confusion before:
saw straight, rather. We rarely realize, in these
latter days, how much of our ability to fight
for good government, and our hope of winning
the fight, is due to the campaign of honesty
waged by Theodore Roosevelt in Mulberry
Street.

[154]

VII
THE CLASH OF WAR

IT sounded like old times, to us who had
stayed behind in Mulberry Street, when,
within a few months after his departure
for Washington, the wail came from down
there that Roosevelt was playing at war with
the ships, that he was spoiling for a row, and
did not care what it cost. It seems he had
been asking a million dollars or so for target
practice, and, when he got that, demanding
more— another half million. I say it sounded
like old times, for that was the everlasting re-
frain of the grievance while he ran the police:
there was never to be any rest or peace where he
was. No, there was not. In Mulberry Street
it was his business to make war on the scoun-
drels who had wrecked the force and brought
disgrace upon our city. To Washington he

[157]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

had gone to sharpen the tools of war. War he
knew must come. They all knew it ; it was his
business to prepare for it, since the first and
hardest blows must be struck on the sea.

Here let me stop a moment to analyze his
attitude toward this war that was looming on
the horizon even before he left Mulberry
Street. It was perfectly simple, as simple as
anything he ever did or said, to any one who
had ever taken the trouble to " think him out."
I had followed him to Washington to watch
events for my paper, and there joined the " war
party," as President McKinley called Roose-
velt and Leonard Wood, poking fun at them
in his quiet way. There was not a trace of self-
seeking or of jingoism in Roosevelt's attitude,
unless you identify jingoism with the stalwart
Americanism that made him write these words
the year before:

" Every true patriot, every man of states-
manlike habit, should look forward to the time
when not a single European power shall hold a
foot of American soil." Not, he added, that it
was necessary to question the title of foreign
powers to present holdings ; but " it certainly
wiU become necessary if the timid and selfish

[158]

THE CLASH OF WAR

peace-at-any-price men have their way, and
if the United States fails to check, at the out-
set, European aggrandizement on this con-
tinent."

That was one end of it, the political one, if
you please ; the Monroe Doctrine in its briefest
and simplest form. Spain had by outrageous
mismanagement of its West Indian colonies
proved herself imfit, and had forfeited the
right to remain. The mismanagement had be-
come a scandal upon our own shores. Every
year the yellow fever that was brewed in Cuban
filth crossed over and desolated a thousand
homes in our Southern States. If proof were
wanted that it was mismanagement that did it,
events have more than supplied it since, and
justified the war of humanity.

Plain humanity was the other end of it,
and the biggest. I know, for I saw how it
worked upon his mind. I was in Washington
when a German cigar-manufacturer, whose
business took him once or twice a year to Cuba,
came to the capital seeking an interview with
Senator Lodge, his home senator, since he was
from Boston. I can see him now sitting in the
comm^ee-room and telling how on his lajst

[159]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

trip he had traveled to some inland towns where
he was in the habit of doing business, but where
now all had been laid waste ; how when he sat
down in the inn to eat such food as he could
get, a famished horde of gaunt, half -naked
women, with starving babies at barren breasts,
crept up like dogs to his chair, fighting for the
crumbs that fell from his plate. Big tears
rolled down the honest German's face as he
told of it. He could not eat, he could not
sleep until he had gone straight to Washing-
ton to tell there what he had witnessed. I can
see the black look come into Roosevelt's face
and hear him muttering under his breath, for
he, too, had little children whom he loved.
And the old anger wells up in me at the
thought of those who would have stayed our
hand. Better a thousand times war with all its
horrors than a hell like that. That was mur-
der, and of women and innocent children.
The war that avenges such infamy I hail as the
messenger of wrath of an outraged God.

The war was a moral issue with him, as in-
deed it was with all of us who understood. It
was with such facts as these— and there was
no lack of them— in mind and heart **iat he

[IdO]

THE CLASH OF WAR

responded hotly to Senator Hanna pleading
for peace for the sake of the country's com-
merce and prosperity, that much as he appre-
ciated those blessings, the honor of the coimtry
was of more account than temporary business
prosperity. It has slipped my mind what was
the particular occasion,— some club gathering,
—but I have not forgotten the profoimd im-
pression the Naval Secretary's words made as
he insisted that our country could better afford
to lose a thousand of the bankers that have
added to its wealth than one Farragut ; that it
were better for it never to have had all the rail-
road magnates that have built it up, great as
is their deserving, than to have lost Grant and
Sherman ; better that it had never known com-
mercial greatness than that it should miss from
its history one Lincoln. Unless the moral over-
balance the material, we are indeed riding for
a fall in all our pride.

So he made ready for the wrath to come.
And now his early interest in naval affairs, that
gave us his first book, bore fruit. When the
work of preparation was over, and Roosevelt
was bpund for the war to practice what he had
preached, his chief. Secretary Long, said, in

[1611

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

bidding him good-by, that he had been literally
invaluable in his place, and that the navy would
feel the stimulus of his personality for a long
time. His industry was prodigious. He
bought ships for the invasion of Cuba, and
fitted them out. He recruited crews and shot
away fortunes with the big guns— recklessly
shouted the critics. He knew better. His ex-
perience as a hunter had taught him that the
best gun in the world was wasted on a man who
did not know how to use it. The Spaniards
found that out later. Roosevelt loaded up
with ammunition and with coal. When at last
the war broke out, Dewey found everything he
needed at Hongkong where he sought it, and
was able to sail across to Manila a week before
they expected him there. And then we got the
interest on the gun-practice that had fright-
ened the economical souls at home.

In Mulberry Street it was corruption that
defied him; now it was the stubborn red tape
of a huge department that dragged and
dragged at his feet, and threatened to snare
him up at every second step he took,— the most
disheartening of human experiences. The men
he came quickly to like. " They are a fine lot

THE CLASH OF WAR

of fellows," he wrote to me, " these naval men.
You would take to them at sight." Of the
other he never spoke, but I can imagine how
it must have nagged him. To this day, when
I have anything I want to find out or do in the
Navy Department, it seems flatly impossible
to make a short cut to the thing I want. So
many bureaus, so mahy chief clerks, and so
many what-you-may-call-'ems have to pass
upon it. It is the way of the world, I suppose,
to go on magnifying and exalting the barrel
where the staves are men with their little in-
terests and conceits, until what it is made to
hold is of secondary importance or less. In the
end he burst through it as he did through the
jobs the police conspirators tried to put up on
him ; kicked it all to pieces and went on his way.
A new light shone through the dusty old
windows. For generations, since steam came
to replace sail, there had been a contention
between the line and the engineer corps, as
to rank and pay, that cut into the heart of
the navy. It was the fight of the old against
the new that goes on in all days. The old
line-ofiicer was loath to give equal place to
the engineer, who, when he was young, wm

[163]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

but an auxiliary, an experiment. The place of
honor was still to be on the deck, though
long since the place of responsibility had
moved to the engine-room. The engineer in-
sisted upon recognition; met the other upon
the floor of Congress and checkmated him in
his schemes of legislation. The quarrel was
bitter, irreconcilable ; on every ship there were
hostile camps. Neither could make headway
for the other. Roosevelt, as chairman of a
board to reconcile the differences that were
older than the navy itself as it is to-day,
steered it successfully between the two fatal
reefs and made peace. Under his " personnel
bill " each side obtained its rights, and, with
the removal of the pretext for future quarrels,
the navy was greatly strengthened. Cadets
now receive the same training; the American
naval officer in the next war will be equally
capable of conmianding on deck and of mend-
ing a broken engine.

When it came to picking out the man who
was to conmiand in the East, where the blow
must be struck, Roosevelt picked Dewey. They
laughed at him. Dewey was a " dude," they
said. It seems the red tape had taken notice of

[164]

THE CLASH OF WAR

the fact that the Commodore was always trim
and neat, and, judging him by its own stan-
dard, thought that was all. Roosevelt told
them no, he would fight. And he might wear
whatever kind of collar he chose, so long as he
did that. I remember, when Dewey was gone
with his ships, the exultation with which Roose-
velt spoke of the choice. We were walking
down Connecticut Avenue, with his bicycle be-
tween us, discussing Dewey. Leonard Wood
came out of a side street and joined us. His
mind was on Cuba. Roosevelt, with prophetic
eye, beheld Manila and the well-stocked am-
mimition-bins in Chinese waters.

" Dewey," he said, " is the man for the place.
He has a lion heart."

I guess none of us feels like disputing his
judgment at this day, any more than we do
the wisdom of the gun-practice.

When Dewey was in the East, it was Roose-
velt's influence in the naval board that kept
his fleet intact. The Olympia had been ordered
home. Roosevelt secured the repeal of the
order. " Keep the Olympia/^ he cabled him,
and " keep f uU of coal." The resistless energy
of the man carried all before it till the day

[165]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

when orders were cabled under the Pacific to
the man with the lion heart to go in and
smash the enemy. " Capture or destroy! " We
know the rest.

Roosevelt's work was done. " There is no-
thing more for me to do here," he said. " I Ve
got to get into the fight myself."

They told him to stay, he was needed where
he was. But he was right : his work was done.
It was to prepare for war. With the fighting
of the ships he had, could have, nothing to do.
Merely to sit in an office and hold down a job,
a title, or a salary, was not his way. He did
not go lightly. His wife was lying sick, with a
little baby; his other children needed him. I
never had the good fortune to know a man who
loves his children more devotedly and more
sensibly than he. There was enough to keep
him at home ; there were plenty to plead with
him. I did myself, for I hated to see him go.
His answer was as if his father might have
spoken: " I have done aU I could to bring on
the war, because it is a just war, and the sooner
we meet it the better. Now that it has come,
I have no business to ask others to do the fight-
ing and stay at home myself."

[166]

THE CLASH OF WAR

It was right, and he went. I have not for-
gotten that gray afternoon in early May when
I went with him across the river to the train
that was to carry him and his horse South.
He had made his will; the leave-taking was
over and had left its mark. There was in him
no trace of the " spoiling for a fight " that for
the twentieth time was cast up against him.
He looked soberly, courageously ahead to a
new and untried experience, hopeful of the
glad day that should see our arms victorious
and the bloody usurper driven from Cuba.
" I won't be long." He waved his hand and
was gone; and to me the leaden sky seemed
drearier, the day more desolate than before.

Two weary months dragged their slow
length along. There had been fighting in
Cuba. Every morning my wife and I plotted
each to waylay the newsboy to get the paper
first and make sure he was safe before the
other should see it. And then one bright and
blessed July morning, when the land was ring-
ing with the birthday salute of the nation, she
came with shining eyes, waving the paper, in
which we read together of the charge on San
Juan Hill; how the Rough-Riders charged,

(M71

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

with him at their head, through a haU of Span-
ish bullets, the men dropping by twos and
threes as they ran.

"When they came^ to the open, smooth
hillside there was no protection. Bullets were
raining down at them, and shot and shells from
the batteries were sweeping everything. There
was a moment's hesitation, and then came the
order : ' Forward ! charge ! ' Lieutenant-Colo-
nel Roosevelt led, waving his sword. Out
into the open the men went, and up the hill.
Death to every man seemed certain. The
crackle of the Mauser rifles was continuous.
Out of the brush came the riders. Up, up they
went, with the colored troops alongside of
them, not a man flinching, and forming as
they ran. Roosevelt was a hundred feet in
the lead. Up, up they went in the face of
death, men dropping from the ranks at
every step. The Rough-Riders acted like
veterans. It was an inspiring sight and an
awful one.

" Astounded by the madness of the rush, the
Spaniards exposed themselves. This was a
fatal mistake. The Tenth Cavalry (the col-

1 This was the account wc read in the New York " Sun.**

[168]

THE CLASH OF WAR

ored troops) picked them off like ducks and
rushed on, up and up.

" The more Spaniards were killed, the more
seemed to take their places. The rain of shells
and bullets doubled. Men dropped faster and
faster, but others took their places. Roosevelt
sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and
shouting for his men to follow him. Finally,
his horse was shot from under him, but he
landed on his feet and continued calhng for his
men to advance. He charged up the hill afoot.

" It seemed an age to the men who were
watching, and to the Rough-Riders the hill
must have seemed miles high. But they were
undaunted. They went on, firing as fast as
their guns would work.

" At last the top of the hill was reached. The
Spaniards in the trenches could still have anni-
hilated the Americans, but the Yankees' daring
dazed them. They wavered for an instant, and
then turned and ran.

" The position was won and the block-house
captured. ... In the rush more than half of
the Rough-Riders were wounded."

In how many American homes was that
splendid story read that morning with a thrill

[169]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

never quite to be got overl We read it toge-
ther, she and I, excited, breathless; and then
we laid down the paper and gave two such
rousing cheers as had n't been heard in Rich-
mond Hill that Fourth of July morning, one
for the flag and one for Theodore Roosevelt.
What was breakfast? The war was won and
overl

We live in a queer world. One man sees the
glorious pamting, priceless for all time; the
other but the fly-speck on the frame. A year
or two after, some one, I think he was an editor,
wrote to ask me if the dreadful thing was true
that in the rush up that hill Roosevelt said,
"HeUl" I don't know what I replied-I
want to forget it. I know I said it, anyhow.
But, great Scott! think of it.

Of that war and of his regunent, from the
day it was evolved, uniformed, armed, and
equipped, through " ceaseless worrying of ex-
cellent bureaucrats who had no idea how to
do things quickly or how to meet an emer-
gency," ^ all through the headlong race with a
worse enemy than the one in front,— the ma-

^ I am quoting " The Rough-Riders. " It seems, then, the
navy has no patent on red tape. I thought as much.

[170]

THE CLASH OF WAR

laria, upon which the Spaniards counted openly
as their grewsome ally,— down to the day when,
the army's work done, Colonel Roosevelt
" wrecked his career " finally and for good, by
demanding its recall home, he himself has told
the story in " The Rough-Riders." Every
school-boy in the land knows it. The Rough-
Riders came out of the heroic past of our coun-
try's history, held the forefront of the stage
for three brief months, and melted back into
college, and camp, and mine with never a rip-
ple. But they left behind them a mark which
this generation will not see effaced. To those
who think it a sudden ambitious thought, a
" streak of luck," I conmiend this reference to
the " rifle-bearing horsemen " on page 249
of the second volume of his " Winning of the
West," written quite ten years before : " They
were brave and hardy, able to tread their way
unerringly through the forests, and fond of
surprises; and though they always fought on
foot, they moved on horseback, and therefore
with great celerity. Their operations should
be carefully studied by all who wish to learn the
possibilities of mounted riflemen." Before he
or any one else dreamed of the war, he had

[171]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

studied and thought it all out, and when the
chance came he was ready for it and took it.
That is all there ever was in " Roosevelt's
luck " ; and that is about all there is in this luck
business, anyhow, as I have said before.

The chance came to one man beside him who
was ready, and the world is the better for it.
I saw the growing friendship between the two
that year in Washington, and was glad; for
Leonard Wood is another man to tie to, as one
soon finds out who knows him. They met there
for the first time, but in one brief year they
grew to be such friends that when the command
of the regiment was offered Roosevelt, he asked
for second place under Wood; for Wood had
seen service in the field, as Roosevelt had not.
He had earned the medal of honor for im-
daunted courage and great ability in the ar-
duous campaigns against the Apaches. Both
earned their promotion in battle afterward.
I liked to see them together because they are
men of the same strong type. When Roosevelt
writes of his friend that, " like so many of the
gallant fighters with whom it was later my
good fortune to serve, he combined in a very
high degree the qualities of entire manliness

[172]

THE CLASH OF WAR

with entire uprightness and cleanliness of char-
acter ; 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 draws as good a picture of himself
as his best friend could have done. While the
Roosevelts and the Woods come when they are
needed, as they always have come, our coun-
try is safe.

Together they sailed away in the spring-
time, southward through the tropic seas, to-
ward the unknown. " We knew not whither
we were bound, nor what we were to do; but
we believed that the nearing future held for us
many chances of death and hardship, of honor
and renown. If we failed, we would share
the fate of all who fail ; but we were sure that
we would win, that we should score the first
great triumph in a mighty world-movement."
The autumn days were shortening when I
stood at Montauk Point scanning the sea for
the vessels that should bring them back.
Within the year one was to sit at Albany, the
Governor of his own, the Empire State; the

[173]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

other in the palace of the conquered tyrant
on the rescued isle. For Roosevelt committees
were waiting, honors and high office. The
country rang with his name. But when he
stepped ashore his concern was for his own at
home,— for his wife; and when I told him that
I had brought her down to see his triumph,
he thanked me with a handshake that told me
how glad he was.

I see him now riding away over the hill, in his
Rough-Rider uniform, to the hospital where his
men lay burning up with the fever. Wherever
he came, confusion, incapacity, gave way to
order and efficiency. Things came round at
once. So did his men. The sight of his face
was enough to make them rally for another
fight with the enemy. They had seen him
walking calmly on top of the earth wall when,
in the smaU hours of the morning, drenched by
pouring rains, chilled to the bone, and starving
in the trenches, they were roused by the alarm
that the Spaniards were coming, and the sight
made them heroes. They had heard his cheer-
ing voice when the surgeons were dressing the
wounded by candle-light, after the fight at Las
Guasimas : '' Boys, if there is a man at home

THE CLASH OF WAR

who would n*t be proud to change places with
you he is not worth his salt, and he is not a
true American " ; and the ring of it was with
them yet. So they took heart of hope and got
well, and went back to those who loved them,
even as did he for a httle while. Then we
needed him again, and he came when he was
called.

1 17*1

VIII
ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

THERE was a thunder of hoofs on the
road that descends the slope from
Camp Wikoff to the Lif e-Saving Sta-
tion, and a squad of horsemen swarmed over
the hill. A stocky, strongly built man on a big
horse was in the lead. In his worn uniform
and gray army hat he suggested irresistibly, as
he swept by, Sheridan on his wild ride to
" Winchester, twenty miles away." They were
gone like the wind, leaping the muddy ford at
the foot of the hill and galloping madly across
the sands. My horse, that had been jogging
along sedately enough till then, caught the
spirit of the rush and made after them, hard as
he could go. On the beach we caught up with
them, riding in and out of the surf with shouts
of delight, like so many centaurs at play. The

[179]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

salt spray dashed over them in showers of shin-
ing ifehiK ImI they yelled back defiance at the
ocean. Their leader watched them from his
horse, and laughed loudly at their sport.

They were Roosevelt and his men. " Roose-
velt's Rough-Riders " belong to history now,
with the war in which they held such a pic-
turesque place. I had seen them go, full of
youthful spirits, eager for the fray, and it was
my privilege to hear the last speech their Colo-
nel made to them on the night when the news
of the disbandment came. He had ridden up
from the Commanding General's quarters with
the message, and, calling his men about him in
the broad street facing the ofiicers' tents, told
them of the coming parting.

" I know what you were in the field," he
said. " You were brave and strong. I ask
now of you that every man shall go back and
serve his country as well in peace as he did in
war. I can trust you to do it."

They tried to cheer, some of them, but they
had no heart in it. The men went quietly to
their tents with sober faces, and I saw in them
that which warranted the trust their Colonel
put in them.

[180]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

The Rough-Riders were not, as many have
supposed, a product of the war with Spain.
On the contrary, the mounted riflemen were
the historic arm of the United States from the
earliest days of the Nation. In the War of
the Revolution they came out of the West and
killed or captured the whole of the British
forces at King's Mountain. A descendant of
two of the three colonels who commanded them
then fought with Roosevelt at Las Guasimas
and on the San Juan hill. They furnished the
backbone of Andrew Jackson's forces in the
War of 1812. As the Texas Rangers they be-
came famous in the troubles with Mexico.
They conquered the French towns on the Illi-
nois, and won the West from the Indians in a
hundred bloody fights. In the Civil War they
lost, to a great extent, their identity, but not
their place in the van and the thick of the fight.
Theodore Roosevelt as a historian knew their
record and value ; as a hunter and a plainsman
he knew where to find the material with which
to fill up the long-broken ranks. It came at his
summons from the plains and the cattle-ranges
of the great West, from the mines of the Rocky
Mountains, from the counting-rooms and col-

[ 181 ]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

leges of the East, and from the hunting-trail of
the wildemesa, wherever the spirit of adventure
had sent young men out with the rifle to hunt
big game or to engage in the outdoor sports
that train mind and body to endure uncomplain-
mgly the hardships of campaigning. The
Rough-Riders were the most composite lot that
ever gathered under a regimental standard, but
they were at the same time singularly typical of
the spirit that conquered a continent in three
generations, eminently American. Probably
such another will never be got together again;
in no other country on earth could it have been
mustered to-day. The cowboy, the Indian
trailer, the Indian himself, the packer, and the
hunter who had sought and killed the grizzly in
single combat in his mountain fastness, touched
elbows with the New York policeman who, for
love of adventure, had followed his once chief
to the war, with the college athlete, the football-
player and the oarsman, the dare-devil moun-
taineer of Georgia, fresh from hunting moon-
shiners as a revenue officer, and with the society
man, the child of luxury and wealth from the
East, bent upon proving that a life of ease had
dulled neither his manhood nor his sense of our

[189]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

common citizenship. They did it in a way that
was a revelation to some who mider other cir-
cmnstances and in a different environment
would have called them " dudes." In the fight
they were the coolest and in the camp fre-
quently the handiest of the lot. One whose
name is synonymous with exclusiveness in New
York's " smart set," and who for bravery in
the face of the enemy rose to conmiand of his
troop, achieved among his brother officers the
reputation of being handiest at " washing up "
after " grub," when they had any. And it
happened more than once on the long marches
through the Cuban jungle, when " Roosevelt's
Rough-Riders," compelled to campaign on
foot, in humorous desperation had taken the
more fitting title of " Wood's Weary Walk-
ers" to themselves, that some Eastern-bred man
with normal manners of languid elegance was
able to relieve his hardier Western neighbor
who had never walked five miles on foot in his
life. When at the end of the march the college
chap came trudging up cheerfully carrying
two packs beside his own and ready for the
chores of camp that his tired conu'ade might
rest, a gap was closed then and there in our na-

[188]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

tional Uf e that had yawned wider than it had
any right to. More than aU political argu-
ments, more than all the preachments of well-
meaning sociologists, did this brief smnmer's
campaign contribute to fill out the gap between
East and West, between North and South, be-
tween " the classes and the masses," unless I
greatly mistake. It was not in the contract,
but it came out so when once they got a fair
look at each other and saw that in truth they
were brothers.

There were clergymen in the ranks. I am
not referring now to Chaplain Brown, whose
stout defense of his Western men,— he was
from Prescott, Arizona,— when he thought I
was attacking them, I remember with mingled
amusement and pleasure. He was an Episco-
palian of no special affiliation with high-church
or low-church tendencies within his fold.
" You see, I don't go much on the fringes of
religion," he said simply. He was after the
genuine article, and he f oimd it in his cowboy
friends— real reverence, and such singing! He
was holding forth to me upon this theme as we
lay in the long grass, when I ventured to re-
mark that I had heard that his people were

[184]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

given to violence, shooting-matches, and such.
He denied it hotly. They were the quietest,
nicest f eUows ; only once in a while, when a fel-
low was caught cheating at cards, then—

" But," argued the Chaplain, rising on his
elbow and earnestly pointing a spear of grass
he had been chewing at me, " when a man
cheats at cards, he ought to be shot, ought n't
he? Well, then, that is all."

I confess to a certain enjoyment in the
thought of Chaplain Brown's theology on a
background of the Rough-Riders' singing at
" meetin' " in the woods. The combination
suggests that first funeral on the ridge at
Guantanamo, with the marines growling out
the responses to the Chaplain's prayer between
pot-shots at the enemy, flat on their stomachs
imder the sudden attack ; and, indeed. Colonel
Roosevelt himself gave testimony that he had
seen Chaplain Brown bring in wounded men
from the field under circtimstances that were
distinctly stirring. But for all that, the Chap-
lain is a digression. The clergymen I was
thinking of wore no shoulder-straps. They
carried guns. One of them came up to bid
his Colonel good-by when I was sitting with

[186]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

him. He was tall and straight, and of few
words.

" That man," said Mr. Roosevelt, as he
went across the field back to the camp, " repre-
sents probably the very best type of om* people.
He is a Methodist preacher, of the old circuit-
rider's stock, strong, fearless, self-reliant. His
people had been in all our wars before him, and
he came as a matter of course. You should
have seen him one morning sitting in the bomb-
proof with his head just below the traverse,
where the shrapnel kept cracking over his hat.
They could n't touch him, as he knew, and he
sat there as imconcemed as if there were no
such things as guns and battles, breaking the
beans for his coffee with the butt of his re-
volver. He was n't going into the fight with-
out his coffee. He was a game preacher.'*

An hour later, when, after a visit to the two
mascots of the regiment,— Josie, the mountain
lion, and the eagle. Jack, — I was chatting with
Lieutenant Ferguson, a young Englishman
who won signal distinction in battle, the flap of
the tent was raised and a tall trooper darkened
the entrance. He came to make a report, and
stood silently at attention while the ojffilcer ex-

[186]

ROOSEVELT AND 'HIS MEN

amined it. His questions he answered in mono-
syllables. " That was Pollock," said his supe-
rior when he was gone. " He is a full-blooded
Pawnee. He has never anything to say, but
you should see him in a fight. I shall never for-
get the ungodly war-whoop he let out when we
went up the San Juan hill. I mistrust that it
scared the Spaniards almost as much as our
charge did. I know that it almost took my
breath away."

Such was the material of which the regiment
was made. Ninety-five per cent, had herded
cattle on horseback, on the great plains, at some
time or other. A majority had been under fire.
The rifle was their natural weapon. They were
not to be stampeded, and they knew how read-
ily to find the range of the enemy's sharp-
shooters, a fact that rendered them far more
effective in a fight than the average volunteer,
who had hardly a speaking acquaintance with
his gun. Ninety per cent, of the Rough-Riders
were Americans bom and bred. Perhaps a
hundred were of foreign birth-German, Nor-
wegian, English. There were Catholics and
Protestants, and they joined with equal fervor
in the singing that edified Chaplain Brown.

[1871

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

They stood all on the same footing. The old
American plan ruled : every one on his merits.
In the last hatch recommended for promotion
by Colonel Roosevelt for gallantry in the field
was a Jew. The result of it all was a corps
that excited the admiration of the regulars who
fought side by side with them.

Of their gameness innumerable stories have
been told. The Indian Issbell was shot seven
times in the fight at Las Guasimas, but stayed
in the firing-Hne to the end. Private Hefi*ner,
shot through the body, demanded to be
propped up against a tree and given his rifle
and canteen. So fitted out, he fought on until
his comrades charged forward and he could no
longer shoot without danger of hitting them.
They found him sitting there dead after the
fight. The cow-puncher Rowland from Santa
Fe was shot through the side and ordered to
the rear by Colonel Roosevelt, who saw the
blood dripping from the woimd. He went
obediently until he was out of sight, and then
sneaked back into the ranks. After it was over
they seized him and took him to the hospital,
where the surgeons told him he would have to
be shipped north. That night he escaped and

[188]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

crawled back to the front as best he could. He
fought beside his Colonel all through the San-
tiago fight.

It was predicted that, with their antecedents,
the Rough-Riders could not be disciplined so
as to become effective in the field; but exactly
the opposite happened. They showed the
world the new spectacle of a body of men who
could think and yet be soldiers; who obeyed,
not because they had to, but because it was
right they should, and they liked to. They
might not have been perfect in what the Chap-
lain would have called the fringes of soldiering.
The pipe-clay and the regulations, and all that,
they knew nothing about. But they kept order
in their camp, and they knew the command
Forward, when it was given. In their brief
campaign they had no opportunity to learn
any other. Their soldiers' manual was brief.
It forbade grumbling, and there was none.
Three days they camped out in the sim and
rain on the San Juan hills, fighting by day
and digging burrows by night, with little to
eat and only the ditches to sleep in, but not a
complaint was heard. When the enemy at-
tacked, suddenly and in full force, at three

[189]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

o'clock in the morning, they were there to meet
him, and. hungry and shivering, drenched
through and through by the rains and by the
heavy dews, they drove him back.

" That is the test," said their commander,
speaking of it afterward : " to wake up men at
three o'clock in the morning who have had no-
thing to eat, perhaps for days, and nothing to
cover them; to wake them up suddenly to a big
fight, and have them all nm the right way ; that
is the test. There was n't a man who went to
the rear."

The Rough-Riders were natural fighters,
from the Colonel down. The science of war
as they took it from him and practised it
sunmied itself up in the simple formula to
" strike hard, strike quick, and when in doubt
go forward." It was so Napoleon won his vic-
tories. But the Spaniards complained bitterly.
The Americans did not fight according to the
rules of war, they wailed. " They go forward
when fired upon instead of falling back." Ac-
cordingly they, the Spaniards, were compelled
to run, which they did, denouncing the irregu-
larity of the preceding. It was irregular. It
was one of the several things in this extraordi-

[190]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

nary war that did violence to all the traditions,
and tangled up military precedent and red tape
in the field in a hopeless snarL However,
enough remained over in camp, after the fight-
ing was over, to more than make up for it.

The regiment was before the people almost
continuously for three months. Raised, or-
ganized, equipped, and carried to Cuba within
a month by the same splendid energy and ex-
ecutive force that fitted out the navy for its
victorious fights in the East and West, it took
the field at once and kept it till the army rested
upon its arms under the walls of Santiago. All
the way up it had been the vanguard. The
dispatches from the front dealt daily with
the Rough-Riders* exploits. When, at Las
Guasimas with General Young's corps, they
drove before them four times their number
of Spaniards, frightened at their impetuous
rush in the face of a withering fire from the
shelter of an impenetrable jungle, the croak-
ers said that they were ambushed, and, as in the
old days when Roosevelt led the police phalanx,
the cry was raised at home that he should be
put on trial, court-martialed. The fact was

that the Rough-Riders were fighting a most

fm]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

carefully planned battle. It was the way they
won that frightened the cravens at home, as it
did the Spaniards. The victory cost some pre-
cious lives, but it is at such cost that victories
are won, and the moral effect of the attack was
very great. Beyond a doubt it saved worse
bloodshed later on. It has been Theodore
Roosevelt's lot often to be charged with rash-
ness, with what his critics in the rear are pleased
to call his " lack of tact." It is the tribute paid
by timidity to unquestioning courage. The
campaign having been carefully planned, and
General Wheeler having issued his orders to
attack the enemy, the thing left to do was to
charge. And they charged. The number of
the enemy had nothing to do with it, nor the
fact that he was intrenched, invisible, whereas
they were exposed, in full sight. He was to be
driven out; and he was driven out. That was
war on the American plan, as imderstood by the
Rough-Riders.

Ten days of marching and fighting in the
bush culminated in the storming of the San
Juan hills, with Colonel Roosevelt in full com-
mand. Colonel Wood having been deservedly
promoted after Las Guasimas. The story of

[193]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

the famous charge up the barren slope, of the
splendid bravery of the colored cavalry regi-
ment that had been lying out with the Rough-
Riders in the trenches and now came to the sup-
port of their chums with a rush, and of the vic-
tory wrested from the Spaniards when all de-
pended upon the success of the attack, will be
told in years to come at every American fire-
side. How much of the quick success of the
campaign was really due to the Roosevelt
Rough-Riders, what fates himg in the balance
when their impetuous rush saved the day, when
retreat had been counseled and in effect de-
cided, we imderstood better as we learned the
real state of the invading army on the night of
June 80. Let it be enough to say that it did
save the day. Others fought as valiantly, but
the honor of breaking the Spanish lines belongs
to the Rough-Riders, as the honor and credit
of standing firmly for an immediate advance
upon the enemy's works belongs to their Colo-
nel and his bold comrades in the coimcil of the
chiefs in that fateful night.

It was one of the unexpected things in that
campaign, that out of it should come the ap-
preciation of the colored soldier as man and

[193]

TttiEODORE ROOSEVELT

brother by those even who so lately fought to
keep him a chattel. It fell to the lot of General
" Joe " Wheeler, the old Confederate warrior,
to command the two regiments of colored
troops, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and no
one will bear readier testimony than he to the
splendid record they made. Of their patience
under the manifold hardships of roughing it in
the tropics, their helpfulness in the camp and
their prowess in battle, their imcomplaining
suffering when lying woimded and helpless,
stories enough are told to win for them fairly
the real brotherhood with their white-skinned
fellows which they crave. The most touching
of the many I heard was that of a negro trooper
who, struck by a bullet that had cut an artery
in his neck, was lying helpless, in danger of
bleeding to death, when a Rough-Rider came
to his assistance. There was only one thing to
be done: to stop the bleeding till a surgeon
came. A toiu'niquet could not be applied
where the wound was. The Rough-Rider put
his thtmab on the artery and held it there while
he waited. The fighting drifted away over the
hill. Jle followed his comrades with longing
eyes till the last was lost to sight. His place

[194]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

was there; but if he abandoned the wounded
cavalrjrman, it was to let him die. He dropped
his gun and stayed. Not until the battle was
won did the surgeon come that way; but the
trooper's life was saved. He told of it in the
hospital with tears in his voice: " He done that
to me, he did ; stayed by me an hour and a half,
and me only a nigger 1 "

The colored soldiers had taken a great liking
to their gallant side-partners. They believed
them invincible, and in the belief became nearly
so themselves. The Rough-Riders became
their mascot. They would have gone through
fire for them, and in sober fact they did. So
fighting and burrowing together, holding every
foot they gained from the enemy, they came at
last to the gates of the beleaguered city, and
there were stayed by the white flag of truce.
Two weeks they lay in the trenches ready to
attack when the word was given, and then came
the surrender. Up to that point the Rough-
Riders had borne up splendidly. Poor rations
had no terrors for them. If " cold hog '' was
the sole item on the bill of fare, it went
down with a toast to better days. Starva-
tion they bore without grumbling while fight-

[ 195 ]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ing for their lives and their country. The
sleepless night, the rain-storms in the trenches,
the creeping things that disgust Northern men,
the tarantulas and the horrible crabs, they took
as they came. It was not imtil they were fairly
back home, in Camp Wikoff , that they rebelled
against tainted food sent up from the ship and
demanded something decent to eat. But be-
fore that they had their dark day, when the
fever came and laid low those whom the en-
emy's bullets had spared.

It was then, when the fighting was over but
a worse enemy threatened than the one they
had beaten in his breastworks,— an allv on
whose aid the Spaniards had openly coimted,
and, but for the way in which they were rushed
from the first, would not have counted in vain,
—that the Rough-Riders were able to render
their greatest service to their country, through
their gallant chief. Until Colonel Roosevelt's
round-robin, signed by all the general ofiicers
of the army in Cuba, startled the American
people and caused measures of instant rehef to
be set on foot, the fearful truth that the army
was perishing from privation and fever was not
known. The cry it sent up was : " Take us

[196]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

home! We will fight for the flag to the last
man, if need be. But now our fighting is done,
we will not be left here to die." It was sig-
nificant that the duty of making the imwelcome
disclosure fell to the Colonel of the Rough-
Riders. Of all the ofiicers who signed it he
was probably the youngest; but from no one
could the warning have come with greater
force.

The Colonel of the Rough-Riders at the
head of his men on San Juan hiU, much as I
like the picture, is not half so heroic a figure
to me as Roosevelt in this hoiu* of danger and
doubt, shouldering the blame for the step he
knew to be right. Perhaps it is because I know
him better and love him so. Here was this man
who had left an oflSce of dignity and great im-
portance in the Administration to go to the
war he had championed as just and right; who
had left a family of little children to expose his
.life daily and hourly in the very forefront of
battle; whose every friend in political life had
blamed him hotly, warning him that he was
wrecking a promising career in a quixotic en-
terprise—apparently justifying their predic-
tions at a critical moment by deliberately shoul-

[197]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

dering the odium of practically censuring the
Administration of which he was so recently
a member. For that was what his letter
amounted to; he knew it and they knew it.
Verily, it is not strange that some who would
have shrunk from the duty should call him
" rash " for doing what he did. They did not
know the man. It was enough for him that it
was duty, that it was right. He never had other
standard than that.

So the army came home, his Rough-Riders
with it, ragged, sore, famished, enfeebled, with
yawning gaps in its ranks, but saved; they to
tell of his courage and imwearying patience;
how in the fight he was always where the bullets
flew thickest, until he seemed to them to have
a charmed life ; how, when it was over, as they
lay out in the jungle and in the trenches at
night, they found him always there, never tir-
ing of looking after his men, of seeing that the
wounded were cared for and the well were fed ;
ready to follow him through thick and thin
wherever he led, but unwilling to loaf in camp
or to do pohce duty when the coimtry was no
longer in need of them to fight ; he to be hailed

[198]

ROOSEVELT AND HIS MEN

by his grateful fellow-citizens with the call to
" step up higher/' Once more the right had
prevailed, and the counsel of expediency been
shamed* Roosevelt's Rough-Riders had writ-
ten their name in history.

" They were the finest fellows, and they were
dead game. It was the privilege of a lifetime
to have commanded such a regiment. It was a
hard campaign, but they were beautiful days—
and we won."

We were lying in the grass at his tent, under
the starry August sky. Taps had been soimded
long since. The Colonel's eye wandered
thoughtfully down the long line of white tents
in which the lights were dying out one by one.
From a darker line in front, where a thousand
horses were tethered, quietly mimching their
supper, came an occasional low whinnying.
That and the washing of the surf on the distant
beach were the only sounds that broke the still-
ness of the night. A bright meteor shot
athwart the sky, leaving a shining trail, and fell
far out beyond the lighthouse. We watched it
in silence. I know what my thoughts were.
He knew his own.

[199]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" Oh, well 1 " he said, with a half -sigh, and
arose, " so all things pass away. But they were
beautiful days."

I knocked the ashes from my cigar, and we
went in.

[000]

RULING BY
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

RULING BY THE TEN COM-
MANDMENTS

THE campaign was over and ended.
The morning would break on Election
Day. We were speeding homeward in
the midnight hour on a special from the west-
em end of the State, where the day had been
spent in speech-making, a hurricane wind-up
of a canvass that had taken the breath of
the old-timers away. Was it the victory in the
air, was it Sherman Bell, the rough-rider de-
puty sheriff from Cripple Creek, or what was
it that had turned us all, young and old, into so
many romping boys as the day drew toward
its close? I can still see the venerable Ex-Gov-
ernor and Minister to Spain Stewart L. Wood-
ford, myself, and a third scapegrace, whose
name I have forgotten, going through the

[90S]

THEODOilE ROOSEVELT

streets of Dunkirk, arm in arm, breasting the
crowds and yelling, " Yi! yil " like a bunch of
college boys on a lark, and again and again fall-
ing into the line that passed Mr. Roosevelt in
the hotel lobby to shake hands, until he peered
into our averted faces and drove us out with
laughter. And I can see him holding his sides,
while the audience in the Opera House yelled
its approval of Sherman Bell's offer to Dick
Croker, who had called Roosevelt a " wild
man": "Who is this Dick Croker? I don't
know him. He don't come from my State.
Let him take thirty of his best men, I don't
care how well they 're heeled, and I will take
my gang and we '11 see who 's boss. I '11
shoot him so full of holes he won't know him-
self from a honeycomb." And then the wild
enthusiasm in the square, where no one could
hear a word of what was said for the cheering.
But now it was all over, and we were on the
way home to add our own votes to the majority
that would carry our Rough-Rider to Albany.
We were discussing its probable size over our
belated supper,— each according to his expe-
rience or enthusiasm. I remember his friendly
nod and smile my way when I demanded a

[904]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

hundred thousand at least. He inclined to ten
or fifteen thousand, as indeed proved quite
near the mark; when there was a rap on the
door, and in came the engineer, wiping his oily-
hands in his blouse, to shake hands and wish
him luck. Roosevelt got up from the table,
and I saw him redden with pleasure as he
shook the honest hand and asked his name.

"Dewey,"' said the engineer, and such a
shout went up! It was an omen of victory,
surely.

" Dewey," said Roosevelt, " I would rather
have you come here as you do to shake hands
than have ten committees of distinguished citi-
zens bring pledges of support " ; and I knew he
would. It is no empty form with him when
he shakes hands with the engineer and the fire-
man of his train after a journey. He was ever
genuinely fond of railroad men, of skilled
mechanics of any kind, but especially of the
men who harness the iron steed and drive it
with steady eye and hand through the dangers
of the night. They have something in com-
mon with him that makes them kin. The
pilot of the Sylph that brought us through the
raging storm in the Sound the other day was

[205]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

/of that class. They sent word from the Navy-
Yard to meet the President that on no accomit
must he proceed down the Bay to Ellis Island.
No boat could live there, ran the message. The
President had the pilot come down and looked
him over. He was a bronzed sea-dog, a man
every inch of him.

" I have promised to go to Ellis Island;
they are waiting for me. Can you get us
there? ''

The pilot wiped the salt spray from his face.
" It can't be worse than we Ve had," he said.
" I '11 get you there."

" Then go ahead," said Mr. Roosevelt, and
to me, " What do you think of him? "

" I would go with him anywhere," said I.
" To look at him is to trust him."

The President followed his retreating form
up the ladder with a look that, had he seen it,
must have made him take his ship through
Hades itself had it been between us and Ellis
Island. " So do I think," he said. " They are
a splendid lot of fellows."

But I am sailing ahead of my time. We
were on our train just now. We did n't wake
up, any of us, the next morning, till it rolled

[906]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

over the Hudson at Albany, and there lay the
Capitol, with flags flying, in full sight. Just
as I put up my curtain and saw it, Roosevelt
opened the door of his room and bade us good-
morning, and eleven throats sent up three
rousing cheers for " the Governor."

At night we shouted again by torch-light,
and the whole big State shouted with us.
Theodore Roosevelt was Governor, elected
upon the pledge that he would rule by the Ten
Commandments, in the city where, fifteen years
before, the spoils politicians had spumed him
for insisting upon doing the thing that was
right rather than the thing that was expedient.
Say now the world does not move 1 It strides
with seven-league boots where only it has a man
who dares to lead the way.

Not necessarily at a smooth or even gait.
He knew what was before him, and as for the
politicians, they were not appreciably nearer tjo
the Ten Commandments than in the old days.
They had not changed. They had fallen in
behind Roosevelt because it was expedient, not
because it was right. They had to win, and they
could win only with him. And yet, when
" Buck " Taylor in a biu-st of fervid frontier

[307]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

eloquence exhorted his audience to " Follow ma
colonel! follow ma colonel 1 and he will lead
you, as he led us, like lambs to the slaughter 1 "'
I think not unlikely there mingled with the
cheers and the laughter the secret hope in the
breasts of some that it might be so. It was
but natural. They knew right well, the poli-
ticians did, how much they had to expect from
him ; it was but a lean two years they were look-
ing forward to with Roosevelt as Governor.
They might have comforted themselves in de-
feat by the thought that he was killed and out
of the way at last. Who knows?

When I speak of politicians here, I am
thinking of the spoilsmen who played the game
for keeps. They ran the machine, and J;hey
took him, with their eyes open, to save it. And
then we saw the curious sight of the good-gov-
ernment forces, his natural allies, who were
largely what they were because of the exam-
ple he had all along consistently set, sulking
disconsolate because he, who had always been
a loyal party man without ever surrendering
his conscience to his partisanship, went with
his party; instead of rejoicing, as they might
well have done, that the party had been forced

[308]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

into making such a choice, that being the very
end and aim and meaning of their political ex-
istence. They grumbled because he would
" see the party bosses." Of course he would—
see anybody that could help him get things
done ; for he had certain definite ends of good
government in view, and it was no more to
his taste to pose on the solitary peak of abor-
tive righteousness as Governor, than it had
been as a legislator. Yes, he would see the
bosses, and he went right up to the front door
and told the newspaper men his business,
though they tried to smuggle him in secretly by
the back way, to save his feelings. His feel-
ings were n't hurt a bit. If he could make the
machine work with him for good, he had killed
two birds with one stone, for so it would be
a more eflFective machine for party purposes as
he saw them. As for its working him to its
uses— the bosses knew better. The reformers
did not. They sat and mourned, needlessly.

For him— I thought more than once in those
days of a paragraph he had written about
practical politics while he was yet a Civil Ser-
vice Commissioner practising them with might
and main. How much of prophecy there is in

[909]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

his writings, when you look back nowl There
would be obstacles, he wrote. " Let him make
up his mind that he will have to face the violent
opposition of the spoils politician, and also, too
often, the unfair and ungenerous criticism of
those who ought to know better. . . . Let him
fight his way forward, paying only so much re-
gard to both as is necessary to help him to win
in spite of them. He may not, and indeed
probably will not, accomplish nearly as much
as he would like to, or as he thinks he ought
to; but he will certainly accomplish something."
He settled down courageously to the fight that
was his own prescription. And when it was
over, this was the judgment passed upon his
administration in the " Review of Reviews " by
Dr. Albert Shaw, than whom there is no fairer,
more clear-headed critic of public events in the
country: "He found the State administra-
tion thoroughly political; he left it business-
like and efficient. He kept thrice over every
promise that he made to the people in his can-
vass. Mr. Roosevelt so elevated and improved
the whole tone of the State administration
and so effectually educated his party and
public opinion generally, that future govem-

[«10]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

ors will find easy what was before almost im-
possible."

That was aeeomplishing something, surely.
It worked all right, then. Had some of the
solemn head-shakers known how he enjoyed
it all, I fear that to the inconsistent charges of
bowing down to the idol of party and of wreck-
ing his party, that were flmig at him in the
same breath, there would have been added
the killing one of levity, that was not used
up against Abraham Lincoln. I have an
amused recollection of one band of visiting
statesmen that filed into the Executive Man-
sion with grave, portentous mien, just as the
Grovemor and I stole down the kitchen stairs
to the sub-cellar to visit with Kermit's white
rats, that were much better company. The
Governor knew their names, their lineage, and
all their " points," which were many, according
to Kermit. They were fully discussed before
we returned to the upper world of stupid poli-
tics.

That is my opinion, anyway. I hate politics
—I am thinking of the game again— and I
am not going to bother with them here, if I can
help it, which I suppose I can't since the

[Ml]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Governor of the Empire State must needs be
in politics up to his neck if he would do his
duty; that is, he must be concerned about the
welfare of his people rather than about putting
his backers into fat jobs and seeing that the
" party is made solid " in every county. But
then, they are different brands. Roosevelt had
his own brand from the start. Long before,
he had identified and carefully charted it, lest
the party managers make a mistake. " Prac-
tical politics," he wrote," must not be construed
to mean dirty politics. On the contrary, in the
long run, the politics of fraud and treachery
and foulness is impractical potties, and the
most practical of all politicians is the one who
is clean and decent and upright. The party
man who offers his allegiance to party as an
excuse for blindly following his party, right or
wrong, and who fails to try to make that party
in any way better, commits a crime against
the country."

To this place had I come when I was asked
to go over and tell the Yoimg Men's Christian
Association on the West Side what the " bat-
tle with the slimi" meant to my city. And
I did, and when I had told them the story I

[919}

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

showed them a picture of Theodore Roosevelt
as the man who had done more hard and honest
fighting for those who cannot fight for them-
selves, or do not know how, than any other man
anywhere. And a man in the audience— there
is always one of that kind in every audience—
who could see in the President of the United
States only the candidate of his party for the
next term, wrote to me of partisanship and of
bad taste, and of how he could not stand Roose-
velt because as Governor he would " see Piatt,"
and did. I have his letter here before me, and
my blood boils up in me whenever I look at it.
Not because of the particular man and his let-
ter. I have come across their like before. The
thing that angers me is the travesty they make
of the real non-partisanship with which we
must win our fight for decency in the cities,
because national politics in municipal elec-
tions are a mere cloak for corruption. How in
the world am I to persuade my healthy-minded
Democratic neighbor not to listen to Tam-
many's blandishments when he has this wizened
spectacle before him? He is a man with con-
victions, who imderstands men and the play of
human forces in the world, and can appreciate

[918]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Roosevelt for what he is and does, even if he
disagrees with him; whereas the other never
can. He can only " see Piatt." Verily, be-
tween the two, give me Piatt. If he had
horns and a spike-tail painted blue, and all
the other parlor furnishings of the evil place,
I think I should take my chances with him
and a jolly old fight rather than with the shiv-
ering visions of my correspondent who is so
mortally afraid of the appearance of evil that
by no chance can he ever get time to do good.

See Piatt 1 Governor Roosevelt saw no end
of people during his two years^ term, and from
some of them he learned something, and others
learned something from him. The very first
thing he did when he was in the Capitol at Al-
bany was to ask the labor leaders to come up
and see him. There were a lot of labor laws,
so called, on the statute-books, designed to bet-
ter the lot of the workingman in one way or
another, and half of them were dead letters.
Some of them had been parsed in good faith,
and had somehow stuck in the enforcement;
and then there were others that were just
fakes.

" These laws," said the Governor to the la-

[914]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

bor leaders, " are your special concern. I want
you to look them over with me and see if they
are fair, and, if they are, that they be fairly
enforced. We will have no dead-letter laws.
If there is anything wrong that you know of,
I want you to tell me of it. If we need more
legislation, we will go to the legislature and
ask for it. If we have enough, we will see to
it that the laws we have are carried out, and the
most made of them."

And during two years there was no disagree-
ment in that quarter that was not gotten over
fairly. Sometimes the facts were in dispute.
Then he went to those who were in portion
to make them plain and asked them to do it.
On two or three occasions he made me the
umpire between disputing organizations and
the Factory Department, and I had again
a near view of the extraordinary faculty of
judging quickly and correctly which habit and
severe training have developed in this man.
Cases to which I gave weeks of steady en-
deavor to get at the truth, and then had to bring
to him, still in doubt, he decided almost at a
glance, piercing the husks with unerring thrust
and dragging out the kernel that had eluded

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

me. I remember particularly one such occa-
sion when I sat on the edge of the bed in his
room at the hotel— he had come down to New
York to review a militia regiment— while he
was shaving himself at the window. I had
gone all over the case and told him of my per-
plexity, when he took it up, and between bub-
bles of soap he blew at me he made clear what
had been dim before, imtil I marveled that I
had not seen it.

There came at last an occasion when nobody
could decide. It was the factory law again
that was in question— the enforcement of it,
that is to say. The claim was made that it wa?
not enforced as it should be. The factory in-
spectors said they did their best. The register-
ing alone of all the tenement-house workers,
as the new law demanded, in a population of
over two millions of souls with few enough
of their tenements free from the stamp of the
sweat-shop, was a big enough task to leave
a margin for honest intentions even with poor
results. But the Governor was not content
to give his inspectors the benefit of the doubt.
He wrote to me to get together two or three of

the dissatisfied, a list of disputed houses, and

[mi

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

the factory inspector of the district, and he
would come down and see for himself.

" I think," he wrote, " that perhaps, if I
looked through the sweat-shops myself with the
inspectors, as well as looked over their work,
we might be in a condition to put things on
a new basis, just as they were put on a new
basis in the police department after you and
I began our midnight tours,"

I shall not soon forget that trip we took
together. It was on one of the hottest days of
early summer, and it wore me completely out,
though I was used to it. Him it only gave
a better appetite for dinner. I had picked
twenty five-story tenements, and we went
through them from cellar to roof, examining
every room and the people we found there.
They were on purpose the worst tenements of
the East Side, and they showed us the hardest
phases of the factory inspector's work, and
where he fell short. The rules under which
a tenement could be licensed for home work
required : absolute cleanliness, that there should
be no bed in the room where the work was
done, no outsider employed, no contagious dis-
ease, and only one family living in the rooms.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

In one Italian tenement that had room for
seventeen families I had found forty-three the
winter before on midnight inspection; that is
to say, three families in every three-room flat,
instead of one, all cooking at the same stove.
No doubt they were still there, but the day-
light showed us only a few women and a lot of
babies whom they claimed as theirs. The men
were out, the larger children in the street.

The Governor went carefully through every
room, observing its condition and noting the
number of the license on the wall, if anything
was wrong. Sometimes there was no Ucense.
Sometimes one had been issued and revoked,
but the women were still at work. They lis-
tened to remonstrances immoved.

" Vat for I go avay ? " said one. " Vere I go
den? "

It was an intensely practical question with
them, but so it was and is with us all; for
from those forsaken tenements, where the home
is wrecked hopelessly by ill-paid work that
barely puts a dry crust into the mouths of the
children, stalks the specter of diphtheria, of
scarlet fever, and of consumption forth over
the dty and the land, sometimes basted in the

[818]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

lining of the coat or the dress that was bought
at the fashionable Broadway counter, proving
us neighbors in very truth, though we deny
the kinship. Roosevelt understood. His in-
vestigations as an assemblyman into the cigar-
makers' tenement-house conditions, and, later,
as a member of the Board of Health, had put
him in possession of the facts. He did not
mince matters with the factory inspector when,
after our completed tour, we went to his office
late in the afternoon. There was improvement,
he said, but not enough.

" I do not think you quite understand," he
said, "what I mean by enforcing a law. I
don't want it made as easy as possible for the
manufacturer. I want you to refuse to license
anybody in a tenement that does not come up to
the top notch of yoiu* own requirements. Make
the owners of tenements understand that old,
badly built, imcleanly houses shall not be used
for manufacturing in any shape, and that li-
censes will be granted only in houses fulfilling
rigidly the requirements of cleanliness and
proper construction. Put the bad tenement
at a disadvantage as against the well-con-
structed and well-kept house, and make the

[M9]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

house-owner as well as the manufacturer un-
derstand it."

We heard the echoes of that day's work in
the Governor's emergency message to the legis-
lature the following winter, calling upon it
to pass the Tenement House Commission Bill.
He summoned " the general sentiment for de-
cent and cleanly living and for fair play to all
our citizens " to oppose the mercenary hostil-
ity of the slum landlord. And the legislature
heard, and the bill became law, to the imtold
relief of the people. That was a sample of the
practical politics in the interest of which he was
willing to " see " the party managers, if it was
needed. And it usually ended with their see-
ing things as he did.

It seemed fair and just to the Governor that
corporations with valuable franchises should be
taxed on these, since they were much more
valuable property than their real estate. It
was one way, to his mind, of avoiding crank
legislation designed merely to "hit money."
The party managers disagreed. The Gov-
ernor had thought it all out; to him it was
just, even expedient as a party measure. He
invited the corporation people to come and see

[290]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

him about it, that they might talk it over. They
did n't; they conspired with the party mana-
gers to bury the bill in committee in the legis-
lature. When the Governor sent an emer-
gency message to wake it, they tore it up. The
next morning another message was laid upon
the Speaker's desk.

" I learn," it read, " that the emergency mes-
sage which I sent last evening to the Assembly
on behalf of the Franchise Tax Bill has not
been read. I therefore send hereby another.
I need not impress upon the Assembly the
need of passing this bill at once. ... It estab-
lishes the principle that hereafter corporations
holding franchises from the public shall pay
their just share of the public burden."

The bill was passed. The party managers
" saw." The corporations did, too, and asked
to be heard. They were heard. The law was
amended at an extra session, but the principle
stood unaltered. Since then the Court of Ap-
peals has declared it constitutional and good,
and not only the State of New York, but the
whole country thanks Governor Roosevelt for
a piece of legislation that makes for the per-
manent peace of our land. There can never

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

be other basis for that than the absolute as-
surance that all men, rich and poor, are equal
before the law. Trouble is sure to come,
sooner or later, where money can buy special
privilege. The marvel is that those who have
the money to buy, cannot half the time see it.
I am tempted to tell the story of how Roose-
velt appointed the successor of Louis F. Payn,
Superintendent of Insurance, and made one
more mortal enemy. That was one of the times
he " saw " Senator Piatt, whose lifelong po-
litical friend Payn was. But what would be
the use? None to my correspondent who
knows it all, yet does not understand. All the
rest of us have it by heart. And it would be
politics, which I said I would eschew. It was
politics for fair, for all the power of the ma-
chine, all of it and more, was opposed to the
Governor in his determination to displace this
man. But Roosevelt was right, and he won.
Let that be the record. When he was
gone from Albany the oldest lobbyist, starved
though he was, had to own that Roosevelt
fought fair, always in the open. His recourse
was to the people, and that was how he
won,— even in the matter of the civil service

[993]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

bill, in which he trod hard on the toes of
the politicians. We had a law, but they had
succeeded in "taking the starch out of it."
Roosevelt put it back. I think no man living
but he could have done it. But they realized
that they could not face him before the peo-
ple on that, of all issues. And to-day my
State has a civil service law that is as good
as it can well be made, and we are so much
better off.

I never liked Albany before, but I grew to
be quite fond of the queer old Dutch city on the
Hudson in those two years. It is not so far
away but that I could run up after office hours
and have a good long talk with the Governor
before the midnight train carried me back
home. Sometimes it was serious business only
that carried me up there. I am thinking just
now of the execution of Mrs. Place, who had
murdered her stepdaughter and tried to brain
her husband. It was a very wicked murder,
but there was something about the execution
of a woman that stirred the feelings of a lot
of people, myself included. Perhaps it was
largely a survival of the day of public hang-
ings, which is happily past. But, more than

[993]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

that, I had a notion that it would hurt his ca-
reer. I think I told of it in " The Making of
an American " when it was all long over. I
certainly did not tell him. I knew better. But
I argued all through a long evening into the
midnight hour, until I had to grab my hat and
run for the train, that he should not permit it.
I argued myself to an absolute stand-still, for
I remember his saying at last impatiently :

" If it had only been a man she killed— but
another woman! " and I, exasperated and il-
logical: "Anyway, you are obliged to admit
that she tried hard enough to kill a man."

After I got back home he sent me a letter
which I may not print here. But I shall hand
it down to my children, and they will keep it as
one of the precious possessions of their father,
long after I have ceased to live and write.
One sentence in it I have no right to withhold,
for it turns the light on his character and way
of thinking as few things do:

" Whatever I do, old friend, believe it will be
because after painful groping I see my duty
in some given path."

So it was always with him. His duty was
made clear when the commission of experts he

[994]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

had appointed reported that Mrs. Place was as
sane and responsible as any of them, and pub-
lie clamor had no power to move him from it.
I like to set over against her case another
in which my argmnent prevailed, for it shows
the man's heart, which he had often no little
trouble to hide under the sternness imposed by
duty. I knew the soreness of it then by the
joy I saw it gave him to make people happy.
Policeman Hannigan had been sent to Sing
Sing for shooting a boy who was playing foot-
ball in the street on Thanksgiving Day. He
ran, .and the policeman, who had been sent with
special orders to clear the ball-players out of
the block, where they had been breaking win-
dows, ran after him. In the excitement of the
chase he fired his pistol, and the bullet struck
and slightly woimded the boy in the leg. The
policeman was " broken " and sent to the peni-
tentiary, and of the incident we made a mighty
lever in the fight for playgrounds where the
boys might play without breaking either win-
dows or laws. And then I thought of the po-
liceman in the prison, a young man with a wife
and children and a clean record till then, and
I asked the Governor to pardon him. Of

[996]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

course he had not meant to shoot ; he was car-
ried away, and now he had been punished
enough. I have preserved the Grovemor's an-
swer that came by next day's mail. It was
written on the last day of the year 1899 :

" Deae Jake :

" Happy New Year to you and yours, and
as a New Year's gift take the pardon of the
policeman Hannigan. The papers were for-
warded to the prison this morning.

" Ever yours,
" Theodobe Roosevelt."

And so one man who that day was without
hope started fair with the new year.

I wish I might go on and write indefinitely
of those days and what they were to me : Of
that dinner-party to some foreign visitors into
which I, taking tea peacefully with Mrs.
Roosevelt and the children, was suddenly cata-
pulted by the announcement that through an
tmexpected arrival there would be thirteen at
the table, a fact which would be sure to make
some one of the guests uncomfortable, and at
which the Governor kept poking quiet fun at

[086]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

me across the table, until I warned him with a
look that I might even betray his perfidy, if
he kept it up. Of how I kept admiring the
Executive Mansion because Cleveland had
lived in it, till he took me to the Capitol and
showed me there the pictures of all his prede-
cessors except Cleveland, who was stingy, he
said, and wouldn't give the State his. Whereat
I rebelled loudly, maintaining that it was mod-
esty. Of the mighty argument that ensued,—
a mock argument, for in my soul I knew that
he thought as much of Cleveland as did I. Of
these things I would like to tell, for they make
the picture of the man to me, and perhaps I can
smuggle it in later. But here, I suppose, I
ought to remember the Governor, and there-
fore I shall not do as I would otherwise.

When I look back now to the day when he
stood in the Assembly Chamber, with the oath
of office fresh upon his lips, and spoke to his
people, there comes to me this sentence from
his speech: " 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

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

steadily for the betterment both of our civil and
social conditions."

Truly, if ever man kept a pledge, he kept
that. He nursed no ambitions ; he built up no
machine of his own. He was there to do his
duty as it was given to him to see it, and he
strove steadily for the betterment of all he
touched as Governor of the State that was
his by birth and long ancestry, even as his
father had striven in his day and in his sphere.
He made enemies— God help the poor man
who has none ; but he kept his friends. When
he was gone, a long while after, my way led
me to Albany again. I had not cared much for
it since he went. And I said so to a friend,
an old State official who had seen many gov-
ernors come and go. He laid his hand upon
my arm.

" Yes," said he, " we think so, many of us.
The place seemed dreary when he was gone.
But I know now that he left something behind
that was worth our losing him to get. This
past winter, for the first time, I heard the ques-
tion spring up spontaneously, as it seemed,
when a measure was up in the legislature:
' Is it right? ' Not ' Is it expedient? ' not

[998]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

* How is it going to help me? ' not * What is it
worth to the party? ' Not any of these, but

* Is it right? * That is Roosevelt's legacy to
Albany. And it was worth his coming and his
going to have that."

So that was what we got out of his term as
Governor— all of us, for the legacy is to the
whole land, not only to my own State. As for
him, all unconscious of it, he had been learning
to be President, the while he taught us Henry
Clay's lesson that there is one thing that is
even better than to be President,— namely, to
be right.

[8»1

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

ON that summer day, three years ago,
I when the Republican party nomi-
nated Theodore Roosevelt for Vice-
President, I was lying on my back, stricken
down by sudden severe illness. My wife had
telegraphed to him that I longed to see him;
but in the turmoil of the convention the mes-
sage did not get to him till the morning after
the nominations were made. He came at once
from Philadelphia, and it was then that I,
out of pain and peril, heard from his own lips
the story of his acceptance of the new dignity
his countrymen had thrust upon him. " Thrust
upon " is right. I knew how stoutly he had
opposed the offer, how he had met delega-
tion after delegation with the frank avowal
that he could serve the party and the country

[933]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

better as Governor of New York, and I knew
that that was his ambition; for his work at
Albany was but half finished. It was his desire
that the people should give him another tenn
in his great office, unasked, upon the record of
the two years that were drawing to a close. He
had built up no machine of his own. He had
used that which he found to the uttermost of its
bent, and of his ability,— not always with the
good will of the managers ; but he had used it
for the things he had in mind, telling the bosses
that for all other legitimate purposes, for or-
ganization, for power, they might have it: he
should not hinder them. Now, upon this rec-
ord, with nothing to back him but that, he
wished the people to commission him and his
party to finish their work. It was thoroughly
characteristic of Roosevelt and of his trust in
the people as both able and willing to do the
right, once it was clearly before them.

He knew well enough what was on foot con-
cerning him. He was fully advised of the
plans of his enemies to shelve him in the
" harmless office " of Vice-President, and how
they were taking advantage of his popu-
larity in the West and with the yoimg men

[3S4]

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

throughout the land to " work up " a strenuous
demand for him to fill the second place on the
ticket. So, they reasoned, he would be out of
the way for four years, and four years might
bring many things. As Vice-President he
would not be in 1904 anything like the candi-
date before the people which two years more as
Governor of the Empire State would make
him. Back of the spoils politicians were the
big corporations that had neither forgotten nor
forgiven the franchise-tax law that made them
pay on their big dividend-earning properties,
as any poor man was taxed on his home. Any-
thing to beat him for Governor and for the
Presidency four years hence ! The big traction
syndicates in the East made the pace : Roosevelt
for Vice-President I He was not deceived ; but
the plotters were. Their team ran away with
them. The demand they desired came from
the West and swept him into the ofl&ce. From
perhaps one State in the East and one in the
West it was a forced call. From the great
and bounding prairies, from the nigged moun-
tain sides, and from the sunny western slope of
the Rockies, where they knew Roosevelt for
what he was, and loved him; from the yoimg

[335]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

men everywhere, from the men with ideals, it
was a genuine shout for the leader who spoke
with their tongue, to their hearts. Senator
Wolcott spoke their mind when he brought him
the nomination: " You, everywhere and at all
times, stood for that which was clean and up-
lifting, and against everything that was sordid
and base. You have shown the people of this
country that a political career and good citizen-
ship could go forward hand in hand. . . . There
is not a young man in these United States who
has not found in your life and influence an in-
centive to better things and higher ideals."
Against such a force traditions went for no-
thing; it was strong enough to break more
stubborn ones than that which made of the
Vice-Presidency a political grave. In 1904 it
was to be Roosevelt for President.

Roosevelt yielded. His friends were in de-
spair; his enemies triumphed. At last they
had him where they wanted him.

Man proposes, but God disposes. Now in
joy, and again in tears and sorrow, do we reg-
ister the decree. One brief year, and the nation
wept at the bier of William M cKinley. Of
his successor the President of Columbia Col-

[236]

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

lege wrote: " He was not nominated to satisfy
or placate, but to succeed. The unspeakably
cruel and cowardly assassin has anticipated the
slow and orderly processes of law."

He himself, standing within the shadow of
the great sorrow— though, light of heart, we
knew it not— spoke these brave words to his
people: " We gird up our loins as a nation with
the stem purpose to play our part manfully in
winning the ultmiate triumph; and therefore
we turn scornfully aside from the paths of
mere ease and idleness, and with unfaltering
steps tread the rough road of endeavor, smit-
ing down the wrong and battling for the right,
as Greatheart smote and battled in Bunyan's
immortal story." ^

The campaign of that year none of us has
forgotten. An incident of it lives in my mem-
ory as typical of the spirit in which the people
took his candidacy, and also with a sense of
abiding satisfaction that one thing was done
right, and at the right moment, in my sight.
I was coming up from Chatham Square one
night in the closing days of the canvass, when

^The concluding words of Vice-President Rooseyelt*s speech
at the Minnesota State Fair, Minneapolis, Sept. 9, 1909.

[237]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

a torch and a crowd attracted me to a truck
at the lower end of the Bowery, from which
a man was holding forth on the issues involved
in the national election. He was not an effec-
tive speaker, and the place needed that, if any
place did. The block was " the panhandlers'
beat," one of the wickedest spots in the world,
I believe. I stood and listened awhile, and the
desire to say a word grew in me until I climbed
on the wagon and, telling them I was a Roose-
velt man, asked for a chance. They were will-
ing enough, and, dropping tariff and the " hon-
est dollar " that had very little to do with that
spot, I plunged at once into Roosevelt's ca-
reer as Governor and Police Commissioner.
I thought with grim satisfaction, as I went on,
that we were fairly within sight of " Mike "
Callahan's saloon, where the fight over the ex-
cise law was fought out by Policeman Bourke,
who dragged the proprietor, kicking and
struggling all the way, to the Elizabeth Street
station. He had boasted that he had thrown
the keys of the saloon away, and that no one
could make him close on Sunday. Bourke was
made a sergeant, and Roosevelt and the law
won.

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

But of that I made no boast then. I told the
people what Roosevelt had done and had tried
to do for them ; how we had traveled together
by night tlirough all that neighborhood, trying
to enter into the life of the people and their
needs. As the new note rose, I saw the tene-
ment blocks on the east of the Bowery give up
their tenants to swell the crowd, and was glad.
Descrying a policeman's uniform on its out-
skirts, I reminded my hearers of how my candi-
date had stood for an even show, for fair play
to the man without a pull, and for an honest
police. I had got to that point when the
drunken rounder who by right should have ap-
peared long before, caromed through the
crowd and shook an inebriated fist at me.

" T-tin s-soldierl " he hiccoughed. " Teddy
Ro-senfeld he never went to Cu-u-ba, no
more 'n, no more 'n— "

Who else it was that had never been to Cuba
fate had decreed that none of us should know.
There came, unheralded, forth from the crowd
a vast and homy hand that smote the fellow
flat on the mouth with a sound as of a huge
soul-satisfying kiss. He went down, out of
sight, without a word. The crowd closed in

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

over him; not a head was turned to see what
became of hrni. I do not know. Who struck
the blow I did not see. He was gone, that was
enough. It was enough, and just right.

Which reminds me of another and very dif-
ferent occasion, when I addressed a Sunday-
evening audience in the Cooper Institute at the
other end of the Bowery upon my favorite
theme. The Cooper Institute is a great place,
a worthy monument to its truly great f oimder.
But its Sunday-evening meetings, when ques-
tions are in order, have the faculty of attract-
ing almost as many cranks as did Elijah the
Restorer to Madison Square Garden. I had
hardly finished when a man arose in the hall
and, pointing a menacing finger at me,
squeaked out :

" You say Theodore Roosevelt is a brave
man. How about his shooting a Spaniard in
the back? "

I had been rather slow and dull up till then,
in spite of my theme ; but the fellow woke me
right up. My wife, who had come over with
me and sat in the audience, said afterward that
she never saw a man bristle so suddenly in
her life.

[340]

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

" The man," I cried out, " who says that is
either a fool or a scoundrel. Which of the two
are you? "

I don't believe he heard. His kind rarely do.
They never by any chance get any other side
of a subject than their own, for they never
can shake themselves off for a moment. He
stood pointing at me still:

" Does not Holy Writ say, * Thou shalt not
kill? ^ " he went on.

" Yes! and on the same page does it not say
that ' Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbor,' even if he is the President of
the United States?"

The audience by this time was upon its feet,
yelling its delight. It was what it wanted.
The crank sat down. In the front row a red-
faced Irishman jumped up and down like a
jack-in-the-box, wildly excited.

" You let him alone," he shouted to the peo-
ple, shaking his hat at them; "let Professor
Riis alone. He can take care of himself.
Teddy Roosevelt is the greatest man in the
country" ; and, turning half toward me, he shot
up a fist like a ham and, grabbing mine, yelled
out, " I druv him oncet ! "

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Crank after crank got up with their ques-
tions, and as I looked out over them bobbing
in the amused crowd like corks on a choppy
sea, there came into my head Solomon's pre-
cept to answer a fool according to his folly.
The President's first message was just out.

" How shall we interpret it? " queried a pe-
dantic spectacled loon, with slow deliberation
checking the points off on his fingers; " shaU
we class it as an economic effort or as a political
discourse, as a literary production or as a—"

" The President's message," I interrupted,
" has just been rendered into the language of
the blind, and they don't have any difficulty in
making it out."

The meeting broke up in a great laugh, amid
a storm of protests from the cranks whose fun
was spoiled. They were not looking for in-
formation. They had come merely to hear
themselves talk.

I guess it is no use beating about the bush^
teUing stories; I have to come to it. But I
have n't got over the shock the news from Buf-
falo gave me up there in the Canadian wUder-
ness. I hate to think of it.

Roosevelt had gone to join his children in

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

the Adirondacksy with the assurance of the doc-
tors that President McKinley was mending,
and in no danger. He had come straight to
Buffalo at the first news of the murderous at-
tempt upon the President's life, thereby giving
great offense to the faultfinders, who could see
in the Vice-President's solicitude for his friend
and chief only a ghoulish desire to make sure
of the job. And now, when he went with
lightened heart to tell his own the good news,
they cried out in horror that he went hunting
while the President lay fighting death. They
were as far from the truth then as before. He,
knowing little and caring less what was said of
him, was resting quietly with his wife and the
children, who had been sick, at the Upper
Tahawus Club on Mount Marcy. No one in
that party had thought of hunting or play.
Their minds were on more serious matters. It
was arranged that they were all to go out of
the woods on Saturday, September 14, on
which day Mr. Roosevelt had summoned his
secretary to meet him at his Long Island home.
He had come from Buffalo only two days be-
fore. Friday found them all upon the moun-
tain: the Vice-President, Mrs. Roosevelt, and

[Q4S]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

their nephews, the two Robinson boys, and Mr.
James McNaughton, their host, Ted,, the
oldest of the Roosevelt boys, had gone fish-
ing. The rest, with two guides, formed the
party.

Far up the mountain side there lies a
pretty lake, the " Tear in the Clouds," whence
the Hudson flows into the lowlands. There the
party camped after a long and arduous tramp
over the mountain trail. Mrs. Roosevelt had
gone back with the children. From his seat on
a fallen log Roosevelt followed the gray out-
line of Mount Marcy's bald peak piercing mist
and cloud. Up there might be sunshine.
Where they were was wet discomfort. A desire
grew in hun to climb the peak and see, and he
went up. But there was no sunshine there.
All the world lay wrapped in a gray, impene-
trable mist. It rained, a cold and chilly rain
in the clouds.

They went down again, and reached the
wood-line tired and hungry. There they spread
their lunch on the grass and sat down to it.
Upon the quiet talk of the party there broke
suddenly an unusual soimd in that quiet soli-
tude, the snapping of a twig, a swift step. A

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

man came out of the woods, waving a yeUow
envelope in his hand.

Silence fell upon them all as they watched
Mr. 'Roosevelt break it and read the message.
It was brief: " The President's condition has
changed for the worse.— Coetelyou." That
was all. He read it over once, twice, and sat
awhile, the message in his hand, grave shadows
gathering in his face. Then he arose, the food
untouched, and said briefly: " I must go back
at once,"

They fell in behind him on the homeward
trail. Silent and sad, the little procession
woimd its way through the gloomy forest.
Dusk was setting in when they reached the
cottage. No news was there. The Vice-
President's secretary, warned in the early
morning by despatches from Buffalo, had
started for the mountains on a special train,
but the road ended at North Creek, more than
thirty miles away, and from there he had been
telegraphing and telephoning all day that he
would wait till Mr. Roosevelt came. Of this
nothing was known on the moimtain. The
telephone line ended at the lower club-house
— ^ten miles farther down, and the messages

[245]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

lay there. No one had thought of sending
them up.

Mr. Roosevelt sent runners down at once to
find out if there was any summons for him,
and made ready for an umnediate start before
he changed his clothing. He was wet through.
The dusk became darkness, and the hours wore
far into the evening. He walked up and down
alone in front of the cottage, thinking it all
over. It could not be. He had arranged to
be advised at once of the least change, and no
word had come. Up to that morning all the
bulletins were hopeful. There must be some
awful mistake. Black night sat upon the
mountain and no message yet. He went in to
snatch such sleep as he could get. Too soon
he might need it.

In the midnight hour came the summons.
Mr. McNaughton himself brought the mes-
sage: " Come at once." In ten minutes Mr.
Roosevelt threw his grip into the buckboard
that was hurriedly driven up, and gave the
word to go.

How that wild race with death was run and
lost— for before it was half finished President
McKinley had breathed his last, and there was

[346]

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MAKCY

no longer any Vice-President hastening to his
bedside — wUl never be told. But for a fright-
ened deer that sprang now and then from the
roadside, stopping in the brush to watch wide-
eyed the plunging team and the swaying lan-
tern disappear in the gloom, no living thing
saw it. The two in the wagon— the man on the
driver's seat and the silent shape behind him
—had other thoughts: the one for the rough
trail which he vainly tried to make out through
the mist ; at any moment the wheels might leave
their rut or crash against a boulder, and team
and all be flimg a hundred feet down a
precipice- As for the other, his thoughts were
L away at a bedside from which a d^g man
was whiipering word, of comfort to S weep-
ing wife- MechanicaUy, when the driver
turned to him with warning of the risks they
were taking, he repeated, as if he had scarcely
heard: " Gro on— go right ahead 1 "

The new day was an hour old and over when
the vehicle stopped at the lower club-house,
mud-splashed from hub to hood- Here Mr.
Roosevelt heard for the first time from his
secretary, who had watched sleepless at the
other end of the wire, the tragedy then pass-

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ing into history in the city of Buffalo. Secre-
tary Loeb knew the dangers of the mountain
roads on a dark and rainy night, and pleaded
with him to wait till morning.

" I will come right through, as quick as
I can," was the answer he received ; and before
he could ring the telephone bell, Mr. Roosevelt
was in his seat again, and the horses were
plunging through the night toward the distant
railroad.

Down hiU and up, through narrow defiles,
over bare hillsides where the wheels scraped
and slid upon the hard rock and the horses*
hoofs struck fire at every jvimp; on perilous
brinks hidden in the shrouding fog, and ten-
fold more perilous for that; now and then a bog-
hole through which the wheels of the buckboard
sank to the hubs; past a little school-house
where a backwood's dance was just breaking
up, the women scattering in sudden fright as
the traveler drove by. Then the wayside hotel
with waiting horses in relay, and two thirds of
the way was covered.

Once more the gloom and the forest; once
more the grim traveler gazing ahead, ahead, as
if he would pierce the veil of fate and wrest

[048]

THE SUMMONS ON MOUNT MARCY

from it its secret, repeating his monotonous
"Go onl Keep right aheadl" In the city
by the lake William McKinley lay dead.
Through the darkness rode the President,
clinging obstinately to hope.

So the dawn came. As the first faint tinge
of it crept into the night, and trees and rocks
whirling past took on dim outlines, the steam-
ing horses drew up at the railroad station at
North Creek, where a pufiing engine had been
in waiting many hours. From the platform
Secretary Loeb came down, bareheaded:

" The worst has happened," he said. " The
President is dead."

So, to this man, who had been tried and found
faithful in much, came the call to take his
jplace among the rulers of the earth.

tMO]

XI
WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

I
\

NOW that by good luck I have after
all presented in something like orderly
fashion the main facts in Theodore
Roosevelt's career,— of which every one knows
more or less, and which he regards as more or
less significant, according to his attitude to-
ward the old college professor's prediction,
many years ago, that his students might rate
our people's fitness for self-government by the
headway Roosevelt made with his ideals a;id
ambitions— now that we have got so far, I can
hear my reader ask: "But about himself;
about the man, the friend? You promised to
tell us. We want to know." And so you shall.
I am going to tell you now,— at least, I am go-
ing to try. Here, a whole week, have I been
walking about the garden, upon which winter

[ 253 ]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

had laid its rude hand and put all the flowers to
sleep; only the wild thyme I brought down
from the Berkshire Hills stands green and fra-
grant, as does the sunny field where I dug it,
in my memory ever. A whole week have I
walked about among the bare bushes, poking
in the dead leaves, trying to think how. Some-
thing very learned and grand had come into
my head. But how can you analyze your
friend? Men's minds and men's motives you
may analyze, if you care and have a taste
that way,— and a pretty mess you will make of
it more than half the time. But resolve a sun-
beam, or a tear, into its original elements, and
what do you get? So much oxygen, perhaps;
so much salt— let the chemist tell in his learned
phrase ; and when all is told your sunbeam and
your tear have escaped you. Whatever else you
have, them you have not. No, I shall not try
that. I shall tell you of him just as I knew
him. I like him best that way, anyhow,— just
as he is.

But first let me give fair warning: if there
be any among my readers still-himting for
special privilege, let him get off right here;
for he won't like him. Whether it be the Trust

[«54]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

that has nothing to conceal, — dear me, no!
—yet most strenuously objects to the public
knowing about its business; the corporation
with franchises paying big dividends but no
taxes; the labor leader who has stared himself
blind upon the dividends, and to whom the
pearly gates shall not swing imless they have
the imion label on them ; or the every-day dolt
who must have the railroad track between him-
self and his brother of darker skin, of different
faith or tongue or birthplace; who, like the
woman of the Four Himdred in Philadelphia,
"must be buried in St. Peter's churchyard
because, really, on resurrection day she must
rise with her own set" — whichever his own
particular folly in this land of no privilege
and of an equal chance, and wherever found,
he will be against Roosevelt, instinctively and
always. He will fight him at the polls and in
the convention; he will bet his money against
him, and pour it out like water across every
party line that held him before, and by the
measure of his success we can grade our own
grip on the ideal of the Republic. That was
what the professor I spoke of meant, and he
was right. And so are they, according to their

[955]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

light. Roosevelt is their enemy, the enemy
forever of all for which they stand.

Because he stands for fair play ; for an even
chance to all who would use it for their own
and for their country's good; for a broad
Americanism that cares nothing for color,
creed, or the wheref rom of the citizen, so that,
now he is here, he be an American in heart and
soul; an Americanism that reaches down to
hard-pan. " Ultimately," he said at Grant's
Tomb, when Governor of New York,—" ulti-
mately, no nation can be great unless its great-
ness is laid on foundations of righteousness
and decency." And at Syracuse on Labor
Day I saw ten thousand stirred by his words:
" If alive to their true interests, rich and poor
alike will set their faces like flint against the
spirit which seeks personal advantage by over-
riding the laws, whether that spirit shows itself
in the form of bodily violence by one set of
men or in the form of vulpine cunning by
another set of men." These are his profes-
sions. I know how they square with his prac-
tice, for I have seen the test put to him a hun-
dred times in little things and in great, and
never once did he fail to ask the question, if

[956]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

there was any doubt about it, after all was said
and done, " Which is right? " And as it was
answered, so was the thing done.

His ambition? Yes, he has that. Is it to
be President? He would like to sit in the
White House, elected by the people, for no
man I ever met has so real and deep a belief
in the ultimate righteousness of the people, in
their wish to do the thing that is right, if it can
be shown them. But it is not that. If I know
anything of the man, I know this : that he would
fight (in the ranks)to the end of life for the
things worth fighting for, rather than reach
out a hand to grasp the Presidency, if it were
to be had as the price of one of the principles
upon which his life has been shaped in the sight
of us all. He riiight, indeed, quarrel with the
party of a lifetime, for he would as little sur-
render his conscience to a multitude of men as
to one,^ and he has said that he does not num-
ber party loyalty with the Ten Commandments,
firmly as he holds to it to get things done.
Party allegiance is not a compelling force with
him; he is the compelling force. "I believe

^GoY. Roosevelt's speech to the West Side Republican Club»

New York, March, 1899.

[ «57 ]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

very firmly/' he said to the State Bar Asso-
ciation in New York, in 1899, " that I can best
render aid to my party by doing all that in me
lies to make that party responsive to the needs
of the people; and just so far as I work along
those lines I have the right to challenge the
support of every decent man, no matter what
his party may be," That is his platform,
always was. In matters of mere opinion I can
conceive of his changing clear around, if he
were shown that he was wrong. I should ex-
pect it ; indeed, I do not see how he could help
it. It was ever more important to him to
be right, and to do right, than to be logical and
consistent.

And that really is his ambition, has been
since the day he rose in the Assembly Hall at
Albany and denounced the conspirators of his
own party and of the other to their faces: to
do the right, and to so do it in the sight of his
fellow-men that they shall see that it is the
right and follow it ; that the young, especially,
shall make the high and the right choice at the
beginning of life that puts ever more urgent
questions to the succeeding generations. That
IS the mainspring and the motive. " Because

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

he thinks he is so much better than all the rest?"
I can hear my cynical neighbor ask. No, but
because to him life is duty first, always ; because
it gave him certain advantages of birth, of edu-
cation, of early associations for which he owes
a return to his day and to his people. I wish
to God more of us felt like that; for until we
do our Republic will be more of a name and
of an empty boast than we have any right to
let it be. Sometimes, when, in the effort of
class privilege to assert itself here as every-
where, the fear comes over me that it will not
last, I find comfort in the notion that it has
hardly yet begun, and that it cannot be that
He in whose wise purpose men must grow
through struggling, will let it pass so soon.
A hundred years of the Republic, and we are
only beginning to understand that what it was
meant to mean, and alone can be made to mean,
is opportunity; that the mere fact of politi-
cal freedom is in itself of little account, but
can be made of ever so much; that different
levels there will be in a democracy as in a mon*
archy, but not of rank nor, indeed, of wealth,
though for a while it may seem so; but ac-
cording to our grasp of the idea of the respon-

[269]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

sibilities of citizenship and its duties and stan-
dards. There is the cleavage, and his is the
highest level who would serve all the rest.
Service to his fellow-men : that is the key-note
to Roosevelt's life, as faith in the Republic and
love of country are its burning fire. Well did
President Eliot, when he bestowed upon him
the degree of his Alma Mater, call him a " true
type of the sturdy gentleman and high-
minded public servant in a democracy."

There! I freed my mind, anyhow. I was
thinking, when I spoke of consistency, of the
fellows who mistake stubbornness for princi-
ple, and what a beautiful mess they make of it.
There came one of that kind to the Board of
Health in Brooklyn, and wanted his landlord
compelled to put a broken window-pane in.
The landlord said it was not in the lease and he
would n't do it. And for two weeks his wife
had been sleeping under it, in danger of pneu-
monia every hour of the night.

" But," said they, " have you let her sleep
there all this time without putting in the
pane? "

" Yes, sir! '' said he. " Yes, sir! I did it on
principle!"

[960]

♦

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

But about himself. You know how he looks.
To my mind, he is as handsome a man as I ever
saw ; and I know I am right, for my wife says
so too, and that settles it. Which reminds me
of the time I lectured in a New York town with
a deaf man in the audience who was no friend
of Roosevelt. The chairman introduced me
with the statement that he had heard that the
Governor called me " the most useful man in
New York." My friend with the ear-tnmipet
did n't quite catch it, and was in high dud-
geon after the meeting.

" Did n't I tell you Teddy Roosevelt ain't
got no sense? " he cried. " The idea of calling
that man Riis the most beautiful man in New
York! Why, he is as plain as can be."

By handsome I do not mean beautiful,
but manly. Stern he may, indeed, appear at
times, though to my mind neariy all his por-
traits do him hideous injustice in that respect.
I have seen but two that were wholly himself.
One was a pen sketch of him on horseback at
the head of his men, climbing some mountain
ridge. There he had on his battle face, the
dark look I have seen come in the middle of
some pleasant chat with gay friends. I knew

[961]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

then that he was alone and that the burden was
upon him, and I felt always as if, upon some
pretext, any pretext, I would like to get him
away where he could be by himself for a while.
The other, curiously, was an old campaign pos-
ter from the days when he ran for Grovemor.
It hung over my desk till the boys in the oflSce,
who used to decorate the volunteers' slouch-hat
with more bows than a Tyrolese swain ever
wore to the village fair, made an end of it, to
my great grief. For it was the only picture
of him I ever saw that had the smile his friends
love. There was never another like it. And
it is for them only. I have come into a room
packed full of people crowding to speak with
hun, and seen it light up his face as with a
ray of sunshine from a leaden sky, and his hand
go up in the familiar salute I meet out West
nowadays, but nowhere else. Odd how peo-
ple, even those who should know him well, can
misunderstand. " I saw him several times in
Colorado," wrote one who likes him, after his
recent Western trip, " and he pleased me very
much by his growing tenderness toward men
and animals. His chief weakness has always
seemed to me his almost cruel strength." To

[969^

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

me he has always seemed as tender as a woman.
Perhaps they had been on the hunting-trail
together; or on one of his long Washington
walks that were the terror of his friends. I
am told they lay awake nights, some of them,
trembling for fear he might pick them out
next.

By contrast there comes to me the recollec-
tion of a walk we took together in the woods
out at Oyster Bay, It was after I had been
sick, and some one had told him that I could not
walk very fast, and must not, any more. So
I infer; for we had not gone five furlongs at
the old clipping gait, he a little ahead, thrash-
ing through the bushes, when he suddenly came
back and, taking my arm, walked very slowly,
teUing me something with great earnestness,
to cover up his remorse. I have never any-
where met a man so anxiously considerate of a
friend's weakness as he ever was and is, though
happily in this instance there was no need of it.
I have been learning to ride these days, and
ride hard, to show him, and also to have the
fun of going out with him again. I cannot
think of anything finer.

It seems to me, when I think back now, that

[963]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

all the time I have known him, with all the
burden and care of such a career as his on his
shoulders, he was forever planning some kind
act toward a friend, carrying him and his con-
cerns with him incessantly amid the crowding
of a thousand things. His memory is some-
thing prodigious. I happened once to mention
to him that when next I came to Washington
I would bring my little boy.

" And don't forget," I said, " when you see
him to ask if he goes regularly to Sunday-
school." To his laughing inquiry I made an-
swer that the lad would occasionally be tempted
by the sunshine and some game up by the golf -
grounds, whereupon I would caution him to
keep his record clear against the day when he
would see the President, who, being the boys'
as well as the papas' President, would natu-
rally ask him if he " went regular." And of
course he must back me up in this; for little
boys remember, too. The thing had long since
gone out of my head when I brought Vivi to
the White House; but not so with him. He
took him between his knees and asked him, first
thing, if he went to Sunday-school like a good
boy; and so the day and my reputation were

[364]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

saved, and the boy made happy; for he had
kept his slate clean.

It was at that visit that, after a thorough in-
spection of the premises, the President asked
the lad what he thought of the White House.

" Pretty good," said he. " But I like better
to ride up and down in the elevator at the
hotel." It was his first experience with an
elevator, and he made full use of it.

The President considered him thoughtfully
a moment. What visions of politicians and
delegations passed before his mind's eye I
know not; but it was with almost a half -sigh
that he said: " So would I, my boy, sometimes."
\ That slouch-hat of his, by the way, at which
some folks took umbrage, at the Philadelphia
Convention, I don't believe he gave as much
thought to, in all the years he wore it, or
one like it, as did those good people in the three
or four days of the convention. He did not
wear it because the rough-riders did, but be-
cause it is his natural head-gear. He began
it in Mulberry Street, and he has kept it up
ever since. He hates a stovepipe, and so do
I; but I thought to honor him especially one
day, when I was going traveling with him, by

[905]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

putting on mine ; and all I got for it was, when
General Greene got into the carriage with a
straw hat on, a deep sigh of relief and an
" Oh, I am so glad you did n*t come in a
top-hat," with a malicious gleam toward me.
Next time I leave it home. Perhaps it was to
pay me for being late. He had arranged to
pick me up at my home station, when going
through to the city ; but his train was a full half-
hour ahead of time, and who could have fore-
seen that? What other President, do you sup-
pose, would have waited fifteen minutes at the
depot with his special train while he sent up
to the house for me, and then received me with
a laugh?

That was characteristic of him, both the
waiting and the being ahead of time. It was
night, and there was nothing on the road to
hinder, so he just slammed through. In that
also he is a typical American in the best
sense : given a thing to be done, he makes sure
of the way and then goes ahead and does it.
" The way to do a thing is to do it," might be
his motto ; it certainly is his way. But the man
who concludes from that that he runs at it head-
long makes the mistake of his life. I know ab-

[966]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

solutely no man who so carefully weighs all
the chances for and against, ever with the one
dominating motive in the background — " Is it
right? "—to steer him straight. In the Police
Department he surprised me over and over
again by his quick grasp and mastery of
things until then foreign to his experience.
He would propose some action and turn it over
to me for review because I had been there
twenty years to his one ; and I would point out
reefs I thought he had forgotten. But not he ;
he had charted them all, thought of every con-
tingency, and done it all in an hour, when I
would be poring over the problem for days,
perhaps weeks. And when it had all been gone
over he would say:
-- " There 1 we will do it. It is the best we can

k' do. If it turns out that there is anything
Wrong, we will do it over again." But I do not
pemember that he ever had to.

Mere pride of opinion he has none. No one
ever estimated his own powers, his own capa-

^cities, more modestly than he. Something I
said one day brought this matter up, and few
things have touched me as did the humility with
which this strong man said : " I know the very

[267]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ordinary kind of man I am to fill this great
office. I know that my ideals are common-
place. I can only insist upon them as funda-
mental, for they are that. Not in the least doing
anything great, I can try, and I am trying,
to do my duty on the level where I am put,
and, so far as I can see the way, the whole
of it." And I thought of his talk to the New
York Chamber of Commerce on the " homely
virtues " as a solvent of our industrial and
other problems, and his counsel to every good
citizen to be able and willing to " pull his own
weight." He has to pull the weight of all of
us along with his own. If these plain sketches
help some who do not know him to make out
how patiently, how thoughtfully he labors at
it, how steadfastly he is on guard, I shall be
glad I wrote them.

As I am writing this now, there comes to
mind really the finest compliment I ever heard
paid him, and quite unintentionally. The lady
who said it was rather disappointed, it seemed.
She was looking for some great hero in whom
to embody all her high ideals, and, said she,
" I always wanted to make Roosevelt out that;
but, somehow, every time he did something that

[ ^68 1

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

seemed really great it turned out, upon look-
ing at it closely, that it was only just the right
thing to do/' I would not want a finer thing
said of me when my work is done. I am glad
I thought of it, for I know that he would not,
either. And it comes as near as anything
could to putting him just right.

Perhaps a good reason why he grasps things
so quickly and correctly is that he looks for
and tries to get at the underlying principles of
them ; deals with them on the elementary basis
of right and fitness, divested of all the con-
ceit and the flmnmery which beset so many
things that come to the Executive of a great
nation. I had gone out to see him at Oyster
Bay, heavy with the anxieties of mothers all
over the land who had sons soldiering in the
Philippines. There was news of fighting every
day, but only the names of the killed or
wounded officers came by cable. There was a
War Department order against sending those
of the privates who fell, or who died of cholera ;
and it resulted that when, say, Company H
of the Fifteenth Regiment had been in a battle,
every mother who had a boy serving in that
command went shivering with fear for six long

[269]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

weeks before the mails brought word whether
her boy was among the " thirteen private sol-
diers" who fell, or not. I had been asked
to put the case to the President, and get him
to cut the red tape, if possible; but, against
expectation, I found a tableful of soldiers and
statesmen at lunch, and I saw clearly enough
that it would be hard to get the President's
ear long enough.

But, as luck would have it, I was put beside
Greneral Young, fine old warrior, whom I had
met before, and I told him of what was on
my heart. He knew of no such order when he
was in the Philippines, and we got into quite
a little argument about it, which I purposely
dragged out till there was a lull in the talk at
the President's end of the table, and I saw him
looking my way. I asked him if he knew of
the order.

" What order? " said he; and I told him—
told him of the mothers fretting for their boys
all over the land. He looked up quickly at
Adjutant-Greneral Corbin, who sat right op-
posite. It was what I wanted. He knew.

" Greneral," said Mr. Roosevelt, " is there
such an order?"

[970]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

" Yes, Mr. President,*^ said he; " there is/'

" Why? " President Roosevelt wastes few
words when in earnest about anything.

Greneral Corbin explained that it was a
measure of economy. The telegraph tolls
were heavy. An officer had a code word, just
one, to pay for, whereas to send the whole
name and place of a private soldier under
the Pacific Ocean might easily cost, perhaps,
twenty-five dollars. The President heard him
out.

" Corbin," he said, " can you telegraph from
here to the Philippines? "

The General thought he might wait till he
got to Washington; he was going in an hour.

" No," said the President; " no, we will not
wait. Send the order to have the names tele-
graphed, now. Those mothers gave the best
they had to their country. We will not have
them breaking their hearts for twenty-five dol-
lars or for fifty. Save the money somewhere
else."

And he sent one of his rare smiles across
the table, that made my heart light, and many
another, from Maine to Texas. The order
went out from the table, then and there, and»

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

before we had finished our luncheon, was speed-
ing under the sea to the far East.

I was an unintentional listener that day to
the instructions Generals Young and Corbin
received for their interview with Emperor Wil-
liam; they were about to go abroad. I doubt
if ever greeting from the Executive of one
great country to the head of another was more
informal than that, and, equally, if there ever
was a heartier.

" Tell him," said the President,—" tell the
Emperor that I would like to see him ride at
the head of his troops. By George, I would I
And give him my hearty regards. Some day
we shall yet have a spin together."

I hope they may. Those who know Mr.
Roosevelt and have met the Emperor say
that in much they are alike: two strong, mas-
terful yoimg men of honest, resolute purpose,
and the faith in it that gets things done.
But they face different ways: the one toward
the past, with its dead rule " by the grace of
God " ; the other to the light of the new day
of the living democracy that in its fullness shall
make of the man a king in his own right, by
his undimmed manhood, please God.

[979}

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

I am told that the generals carried out their
instructions in the spirit in which they were
given, to the great delight of the Emperor, who
asked General Corbin if he had ever before
been in Germany. The General said not in
that part of it.

Which part, then? " asked the Emperor.
In Cincinnati and St. Louis, your Maj-
esty," responded the General, and the Em-
peror laughed till his sides shook. His brother
had told him about those cities.

We went home in the same train, and Gen-
eral Young and I sat together in the car. I
had been reading the " Sunday-school Times,"
and it lay on the opposite seat so that the Gen-
eral could read the title. He regarded it
fixedly for a while, then poked it cautiously
with the end of his stick, as who should say, " I
wonder— now — what — " I read him like a
book, fighting-man to the finger-tips that he
is, but said nothing until curiosity got the bet-
ter of him and he asked some question about
it. Then I reached out for the paper.

" Oh, yes. General! This is the paper for
you. See here,"— and I pointed to a column
telling of all the big fighters in the Old

[«TS]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Testament, the Maccabees and the rest, with
then- battles in chronological order, and what
they were about. The old warrior's eyes
kindled.

"Well, I never I " he said, and took the paper
up with an evident respect that contrasted com-
ically with his gingerly way of before. The
Grcneral of the Army will forgive me for telling
on him. He has my heartiest friendship and
regard. I expect to see him yet conduct a
Sunday-school on Maccabean lines, and we
shall all be glad. For that is what we and the
Sunday-school want.

But though ordinarily President Roosevelt
is the most democratic of men, he does not lack
a full measure of dignity when occasion re-
quires it. The man whom I had seen telling
stories of his regiment to a school full of little
Italian boys in the Sullivan Street slum, had,
a little while after the interview with the gen-
erals, to receive a delegation from the French
people, and it happened that one of the guests
of that day was present. He told me that he
never was prouder of the President and of his
people than when he saw him meet the distin-
guished strangers. And so were they. They

[974,]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

spoke of it as the honor of a lifetime to be re-
ceived by President Roosevelt.

It is just the human feeling that levels all
differences and makes kin of all who have
claim to the brotherhood; searches out and lays
hold of the good streak in man wherever it is
found. It accounts for the patience I have
known him to exercise where no one would have
expected it; and it accounts, to my way of
thinking, for the friendships that have existed
between him and some men as far from his
way of thinking in all other respects as one
could well imagine. I know. I ever had a
soft spot for "Paddy" Diwer, with whom
I disagreed in all things that touched his pub-
lic life as fundamentally as that was possible.
But there was a mighty good streak in " Pad-
dy," for all his political ill-doings. As a police
judge he came as near doing ideal justice in
all matters that had nothing to do with politics
as any man who ever sat on the bench, and he
was not bothered in his quest by the law half
as much. I remember— but no, " Paddy "
is dead, and the story shall remain untold.
Some would not imderstand; but I did, for
I had in mind the Kadi administering justice

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

in the gate, and this fellow needed that kind
if the law was powerless to reach him.

I told the President when, at his recent visit
to Ellis Island, he had personally heard the
case of a woman detained mider the rules, but
whom my friend on the police bench would
have discharged with a ten-dollar bill in her
pocket, that his judgment was almost equal to
" Paddy's," whereat he laughed in amusement,
for our dealings—" Paddy's " and mine— had
been the cause of his poking fun at me be-
fore. But when I told him of what befell me in
Chicago on a visit there, he said he should
presently have to cut my acquaintance, and
I was bound to agree with him. I had gone
to the ball of the Hon. Bath-house John's con-
stituents, to see the show ; and when their great
leader heard of my being from New York,
nothing was too good for me. Evidently,
he took me for " one of the b'ys," for when
the champagne had opened wide the flood-
gates of liberality and companionship, he ad-
dressed me confidentially in this wise :

" B'y, the town is yours! Take it in. Go
where ye like; do with it what ye like. And
if ye run up against trouble— ye know, the

[976]

WHAT HE IS LIKE HIMSELF

b'ys will have their little scrap with the police—
come to me for bail— any crime! any crime I "

Say not that the freedom of the city by the
lake has not been conferred upon me. It has.
Even Mayor Harrison will have to own it.

But this chapter has outrun its space, and I
have n't yet said what I had in mind concerning
Theodore Roosevelt. I will drop reminis-
cences and settle right down to it now.

[fT7]

XII
THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

WE had been summoned to the White
House, my wife and I. I say,
" simwioned " on purpose, because
we had carefully avoided Washington; it was
enough for us to know that he was there. But
he would not have it, and wrote threateningly
that he would send a posse if we did n't come.
So we went. I do not think I ever saw a
prouder woman than my wife when the
President took her in to dinner. I heard her
ask him if her smile reached from ear to ear
because she felt like it. And I was proud
and glad, for so it seemed to me that she had
at last come to her rights, and I where there
was nothing more to wish for. But withal
I felt a bit unhappy. I had thought to do
him the highest honor I could by wearing the

[981]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

cross King Christian gave me, but it turned out
that among the dozen diplomats and other
guests no one wore any decoration save my-
self, and I did n't like it. The President saw,
I think, that I was troubled, and divined the
reason in the way he has. He slipped up be-
hind me, at the first chance, and said in my ear :
" I am so much honored and touched by your
putting it on for me." So he knew, and it was
all right. The others might stare.

It is just an instance of the loyalty that is
one of the traits in the man which bind you to
him with hoops of steel once you are close to
him. It takes no account of condition in life :
good reason why his Rough-Riders worshiped
the grotmd he trod on. When they ate bacon
and hard-tack, that was his fare; and if there
was any better to be had, they shared even. It
was that trait that came out in him the night
a half-witted farmer drove to Sagamore HiU
on purpose to shoot him. He was in the li-
brary with Mrs. Roosevelt when the voice of
the fellow, raised in angry contention with the
secret service guard under the trees, attracted
his attention. He knew the officer was alone,
out of ear-shot of the others down at the bam,

[JW»]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

and he acted at once upon the impulse to go to
his aid. Before Mrs. Roosevelt could put in
a word of warning, he was out on the veranda
in the moonlight, his white shirt hosom making
a broad target for the frenzied man who had
a cocked pistol in the buggy. He whipped up
his horse when he saw the President, and made
straight for him, but before he had gone a step
the secret service man had him down and safe.
I joined Mrs. Roosevelt the next day in de-
manding the President's promise that he would
not do it again, and he gave it good-humoredly,
insisting that he had been in no danger. " But,"
said he, " he was fighting my fight, and he was
alone. Would you have had me hide, with
him, perhaps, one against two or three? " It
was a hard question to answer. We could
only remind him that he was the President,
and not simply Theodore Roosevelt, and had
the whole country to answer to.

I think I never knew a man who so utterly
trusts a friend, once he has taken him to his
heart. That he does not do easily or offhand ;
but once he has done it, there is no reservation
or secret drawback to his friendship. It is a
splendid testimony to the real worth of human

[383]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

nature that his trust has rarely indeed been be-
trayed. Once his friend, you are his friend
forever. To the infallible test he rings true:
those who love him best are those who know
him best. The men who hate him are the
scalawags and the self-seekers, and they only
distrust him who do not know him. He never
lost a friend once made. Albert Shaw
summed it all up in a half -impatient, wholly af-
fectionate exclamation when he was telling me
of a visit he had made to Washington to re-
monstrate with the President.

" I never knew a man," he said, " to play so
into the hands of his enemies. He has no
secrets from them; he cannot bear a grudge;
he will not believe evil ; he is generous and fair
to eveiybody; he is the despair of his friends.
And, after all, it is his strength."

And the reason is plain. Had I not known
him, I would have found it long ago in his insis-
tence that the America of to-day is better than
that of Washington and Jefferson. A man
cannot write such things as this he wrote of
Lincoln without meaning every word of it and
acting it out in his life :

" The old-school Jeffersonian theorists be-

[384]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

lieved in a strong people and a weak govern-
ment. Lincoln was the first who showed how
a strong people might have a strong govern-
ment and yet remain the freest on earth. He
seized, half imwittingly, all that was best in the
traditions of Federalism. He was the true suc-
cessor of the Federal leaders, but he grafted on
their system a profound belief that the great
heart of the nation beats for truth, honor, and
liberty."

Now do you wonder that he is the despair-
ing riddle of the politicians the land over, the
enemy, wherever they meet, of all the af ter-us-
the-deluge plotters? They have not the key
to the man; and if they had, they would not
know how to use it. The key is his faith that
the world is growing better right along. In
their plan, it may go to the devil when they
have squeezed it for what there is in it for
them. They can never comprehend that the
man who believes in the world growing better
helps make it better, and so, in the end, is
bound to win ; or why he is closer to the people
than any man since Lincoln's day. It is all a
mystery and a nuisance to them, and I am
glad it is.

[S85]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Speaking of Lincoln, one of the few times I
have seen Roosevelt visibly hurt was when
some yellow newspaper circulated the story
that he had had Lincoln's portrait taken from
the wall in the White House and hung in the
basement, and had his own put up in its place.
Ordinarily he takes no notice of attacks of
that kind, except to laugh at them if they are
funny; but this both hurt and saddened him,
for Lincoln is his hero as he is mine. It was
at the time the White House was imdergoing
alterations, and the pictures were hung in the
basement to preserve them, or there would have
been no pictures by this time. Some of the old
furniture was sent away and sold at auction,
as it had to be, there being no other legal way
of disposing of it. Even' the chairs in the
cabinet-room his official family had to buy at
five dollars each, when they wanted them as
keepsakes. Among the things that went to the
auction-shop was a sideboard from the din-
ing-room, and promptly the report was circu-
lated that it had been presented by the tem-
perance women of Ohio to Mrs. Hayes, and
that President Roosevelt had sold it to a
saloon-keeper. Resolutions began to come

[386]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

from Women's Christian Temperance Union
branches East and West imtil Secretary Loeb
published the facts, which were these: that no
sideboard had ever been presented to Mrs.
Hayes, but an ice-pitcher with stand, long
since placed in a Cincinnati musexmi, where
it now is. The sideboard was a piece of fur-
niture bought in the ordinary avenues of trade
during President Arthur's term, and of no
account on any ground. But long after the
true story had been told the resolutions kept
coming; for all I know, another one is being
prepared now in some place which the lie on its
travels has just reached.

I know what it was that hurt, for I had seen
Roosevelt recoil from the offer to strike an
enemy in the Police Department a foul blow,
as from an unclean thing, though that enemy
never fought fair. He does. " I never look
under the table when I play," he said, when
the spoilsmen beset him in their own way at
Albany; " they can beat me at that game every
time. Face to face, I can defend myself and
make a pretty good fight, but any weakling can
murder me. Remember this, however, that
if I am hit that way very often, I will take to

[297]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

the open, and the blows from the dark will only
help me in an out-and-out fight," " Clean as a
hound's tooth," one of his favorite phrases,
fits himself best. It was the showing that
an honest man's honest intentions were not
accepted at their face value that saddened and
hurt, for it smudged the ideal on which he
builds his faith in his fellow-man.

It was only yesterday that a friend told me
of an experience he had at Albany while Roose-
velt was Governor. He was waiting in the Ex-
ecutive Chamber with, as it happened, a man
of much account in national politics, a Federal
office-holder occupying a position second to
none in the land in political influence. The
gentleman had come to Albany to press legis-
lation for goodc roads, being interested in the
manufacture of bicycles or automobiles, I for-
get which. While they waited, in came the
Governor. There were but two other persons
in the room, an old farmer and his daughter,
evidently on a holiday. They were looking at
the pictures with much interest. Mr. Roosevelt
went over to them and engaged them in con-
versation, found out where they were from,
said he was glad to see them, and pointed out

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

one or two of the portraits especially worth
seeing* Then he shook hands and bade them
come back as often as they pleased. It was
clear that they did not know who the friendly
man was. When they went out he came
straight across to the Federal official.

" Now, Mr. ," he said, shaking his fin-
ger at him, "the legislature has appropri-
ated every cent it is going to this year for good
roads, and nothing you can say will change
their minds or mine on that subject. So you
can save yourself the trouble. It is no use."
And, turning to my friend, " Do you wish to
see me? " But his amazement was so great that
he said no, making up his mind on the spot to
talk to the Governor's secretary. The official
had gone away at once.

I recommend this anecdote to the special pe-
rusal of the friends who think Roosevelt is
playing to the galleries when he hails the plain
man cordially. He does it because he likes
him. They might have seen him one day in
an elevated car, when we were riding together,
get up to give his seat to a factory-girl in a
worn coat. I confess that I itched to tell her
who he was, but he let me have no chance.

[889]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

We were talking about a public institution I
wished to see reformed, and he was anxious
to know if there was any way in which he could
help. " If there is," he said, " let me." But
there was not, and I was sorry for it; for the
matter concerned the growing youth and the
citizenship of to-morrow, and I knew how near
his heart that lay.

I have been rambling along on my own plan
of putting things in when I thought of them,
and I cannot say that I feel proud of the re-
sult; but if from it there grows a person-
ality whose dominating note is utter simplicity,
I have not shot so wide of the mark, after all.
For that is it. All he does and says is to be
taken with that understanding. There again
is where he unconsciously upsets all the schemes
and plots of the politicians. They don't under-
stand that " the game can be played that
way," and are forever looking for some ulterior
motive, some hidden trap he never thought of.
Bismarck, it is said, used to confound his ene-
mies by plumping out the truth when, accord-
ing to all the rulers of the old-school diplo-
macy, he should have lied, and he bagged them
easily. Roosevelt has one fundamental convic-

£«90]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

tion, that a frank and honest man cannot in the
long run be entangled by plotters, and his life
is proving it every day. To say that the world
can be run on such a plan is merely to own that
a,e b«t there is in it, the cynics to the contrwy
notwithstanding, is man hUelf. which is tr^
and also comforting in the midst of all the
trickery contrived to disprove it.

It was the simplest thing in the world, when
the nation was justly up in arms about the
Kishineff atrocity, to do what Roosevelt did,
and that was why he did it. Friends from all
over wrote to me to warn the President not to
get into trouble with Russia by mixing up in
her domestic troubles. Mischief would be sure
to come of it. The Czar would n't receive the
Jews' petition, in the first place, and we would
have to take a rebuke if we tried to send it.
•But the President did not need my advice or
theirs. I laughed when I read in the paper
how he cut that Gordian knot that was so full of
evil omen: merely telegraphed the whole peti-
tion to the American minister in St. Peters-
burg, with orders to lay it before the Czar and
ask whether he would receive it if transmitted
in the usual way. To which the Czar returned

[391]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

a polite answer, as he was in duty bound, that
he would not ; but he had received it, all of it,
and the results were not long in showing them-
selves.^ For days the cables had groaned under
guarded threats of what would happen if we
tried to send the petition over, and that was
what happened 1

Perhaps it is in a measure this very unex-
pectedness—more pity that it is unexpected—
of method that is no method, but just common
honesty, that has got abroad among people
the notion that he is a man of impulse, not
of deliberate, thoughtful action. More of it,
probably, is due to his quick energy that sizes
things up with marvelous speed and accuracy.
In any event, it is an error which any one can
make out for himself, if he will merely watch
attentively what is going on, and what has been
going on since Roosevelt came prominently
into the public eye. What position did he ever
take hastily that had to be abandoned, ready
as he would have been to quit it had he been
shown that he was wrong? He shut the saloons
as Police Commissioner, since the law he had

1 What they will amount to or how long they will last is another
matter. The Muscovite is a slippery customer.

[992]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

sworn to enforce demanded it. And though
politicians claimed that he alienated support
from the administration he stood for, he taught
us a lesson in civic honesty that will yet bear
fruit; for while politics are allowed to play
hide-and-seek with the majesty of the law,
that majesty is a fraud and politics will be un-
clean. As Health Commissioner he gave the
push to the campaign against the old murder-
ous rookeries that broke the slum landlord's
back; abuse and threats were his reward, but
hope came into the lives of two million souls
in my city, and all over the land those who
would help their fellow-men took heart of hope
because of what he did. He offended a thou-
sand spoilsmen as Civil Service Conunissioner,
and earned the gratitude and confidence of a
Democratic President; but who now who has
sense would have had him do otherwise?

He compelled the corporations to pay just
taxes, and though they swore to knife him
for it, the Court of Appeals has said it was fair
and just. I have heard some people blaming
him hotly for interfering in the anthracite coal
strike. Their cellars were full of coal that
winter, but their factory bunkers were not;

[998]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

and, singularly, I remember some of those very
men, when their pocket-books were threatened,
predicting angrily that " something would
happen " if things were not mended. And in
that they were right; something would have
happened. Perhaps that was a reason why
he interfered. However, I shall come back to
that yet. But where is there to-day a cloud on
the diplomatic horizon because of the " impul-
siveness " of the young man in the White
House? When were there so cordial relations
with the powers before — Math England, with
France, with Germany that sends the Presi-
dent's personal friend to represent her here?
Does any one imagine William of Germany
seeks personal advantage in that? Then he
is not as smart as the emperor. For the first
time in the memory of diplomats, I imagine,
they are able to discuss things, up at the White
House, just as they are; yet they don't take a
trick, and they know it.

Roosevelt is as far as possible from being
rash. When people say it I am always re-
minded of the difference between the Danish
word rtisk and the English rash. Rask means
quick, resolute. That is what he is. He ar-

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

rives at a conclusion more quickly than any one
I ever knew; but he never jumps at it. He
has learned how to use his mind, and all of it,
that is why. " I own," writes a friend to me
from Ohio, "that he has been right so far
every time. But next time where will we find
him? " Learn to think a thing out, as he does;
and when you have done it, ask yourself,
" Which, now, is right? '' and you will know.
Watch and you will see that the real difference
between his critics and him is this: they chase
all round the compass for some portent of
trouble " if they do this or do that," and in
the end throw themselves headlong on some
course that promises safety; whereas, he goes
calmly ahead, seeking the right and letting
troubles take care of themselves if they must
come. That is the quality of his courage which
some good people identify as a kind of fight-
ing spunk that must be in a broil at regular
intervals. I do not suppose there is a less emo-
tional man in existence than Secretary Root
of the War Department. He was the only one,
the newspapers said, in the cabinet who would
not give five dollars for his chair as a souvenir.
He could put the money to better use, and he

[»5]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

did n't need the chair. But when he came to
take leave of Roosevelt, this is what he wrote:
" I shall cany with me unahated loyalty to
your administration, confidence in the sound
conservatism and patriotic unselfishness of
your policy, . . . and I shall always be happy
to have been a part of the administration
directed by your sincere and rugged adhe-
rence to right and devotion to the trust of
our country." Blame me for partiality, if
you will, but against Secretary Root the
charge does not justly lie. He just spoke the
truth.

Verily, I think that were the country to be
called upon to-morrow to vote for peace or for
war, his voice would be for peace to the last
hour in which it could be maintained with
honor. Slower than Lincoln would he be to
draw the sword. But once drawn for justice
and right, I should not like to be in its way,
nor should I be lazy about making up my mind
which way to skip. I remember once when I
got excited— over some outrage perpetrated
upon American missions or students in Turkey,
I think. It was in the old days in Mulberry
Street, and I wanted to know if our ships

[296]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

could not run the Dardanelles and beard the
Turk in his capital.

" Ah," put in Colonel Grant, who was in the
Police Board, " but those forts have guns."

" Gunsl " said Roosevelt; notliing more. It
is impossible to describe the emphasis he put
upon the word. But in it I seemed to hear De-
catur at Tripoli, Farragut at Mobile. Gunsl
The year after that he was busy piling up
ammunition at Hongkong. They had guns
at Manila, too. And Dewey joined Decatur
and Farragut on the record.

I said Roosevelt had learned to use all of his
mind. To an extraordinary degree he pos-
sesses the faculty of concentrating it upon the
subject in hand and, when it has been disposed
of, transferring it at will to the thing next m
order, else he could not have written important
historical works while he was Police Com-
missioner and Governor. Whether this is all
the result of training, or a faculty bom in him,
I do not know. Napoleon had the same gift.
I have sat with Mr. Roosevelt in his room at
Police Headquarters and seen him finish his
correspondence, dispose of routine matters in
hand, and at once take up dictation of some

[297]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

magazine article, or a chapter in one of his
books where he left off the day before. In five
minutes he would be deep in the feudal days»
or disentangling some Revolutionary kink in
Washington's time, and seemingly had lost all
recollection of Mulberry Street and its con-
cerns. In the midst of it there would come a
rap at the door and a police official would enter
with some problem to be solved. Roosevelt
would stop in the doorway, run rapidly over it
with him, decide it, unless it needed action by
the Board, and after one nervous turn across
the floor would resimie dictating in the mid-
dle of the sentence where he had stopped. I
used to listen in amazement. It would have
taken me hours of fretting to get back to where
I was.

One secret laugh I had at him in those days.
The room was a big square one, with windows
that had blue shades. When he got thoroughly
into his dictation— during which he never per-
mitted me to leave; he would stay any move-
ment of mine that way with a detaining ges-
ture, and go right on— he made, unconsciously,
a three-fourths round of the office, and when
he passed each window would seize the shade-

[308]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

cord and give a little abstracted pull, bringing
it down an inch or so, until by degrees the room
was in twilight. By the fourth or fifth round
he would acquire a game leg. One of his
knees stiffened, and tliereaf ter he would drag
around with him a disabled limb to the end
of the chapter, when he as suddenly recovered
the use of it. I sometimes wonder if his game
leg takes part in cabinet discussions. If it
does, I will warrant the country will know of
it, though it may not be able to identify the
ailment. I give it as a hint to nations that may
be meditating provocation of Uncle Sam. I
should beware of provoking the President's
game leg.

Which reminds me of the time we plotted
against him in Mulberry Street, putting in
quarters at a raffle at an Italian feast. The
raffle was for a sheep which we hoped to win,
and to lead to Headquarters in procession,
headed by the Italian band. We even took Mr.
Roosevelt around and made him spend five
quarters in his own prospective undoing. But
we did n't win the sheep. It was the Widow
Motso on the third floor back who did; and
when I heard her rapturous cry, and saw her

[999]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

hug the sheep then and there, and kiss its black
nose, I was glad the plot miscarried. The
widow killed the sheep the next day. Roose-
velt never knew what he had escaped. It was
all my way of paying him for calling sheep
"woolly idiots/* whereas they are my special
pets. There is no animal I like so much as a
sheep. It is so absolutely, comfortably stupid.
You don't have to put sense into it, because
you can't.

I am tempted to tell you of more jokes, for
he loves one dearly so long as it hurts no one's
feelings. Two timid parsons found that out
who saw Mr. Gilder shake hands with him at
a reception and express the hope that " he
would not embroil us in any foreign war."

" What," cried the President, " a war? with
me cooped up here in the White House 1
Never, gentlemen, never! " I wonder what the
parsons thought when they caught their breath.
Perhaps the man I met on a railroad train and
told the story to, expressed it. " There, you
see," said he ; " he says it himself. If he could
get away he wotdd start a fight." His fun
sometimes takes the form of mock severity with
intimate friends. In the swarm of officials that

[800]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

came to wish the President a happy New Year
were the Civil Service Commissioners, headed
by John R. Procter, his old colleague, all men
after his own heart. Mr. Procter still laughed
at the recollection of that New Year's greet-
ing when I saw him last.* The President
drew himself up at their approach and re-
marked with stiff dignity, loud enough for all
to hear:

" The moral tone of the room is distinctly
lowered."

No one need ever have any fear that Roose-
velt will get the country into an undignified
position. If unfamiliarity with a situation
should lead him off the track, take my word for
it he will take the straight, common-sense way
out, and get there. The man who in his youth
could describe Tammany as " a highly organ-
ized system of corruption tempered with ma-
levolent charity," and characterize a mutual ac-
quaintance, a man with cold political ambitions
whom I deemed devoid of sentiment, as having
both, but "keeping them in different com-

^ Poor friend! As the printer brings me the proof of this, I
hear of his death. There was never a more loyal heart, a more
dauntless soul than his. The world is poorer, indeed, for his
going from us.

[301]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

partments/' can be trusted to find a way out of
any dilemma.

If he got into one, that is to say. I know him
well enough to be perfectly easy on that score.
It seems to me that all the years I have watched
him he has tackled problems that were new and
strange to him, with such simple common sense
that the difficulties have vanished before you
could make them out; and the more difficult
the problem the plainer his treatment of it.
We were speaking about the Northern Secu-
rities suits one day.

" I do not claim to be a financial expert," he
said ; ^^ but it does not take a financial expert
to tell that, the law being that two small men
shall not combine to the public injury, if I al-
low two big men to do it I am setting up that
worst of stumbling-blocks in a country like
ours, which persuades the poor man that if
he has money enough the law will not apply
to him. That is elementary and needs no train-
ing a financier. So in this matter of pub-
licity of trust accounts. Publicity hurts no
honest business, and is not feared by the man
of straight methods. The man whose methods
are crooked is the man whose game I would

[803]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

block. Those who complain know this per-
fectly well, and their complaining betrays
them. Again, with honest money— I did not
need any financier to tell me that a short-weight
dollar is not an honest dollar to pay full-
weight dollar debts with/'

I thought of the wise newspaper editors who
had been at such pains to explain to us how
Roosevelt was responsible for the " unsettled
condition" of Wall Street. Their house of
cards, built up with such toilsome arguing,
was just then falling to pieces, and the news
columns in their own papers were giving us an
inside view of what it was that had been going
on in the financial market, and why some se-
curities remained "undigested.*' Water and
wind are notoriously a bad diet ; and what else
to call the capitalization of a concern at thirty
millions that rated itself at five, would puzzle,
I imagine, even a " financial expert."

And has he then no faults, this hero of mine?
Yes, he has, and I am glad of it, for I want
a live man for a friend, not a dead saint— they
are the only ones, I notice, who have no faults.
He talks, they say, and I hope he will keep
on, for he luus that to say whidi the world needs

[303]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

to hear and cannot hear too long or too often.
I don't think that he could keep a scrap-hook,
if he tried. I am sure he could not. It is not
given to man once in a thousand years to make
and to record history at the same time. But
then it is not his business to keep scrap-books.
I know he cannot dance, for I have seen a
letter from a lady who reminded him of how
he " trod strenuously " on her toes in the old
dancing-school days when the world was
young. And I have heard him sing— that he
cannot do. The children think it perfectly
lovely, but he would never pass for an artist.
And when the recruit in camp accosted him
with " Say, are you the Lieutenant-Colonel?
The Colonel is looking for you," he did not
order him under arrest or jab him with his
sword, but merely told him to " Come with me
and see how I do it " ; which was quite irregu-
lar, of course, if it did make a soldier out of
a raw recruit. Oh, yesl I suppose he has his
faults, though all these years I have been so
busy finding out good things in him that were
new to me, that I have never had time to look
for them. But when I think of him, gentle,
loyal, trusting friend, helpful, unselfish ever,

[304]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

ehampion of all that is good and noble and
honest ; when I read in an old letter that strays
into my hands his brave, patient words: " We
have got to march and fight for the right as
we see it, and face defeat and victory just as

they come " ; and in another : " As for what

say of my standing alone, why, I wiU if I must,
but no one is more heartened by such support
as you give than I am " — ^why, I feel that if
that is the one thing I can do, I will do that;
that, just as he is, with or without faults, I
would rather stand with him and be counted
than anywhere else on God's green earth. For,
standing so, I know that I shall count always
for our beloved country, which his example and
his friendship have taught me to love beyond
my own native land. And that is what I would
do till I die.

There is yet one side of Theodore Roosevelt
upon which I would touch, because I know
the question to be on many lips ; though I ap-
proach it with some hesitation. For a man's
religious beliefs are his own, and he is not one
to speak lightly of what is in his heart con-
cerning the hope of heaven. But though he is
of few public professions, yet is he a reverent

[305]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

man, of practice, in private and public, ever in
accord with the highest ideals of Christian
manliness. His is a militant faith, bomid on
the mission of helping the world ahead; and
in that campaign he welcomes gladly whoever
would help. For the man who is out merely
to purchase for himself a seat in heaven, what-
ever befall his brother, he has nothing but con-
tempt; for him who struggles painfuUy toward
the light, a helping hand and a word of cheer
always. With forms of every kind he has tol-
erant patience— for what they mean. For the
mere husk emptied of all meaning he has little
regard. The soul of a thing is to him the use it
is of. Speaking of the circuit-riders of old, he
said once : " It is such missionary work that
prevents the pioneers from sinking perilously
near the level of the savagery against which
they contend. Without it, the conquest of this
continent would have had little but an ani-
mal side. Because of it, deep beneath and
through the national character there runs that
power of firm adherence to a lofty ideal upon
which the safety of the nation will ultimately
depend."

He himself declared his faith in the closing

[906]

THE DESPAIR OF POLITICIANS

words of his address to the Young Men's
Christian Association in New York City the
night before he surrendered his stewardship
as Governor into the hands of the people;
and so let him stand before his countrymen
and before the world :

" The true Christian is the true citizen, lofty
of purpose, resolute in endeavor, ready for a
hero's deeds, but never looking do^vn on his
task because it is cast in the day of small
things; scornful of baseness, awake to his own
duties as well as to his rights, following the
higher law with reverence, and in this world
doing all that in him lies, so that when death
comes he may feel that mankind is in some
degree better because he has lived."

[307]

XIII
AT HOME AND AT PLAY

THE Sylph had weighed anchor and was
standing out for the open, sped on her
way by a small gale that blew out of a
bank of black cloud in the southeast. The sail-
ors looked often and hard over the rail at the
gathering gloom, the white-caps in the Sound,
and the scudding drift overhead, prophesying
trouble. A West Indian cyclone that had de-
stroyed the crops in Jamaica and strewn our
coast with wrecks had been lost for two days.
It looked very much as if the Sylph, carrying
the President from Oyster Bay to New York,
had found it. And, indeed, before we reached
the forts that guard the approach to the city,
a furious hurricane churned the waters of the
Sound and of the clouds into a maddening
whirl in which it seemed as if so small a ship

[311]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

could never live. A tug went down within hail ;
but only the sailors knew it. The passengers
had been cleared from the deck, that the Sylph
might be stripped of its awnings and every rag
of canvas which might help throw it over if the
worst happened. We went gladly enough, for
the deck had ceased to be a comfortable or even
a safe place, — all except the President, who had
fallen out of the general conversation and into
a comer by himself, with a book. A sailor con-
fronted him with an open knife in his hand.

" Mr. President," he said, " orders are to cut
away " ; and without any more ado he slashed at
the awning overhead, cutting its fastenings.
The President woke up and retreated. Fol-
lowing him down into the cabin, I came upon
Mrs. Roosevelt placidly winding yam from the
hands of the only other woman passenger.
They were both as calm as though Government
tugs were not chasing up the river as hard as
they could go to the rescue of our boat, sup-
posed to be in peril of shipwreck.

But at the moment I am thinking of, the hur-
ricane was as yet only a smart blow. We were
steaming out past Centre Island, under the
rugged shore where Sagamore Hill lay hid

[319]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

among the foliage. The President stood at the
rail surveying the scenes he loves. Here he
had played as a hoy, and dreamed a boy's
dreams; here he had grown to manhood; here
his children were growing up around him,
happy and healthy boys and girls. We passed
a sandy bluff sloping sheer into the Sound
from under its crown of trees.

" See," he said, pointing to it. " Cooper's
Bluff 1 Three generations of Roosevelts have
raced down its slope. We did, only yesterday.
Good run, that 1 "

And as the Sylph swept by I made out three
lines .of track, hugging each other close,— a
man's long, sturdy stride and the smaller feet
of Archie and Kermit racing their father down-
hill. Half-way down they had slipped and
sUd, scooping up the sand in great furrows. I
could almost hear their shouts and laughter
ringing yet in the woods.

Sagamore Hill is the family sanctuary, whi-
ther they come back in June with one long
sigh of relief that their holiday is in sight, in
which they may have one another. No longer to
themselves, it is true. The President is not
permitted to be alone even in his own home.

[SIS]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

But still they have days of seclusion, and
nights, — that greatest night in the year, when
the President goes camping with the boys.
How much it all meant to him I never fully
realized till last Election day, when I went
with him home to vote. The sun shone so
bright and warm, when he came out from
among his old neighbors, who crowded around
to shake hands, that a longing came over him
for the old place, and we drove out to Saga-
more Hill to catch a glimpse of it in its Indian-
summer glory. Four dogs came bounding out
with joyous barks and leaped upon him, and he
caressed them and called them by name, each
and every one, while they whined with delight,
— " Sailor-boy " happiest of the lot, a big,
clmnsy, but loyal fellow, " of several good
breeds," said the President, whimsically. They
followed him around as he went from tree to
tree, and from shrub to shrub, visiting with each
one, admiring the leaf of this and the bark of
that, as if they were personal friends. And so
they were ; for he planted them all. Seeing him
with them, I grasped the real meaning of the
family motto. Qui plantavit curabit, that stands
carved in the beam over the door looking north

[SU]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

toward the hiU with the cedars, where the soil is
warm and full of white pebbles, and it is nice to
lie in the grass when strawberries are ripe.

Roses were blooming stiU, and heUotrope
and sweet alyssmn, in Mrs. Roosevelt's garden,
and down at the foot of the long lawn a wild
vine crept caressingly over the stone that
marks the resting-place of the children's pets.
" Faithful Friends " is hewn in its rough face,
with the names of " Susie," " Jessie," and
" Boz." How many rabbits, rats, and guinea-
pigs keep them company in their ghostly revels
I shall not say. No one knows unless it be
Kermit, who has his own ways and insists upon
decent but secret burial as among the inalien-
able rights of defunct pets. It was his discov-
ery, one day in the White House, that a rabbit
belonging to Archie lay unburied in the garden
a whole day after its demise, whidi brought
about a court-martial in the nursery. Ted, the
oldest brother, was Judge-Advocate-G^neral,
and his judgment was worthy of a Solomon.

" It was Archie's rabbit," he said gravely,
when all the evidence was in, " and it is Archie's
funeral. Let him have it in peace."

Poor " Susie "—ill named, for " she " was a

[815]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

he— came nearer to provoking irreverence in
me, by making me laugh in church, than any-
thing that has happened since I was a boy. I
had come out on a Sunday, and finding the
President's carriage at the church, went in to
join in the worship while waiting for him.
" Susie " lay in the vestibule, and at sight of
me manifested his approval by pounding the
floor with his club tail until the sound of it re-
verberated through the building like rolling
thunder. The door opened, and a pale young
man came out to locate the sotu'ce of the dis-
turbance. Discovering it in " Susie's " tail, he
grabbed him by the hind legs and dragged him
around so that the blows might fall on the soft
door-mat. But " Susie," pleased with the ex-
tra attention paid him, hammered harder than
ever, and in his delight stretched himself so far
that his tail still struck the hollow floor. I was
convulsed with laughter, but never a smile
crossed the countenance of the proper young
man. He studied " Susie " thoughtfully, made
a mental diagram of his case, then took a fresh
hold and dragged him aroimd, this time to a
safe harbor, where he might wag as he would
without breaking the Sabbath peace. I am

[316]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

glad I sat five seats behind Mr. Roosevelt dur-
ing the rest of the service, and that he knew
nothing of " Susie's" doings; for if he had
turned his head and given me as much as one
look, I should have broken right out laughing
and made a scandal.

When we drove back to the village that No-
vember day I caught him looking back once or
twice toward the house in its bower of crimson
shrubs, and I saw that his heart was there. You
would not wonder if you knew it. I never go
away from Sagamore Hill without a feeling
that if I lived there I would never leave it, and
that nothing would tempt me to exchange it for
the White House, with all it stands for. But
then I am ten years older than Theodore Roose-
velt ; though it isn't always the years that count.
For I think if it came to a vote, the children
would carry my proposition with a shout. Not
that Sagamore Hill has anything to suggest
a palace. Quite the contrary: it is a very
modest home for the President of the United
States. On a breezy hilltop overlooking field
and forest and Sound, with the Connecticut
shore on the northern horizon, its situation is
altogether taking. The house is comfortable,

[317]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

mied with reminders of the stirring life its
owner has led in camp and on the hmiting-trail,
and with a hroad piazza on the side that catches
the cool winds of smnmer. But it is homelike
rather than imposing. It is the people them-
selves who put the stamp upon it, — ^the life they
live there together.

Truly, together. The President is hoy with
his boys there. He puts off the cares of state
and takes a hand in their games; and if they
lagged before, they do not lag then. It is he
who sets Josiah, the badger, free, and bids all
hands skip, and skip lively; for Josiah's one
conscious aim, when out of his cage, appears to
be to nip a leg,-any leg, even a Presidential
kg. witL JL.-L L makes for them .11
successively in his funny, preoccupied way. Jo-
siah, then a very small baby badger, was heaved
on board the Presidential train out in Kansas
last year, by a little girl who shouted his name
after the train, and was brought up on a nurs-
ing-bottle till he cut his teeth. Since then he has
been quite able to shift for himself. At pres-
ent he looks more like a small, flat mattress,
with a leg under each comer, than anything
else. That is the President's description of

[818]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

him, and it is a very good one. I wish I could
have shown you him one morning last summer
when, having vainly chased the President and
aU the children, he laid siege to Archie in his
hammock. Archie was barelegged and pru-
dently stayed where he was, but the hammock
hung within a few inches of the grass. Josiah
promptly made out a strategic advantage there,
and went for the lowest point of it with snap-
ping jaws. Archie's efforts to shift continu-
ously his center of gravity while watching his
chance to grab the badger by its defenseless
back, was one of the f imniest performances I
ever saw. Josiah lost in the end.

The President himself teaches his boys how
to shoot; he swims with them in the cove and
goes with them on long horseback rides, start-
ing sometimes before sunrise. On fine days, as
often as he can get away, limcheon is packed in
the row-boat and he takes the whole family
rowing to some distant point on the shore,
which even the secret service men have not dis-
covered, and there they spend the day, the
President pulling the oars going and coming.
Or else he takes Mrs. Roosevelt alone on a little
jaunt, and these two, over whose honeymoon

[319]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

the years have no dominion, have a day to them-
selves, from which he returns to wrestle with
powers and principalities and postmasters with
twice the grip he had before; for she is truly
his helpmeet and as wise as she is gentle and
good.

When he wants to be alone, he dons a flannel
shirt, shoulders an ax, and betakes himself to
some secluded spot in the woods where there
are trees to fell. Then the sounds that echo
through the forest glade teU sometimes, unless
I greatly mistake, of other things than lifeless
logs that are being smitten,— postmasters let us
say. I remember the story of Lincoln, whom
one of the foreign ambassadors found pacing
the White House garden in evident distress,
at a time when Lee was having his own way
with the Union armies ; whereat the ambassador
expressed his regret that the news from the
field so distressed the President.

" From the field? " said Mr. Lincohi. " If
that were all I No^ it is that wretched postmas-
tership of Brownsville that makes life a bur-
den." ♦

I have met Mr. Roosevelt coming in with
his ax, and with a look that told of obsti-
nate knots smashed— yes, I think they were

[390]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

smashed. I fancy tougher things than post-
masters would have a hard time resisting the
swing of that strong and righteous arm bound
on hewing its way ; wolves howling in the woods
would n't stay it, I know, — not for a minute.

The great day is when he goes campmg
with the boys. The Sagamore Hill boys and
their cousins whose summer homes are near
plan it for months ahead. A secluded spot
alongshore is chosen, with good water and a
nice sand beach handy, and the expedition sets
out with due secrecy, the White House guards-
men being left behind to checkmate the report-
ers and the camera fiends. Mr. Roosevelt is sail-
ing-master and chief of the jolly band. Along
in the afternoon they reach their hiding-place ;
then bait and fishing-poles are got ready — for
they are real campers-out, not make-believes,
and though they have grub on board, fish they
must. When they have caught enough, the
boys bring wood and build a fire. The Presi-
dent rolls up his sleeves and turns cook.

" Um-m 1 " says Archie ; " you oughter taste
my father's beefsteak! He tumbles them all
in together,— meat, onions, and potatoes, — but,
um-ml it is good."

I warrant it is, and that they eat their fill I

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I have n't forgotten the potatoes I roasted by
the brook in the wood-lot when I was a boy.
No such potatoes grow nowadays.

Afterward, they sit aroimd the fire, wrapped
in blankets, and tell bear-stories and ghost-
stories, while the children steal furtive glances
at the shadows closing in upon the circle of
flickering light. They are not afraid, those
children. The word is not in the Sagamore
Hill dictionary. The spectacle of little Archie,
hatless, guiding a stalwart Rough-Rider
through the twilight woods, telling him to fol-
low his white head and not be afraid of
bogies,— they won't hurt him,— is a joy to me
forever. But when owls are hooting in the dark
woods I like to hug the fire myself. It feds
twice as good then.

When the stars shine out in the sky over-
head, they stretch themselves with their feet to
the fire, roll up in their blankets, and sleep
the imtroubled sleep of the woods. The sim,
peeping over the trees, finds them sporting in
the cool, salt water; and long before the day
begins for the world of visitors they are back
home, a happy, roistering crew.

The Roosevelts have foimd (if they have

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

not always had it; certainly the President's
father did) the secret that binds families to-
gether with bonds which nothing can break:
they are children with their boys and girls.
How simple a secret, yet how many of us have
lost it ! I did not even know I was one of them,
or what it was that had come between me and
my little lad— the one who figured out after
hours of deep study, when our second grand-
child was bom, that now he was " two xmcles **
— until one bright day last summer when I
went fishing with him. I wanted to know where
he went when he disappeared for whole days at
a time ; and when I volunteered to dig the bait
by a new method that made the worms come
up of themselves to locate a kind of earthquake
I was causing, he took me by many secret
paths to a pond hidden deep in the woods a
mile away, which was his preserve. There we
sat solemnly angling for shiners an inch long,
with bent pins on Unes of thread, and were
nearly eaten up by mosquitoes. But to him it
was lovely, and so it was to me, for it gave me
back my boy. That evening, on the way home,
his boyish hand stole into mine with a new con-
fidence. We were chums now, and all was well.

[323]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

When they were little, the Roosevelt boys
and girls went to the Cove school, which is the
public school of the district, where the children
of the gardener and the groom go, as well as
those of their employers if they live there in
the school season. Now, in Washington, the
Roosevelts f oUow the same plan. The public
school first, as far as it will carry the children
to advantage, thereafter the further training
for college. It is the thoroughly soimd and
sensible way in which they do all things in the
Sagamore Hill family. So only can we get
a grip on the real life we all have to live in a
democracy of which, when aU is said and done,
the public school is the main prop. So, and
in no other way, can we hold the school to ac-
count, and so do we fight from the very start
tiie class spirit that is the arch enemy of the re-
public. , If it could be done that way, I would
have it ordered by law that every American
child, be its parents rich or poor, should go
certain years to public school. Only it cannot
be done that way, but must be left to the citi-
zens' common sense that in the end has to be
coimted with everywhere.

All real children are democrats if left to their

[324]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

natural bent, and the Roosevelt children are
real children. At Groton I met Ted, the old-
est, with his arm in a sling, a token from the
football game and also from a scrap he had had
with another lad who called him " the first boy
in the land " and got a good drubbing for it.
" I wish," said Ted to me in deep disgust, " that
my father would soon be done holding oflBice.
I am sick and tired of it."

It was not long after that that Ted fell ill
with pneumonia, and his brother Archie sent
him his painfully scrawled message of sympa-
thy: " I hop you are beter." His father keeps
it, I knowfi m leered place in hi, hJk
where lie treasured the memories of letters in
childish scrawl that brought home even to the
trenches before Santiago, with the shrapnel
cracking overhead.

There are other lessons than spelling and
grammar to be learned in Washington,— les-
sons of democracy, too, in their way. I have
heard of the policeman of the White House
Squad who was discharged for cause, and ap-
pealed to the little lad who answers roll-call
with the police on holidays and salutes the ser-
geant as gravely as the men in blue and brass.

[325]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Archie heaxd him out. »Appeal to his father
direct was cut off— the policeman knew why.
But Senator Lodge, who is next friend of the
President and is supposed to have a " pull,"
lives in Massachusetts Avenue, opposite Ar-
chie's school. That was it.

"You come around," were Archie's direc-
tions to his friend, " to the Force School to-
morrow, and we will see what Lodge can do
about it"

What " Lodge did " I don't know. I know
it would have been hard for me to resist.

It was the privilege of Mr. Roosevelt, when
he was nearer home, to give the children at the
Cove school their Christmas gifts, and the mem-
ory of those occasions is very lively in Oyster
Bay. Mr. Roosevelt made a good Santa Claus,
never better than when he was just home from
the war, with San Juan hill for a backgroimd.
That time he nearly took the boys' breath away.
Nowadays some one else has to take his place ;
the gifts come, as in the past, and the little
" coves " are made happy. But the President
comes into their lives only twice or three times
^ year — at Christmas and when he comes home
for his vacation; perhaps on the Fourth of

[326}

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

July. Mrs. Roosevelt is part of it all the time,
and a very lovely because a loving part of life
in the little village. When I hear of her go-
ing about among its people, their friend and
neighbor in the true sense, I think of her hus-
band's father, the elder Theodore, who syste-
matically took one day out of six for personal
visitation among his poor friends; and how
near they, both he and she, have come to the
mark which the rest of us go all around and
miss with such prodigious toil and trouble.
Neighborliness, — that covers the ground. It
is all that is needed.

They have a sewing-circle in Oyster Bay, the
St. Hilda chapter of the Society of Christ
Church, which the Roosevelts attend ; and of its
twenty-odd members, embracing the wives of
the harness-maker, the conductor, the oyster-
man,— the townspeople whom she has known all
her married life,— there is no more faithful at-
tendant at the Thursday-afternoon meetings
than Mrs. Roosevelt. She brings her own
thimble and cotton, and hems and sews with
the rest of them the little garments of outing-
flannel or unbleached muslin that are worn by
the child cripples in the House of St. Giles,

[397]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Brooklyn, the while she gossips with them and
tells aU about the fine doings in Washington*
I saw not long ago in a newspaper that some
thoughtless woman who had demanded of Mrs.
Roosevelt a gift for a church fair, and had re-
ceived a handkerchief hemmed by herself, had
sent it back with the message that something
better was wanted. I hope this which I am
writing here will come under her eye and make
her sorry for what she did. At that very time
the President's wife, with six children whose
bringing up she supervises herself, and with
all the social burdens of the mistress of the
White House upon her shoulders, was patiently
cutting and sewing a half-dozen nightgowns
for the little tortured limbs of her crippled
friends, and doing it aU herself for love's sake.
She had brought them with her from Oyster
Bay and finished them in the White House,
where, I suppose, the church-fair woman
thought she was being amused to keep from
perishing of ennui.

/ They recall in that sewing-circle the days of
the war, when Mrs. Roosevelt, walking down
from the hill every Thursday to their meeting,
and never betraying by word or look the care

[3281

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

that gnawed at her heart, grew thin and pale
as the days went by with news of fighting and
her husband in the thick of it; till on the day
of San Juan hill the rector's wife caught her
impetuously into her embrace before them all,
and told her that Colonel Roosevelt was a hero,
without doubt, " but you are three."

And they tell, while they wipe a tear away
with the apron corner, of the consumptive girl
lying in her bed longing for the bright world
which she would never see, to whom the then
Vice-President's wife brought back from the
inauguration ball her dance-card and her bou-
quet, and all the little trinkets she could gather
for her in Washington, to make her heart glad.
No wonder they think her a saint. There are
those m Washington, m need and in sorrow,
I am told, who would think so, too, did they
know the whence of the helping hand that
comes just in time. It was so in Albany, I
know. No one ever appealed to the Governor's
wife without having his case intelligently and
sjmipathetically inquired into, so that she might
know exactly how to help. Mrs. Roosevelt
does not believe in wasting anjrthing, least of all
sweet charity. With her husband she wisely

[339]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

maintains that the poorest service one can ren*>
der his neighbor is to carry him when he ought
to walk.

As for the St. Hilda circle, its measure was
full last summer when Mrs. Roosevelt took it
out in a body on the Sylph to the naval review
in the Soimd, and the great ships gave them the
Presidential salute,— or the Sylph, anywaY,
which was the same thing. Were they not on
board, its honored guests?

The same simple way of Hving that has al-
ways been theirs at home, they carried with
them to the White House. I do not know how
other Presidents lived, for I was never there
before, but I imagine no one ever led a more
plain and wholesome life than the Roosevelts
do. I cannot think that there was ever a family
there that had so good a time. The children
are still the mother's chief care. They have
their hour that is for them only, when she
reads to them or tells them stories in her room,
and at all other hours they are privileged to in-
trude except when, on Tuesday, their mother
entertains the cabinet ladies in the library. She
is never too busy to listen to their little stories
of childish pleasure and trouble, and they bring

[830]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

to her everything, from the first dandelion
Quentin found in the White Lot to the latest
prank of Algonquin, the calico pony that was
smuggled up in the elevator to Archie when
he was sick with the measles. Algonquin is
about the size of a big Newfoundland dog,
but twice as lively with his heels. That was a
prank of the stable-boy, aided and abetted, I
imagine, by the doorkeeper, who had been a
boy himself, and to whom the swiftly flashing
legs of Archie in the corridors of the old build-
ing are like spring come again. They all love
him; no one can help it.

But I must not be tempted to write about
the children, since then there would be no end,
and this is a story of their father.

I might even be led to betray the secret of
tiie morning battles with pillows when the
children, in stealthy, night-robed array, am-
bush their father and compel him to ignomin-
ious surrender if they catch him "down.''
That is the rule of the game. I remember
the morning when they came swarming down
about him, rejoicing in their victory, and his
sober counsel to them to go slow thenceforth,
for Rose, their maid, whom they brought with

[331]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

them from Oyster Bay, and whom wild horses
could n't drag away from the Roosevelts, had
protested that they mussed the beds too much.
I have read of President Jackson making
an isolated ward of the White House, and
himself nursing a faithful attendant who was
stricken with the smallpox, when his fellow-ser-
vants had run away ; and of Lincoln laughingly
accepting General Grant's refusal of the din-
ner Mrs. Lincoln had planned in his honor,
because he had " had enough of the show busi-
ness." The Colonel of the Rough-Riders
bowing obediently before the law of the house-
hold, and retreating before Rose where she was
rightfully in command, belongs with them in
my gallery of heroes; and not a bit less hero
does he seem to me, but more.

The White House in its new shape— or, ra-
ther, as restored to the plan that was in the
minds of the builders— is in its simple dignity
as beautiful a mansion as any land has to
show, altogether a fitting residence for the
President of the American Republic. The
change is apparent to the casual visitor as soon
as he enters the great haU, where the noble
white pillars have been set free, as it were, from

[339]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

their hideously incongruous environment of
stained glass and partition, and stand out in
all their massive beauty. Really, the hall is as
handsome a place as I have ever seen. Up-
stairs, where the public does not come, a wide
corridor, I should think quite twenty feet,
that is in itself a cozy living-room, with its
prevailing colors dark green and gray, runs
the whole length of the building from east
to west, and upon it open the family rooms
and the guest-rooms. The great hall makes
a splendid ball-ground, as I know from expe-
rience, for I joined Ethel and Archie in a
game there, which they would have won by
about 99 to 0, I should say, if there had been
any score, which there was n't. At the east
end of the haU is the President's den, where
the lamp bums late into the smaU hours many
a night when the world sleeps without. There
he keeps the swords and the sticks with which
he takes vigorous exercise when he cannot ride.
The woodman's ax he leaves behind at Oyster
Bay.

The day begins at exactly 8 : 80 at the White
House. The President himself pours the cof -^
fee at breakfast. It is one of his privileges, and

[333]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

he looks fine as host. I can ahnost hear my
woman reader say, '"What do they eat at a
White House breakfast? " Oatmeal, eggs and
bacon, coffee and rolls— there is one morning's
menu. I don't think they would object to my
telling, and I like to think that in thouisands of
homes all over our land they are sharing the
President's breakfast, as it were. It brings us
all so much nearer together, and that is where
we belong. That was why I told of the chil-
dren's play. And if there is any who thinks
that his sporting with the little ones when it
is the hour of play makes him any less fitted for
the work he has to do for all of us,— why, he
never made a bigger mistake. Ask the politi-
cians and the place-seekers who come to see
him in the early hours of the afternoon, and
hear what they think of it.

From breakfast to luncheon the President is
in his office, seeing the people who come from
everywhere to shake hands, or with messages
for the Chief Magistrate.

Along in the afternoon the horses are
brought up and the President goes riding with
Mrs. Roosevelt or alone. Once I heard him
tempt Secretary Root to go, and the Secretary

[8S4]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

agreed if he would guarantee that Wyoming,
the horse he oif ered him, would not kneel. He
was averse to foreign customs, he said.

" Yes," laughed the President, " you are
a good American citizen, and home ways are
good enough for you."

I have a ride on Wyommg coming to me,
and I am glad. I was cheated out of it the
last time, because Washington had so tired me
out that the President would not take me.
And Wyoming can kneel if he wants to. I
think I would let him jump a fence with me
where his master led. I guess I know how
his Rough-Riders felt.

That was the only time Washington tired
me out. I had come to help tackle its slums,
for it has them, more 's the pity. Ordinarily it
is one of my holiday cities : I have three, Wash-
ington, Boston, and Springfield, Massachu-
setts. As to Boston and Springfield, I suppose
it is just because I like them. But Washington
is a holiday city to me because he is there. When
he was in Albany that was one. To Washing-
ton I take my wife when we want to be young
again, and we go and sit in the theater and
weep over the miseries of the lovers, and rejoice

[SSS]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

with them when it all comes right in the end.
There should be a law to make all lovers happy
in the end, and to slay all the villains, at least
in the national capital. And then, nowadays,
we go to the White House, and that is the best
of all. I shall never forget the Christmas be-
fore last, when I told the President and Mrs.
Roosevelt at breakfast of my old mother who
was sick in Denmark and longing for her boy,
and my hostess's gentle voice as she said,
" Theodore, let us cable over our love to her."
And they did. Before that winter day was
at an end (and the twilight shadows were steal-
ing over the old town by the bleak North Sea
even while we breakfasted in Washington) the
telegraph messenger, in a state of bewilder-
ment,— I dare say he has not got over it yet, —
brought mother this despatch:

" The White House, Dec. 20, 1902.
" Mes. Riis, Ribe, Denmark :

" Your son is breakfasting with us. We send
you our loving sympathy.

" Theodobe and Edith Roosevelt."

Where is there a mother who would not get
up out of a sick-bed when she received a mes-

{SS6]

AT HOME AND AT PLAY

sage like that, even though at first she would
not believe it was true? And where is the son
who would not cherish the deed and the doer
forever in his heart of hearts? But it is the
doing of that sort of thing that is their dear
delight, those two ; and that is why I am writing
about them here, for I would like every one to
know them just as they are. Here is a friend
Vay out in Kansas, whose letter came this min-
ute, writing, " the President who walks through
your pages is a very heroic and kingly figure,
a very Arthur among his knights at the round
table." Truly the President is that. I think
we can all begin to make it out, except those who
are misled and those in whose natures there is
nothing to which the kingly in true manhood
appeals. But could I show you him as he really
is, as husband, father, and friend, you would
have to love him even if you disagreed with
him about everything. You just could n't help
it any more than could one of the old-time em-
ployes in the White House who stopped beside
me as I stood looking at him coming across
from the Executive Ofiice the other day.

" There he is," said he, and his face lighted
up. " I don't know what there is about that man

[837]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

to make me feel so. I have seen a good many
Presidents come and go in this old house, and I
liked them all. They were all good and kind;
but I declare I feel as if I could go twice as
far and twice as quick when he asks me to, and
do it twice as gladly."

I guess he knows, too, how his Rough-Riders
felt about their ColoneL

[988]

XIV
CHILDREN TRUST HIM

WHEN the President came back from
his long Western trip, I went to
meet him on the Long Island
ferry. I had myself returned from the Western
country a little while before, a very tired man,
though I had only to lecture once each night;
and when I remembered his experience on that
record-breaking journey I expected to meet a
jaded, worn-out man. But his powers of physi-
cal endurance are truly marvelous. I found
him as fresh, to all appearances, as if he had
been off in the woods on a hunt instead of
shaking hands with and being entertained by
half the nation. No doubt going home was
part of it; for he knew how they had counted
the days to his return at Sagamore Hill, and
now an hour or two— then he should see them.

[841]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

His eyes fairly danced as he sat down to tell
me of the trip. There was so much, he said,
that it would take a month. And then, as in
mind he went back over the thousands of miles
he had traveled, the Sunday quiet of a little
Kansas prairie town, and a picture from the
service that brought the farmers in from fifty
miles around, stood out among all the rest.
The children came to his car to take him to
church, and when the people had all been
seated two little girls for whom there was no
room stood by his pew. He took them in
and shared his hynm-book with them, and the
three sang together, they with their clear girl-
ish voices, he with his deep bass. They were
not afraid or embarrassed; he was just their
big brother for the time. And there was the
tenderness in his voice I love to hear as he
told me of them.

" You should have seen their innocent little
faces. They were so dainty and clean in their
starched dresses, with their vellow braids
straight down their backs. And they thanked
me so sweetly for sharing the book with them
that it was a hardship not to catch them up
in one's arms and hug them then and there."

[349]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

Some of the party told me of the reception
that followed, and of the little fellow who
squirmed and squirmed in the grasp of the
President's hand, twisting this way and that,
in desperate search of something, until Mr.
Roosevelt asked him whom he was looking for.

" The President," gasped the lad, twisting
harder to get away, for fear he would lose his
chance. And then the look of amazed incredu-
lity that came into his face when the man who
still had him by the hand said that he was the
President. He must have felt as I did when I
first met King Christian in Copenhagen, and
learned who the man in the blue overcoat was,
with whom I had such a good time telling him
all about my boyish ambitions and my father
and home, while we climbed the stairs to the
picture exhibition in the palace of Charlotten-
borg. The idea of a real king in an overcoat
and a plain hat I I had had my doubts about
whether he took off his crown when he went to
bed at night.

That is the boy of it, I suppose ; and they are
all alike. If any, you would think the preco-
cious youngster from the East-side Jewry
would be excepted; but he is not. I have a

[348]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

fairly representative specimen in mind, who
wrote home from his vacation in Maine, "' Tom
Reed has seen me twice." But when at last the
privilege was vouchsafed to President Roose-
velt, speedb and sense forsook our East-sider,
and he stood and looked on, gaping, the fine
oration he had conmiitted to memory clean
gone out of his head. He explained his break
after the President was gone.

" Why," he gasped, " he was just like any
other plain-clothes man ! "

A ribbon or sash, at least, with a few stars
and crosses, a fellow might have expected.
And, when you come to think of it, it is not
so strange. Look at the general of the army in
gala suit, and at the President, his commander-
in-chief. Which makes me think again of
Mr. Cleveland, who, when he was governor,
togged out his staff in the most gorgeous
clothes ever seen, and when heading it on his
way to a public function, himself in plain black,
was stopped by an underling, who took one
glance at the procession and waved it back*

" The band goes the other way," he said.

Long years after, Mr. Cleveland had not
stopped laughing at the recollection of the look

[S44]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

that sat upon the faces of the gold-laced com-
pany of distinguished citizens.

But I was thinking of President Roosevelt's
affection for children. It is just the experi-
ence of an unspoiled nature that reaches out
for what is pure and natural. I remember that
the day we were making the trip of the tene-
ment-house sweat-shops together, we came, in
one of the Italian flats, upon a little family
scene. A little girl was going to confirmation,
all dressed in white, with flowers and veil. She
stood by her grandmother's chau- in the dingy
room, a radiant vision, with reverently bowed
head as the aged hand was laid in trembling
benediction upon her brow. The Governor
stopped on the threshold and surveyed the
scene with kindling eyes.

" Sweet child," he said, and learned her
name and age from the parents, who received
us with the hospitable courtesy of their peo-
ple. " Tell them," to the interpreter, " that
I am glad I came in to see her, and that I be-
lieve she will be always as good and innocent
as she is now, and a very great help to her
mother and her venerable grandmother." That
time I did get a chance to tell them who it was

[845]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

that had come to the feast, so that it might add
to the pleasure of the day for them. I just
sneaked back and told them.

The children usually take to him, as he to
them, in the same perfect good faith. We saw
it in Mulberry Street, after he had gone, when
two little tots came from over on the East Side
asking for "the Commissioner," that they
might obtain justice. I can see them now: the
older a little hunchback girl, with her poor
shawl pinned over her head and the sober look
of a child who has known want and pinching
poverty at an age when she should have been
at play, dragging her reluctant baby brother
by the hand. His cheeks were tear-stained,
and his little nose was bruised and bloody, and
he was altogether an unhappy boy, in his role
of ;' evidence," under the scrutiny of *e big
policeman at the door. It was very plain that
he would much rather not have been there.
But the decrees of fate were no more merciless
than his sister's grasp on him as she marched
him in and put the case to the policeman. They
had come from Allen Street, then the Red
Light District. Some doubtful " ladies " had
moved into their tenement, she explained, and

[346]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

the other tenants had " made trouble " with the
police. The " ladies," locating the source of
the trouble in their flat, had seized upon the
child and " punched " his nose. They had
even had to send for a doctor. She unrolled
a bundle and showed a bottle of medicine in
corroboration. Her brother had suffered and
the household had been put to expense. Seeing
which, she had collected her evidence and come
straight to Police Headquarters to " see the
Commissioner." Having said it, she waited
calmly for directions, sure that when she found
the Commissioner they would get justice.

And they did get it, though Roosevelt was
no longer there. It was for him they had come.
Nothing that happened in all that time showed
better how deep was the mark he left. It was
his legacy to Mulberry Street that the children
should come there seeking justice, and their
faith was not to be put to shame.

In those days he would sometimes slip away
with me from Headquarters for an hour with
the little Italians in the Sullivan Street Indus-
trial School, or some other work of the Chil-
dren's Aid Society, in which his father had
borne a strong hand. It was after the first

[34T]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

McKinley election that we surprised Miss
Satterie's school (in Sullivan Street) at their
Christmas-tree. They were singing " Children
of the Heavenly King," and the teacher, with
the pride in her pupils that goeth hefore a
fall, according to the proverb, held up the
singing without warning, and asked:

" Children, who is this heavenly King? "

It was not a fair question, with a small bat-
talion of pink-robed dolls nodding from the
branches of the tree, and ice-cream being
brought in in pails. Heaven enough in Sul-
livan Street for them, just then. There was a
dead silence that was becoming painful when
a little brown fist shot up from a rear bench.
Well, Vito ! " said the teacher, relieved,

who is he? "

McKinley," piped the youngster. He had
not forgotten the fireworks and the flags and
the brass bands. Could anything be grander?
And all in honor of McKinley. What better
proof that he must be the King— of Sullivan
Street anyway, where heaven had just found
lodgment ?

When Roosevelt had been elected governor,
we went over together for the last time; for

[348]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

it was getting to be hard for him to go around
without gathering a crowd, and I saw that
he did not like it. In one of his letters not long
ago he spoke of the old days, and our expe-
ditions, and of how he wished we could do
again what we did then, for he had ever a great
desire to get close to the real life of the peo-
ple. It was a natural sympathy for his honest
but poorer neighbor, for whom he had battled
ever since life meant more to him than play.
His errand being one of friendly interest, and
not of mere curiosity, there was never any
danger of his seeming to patronize by his
presence, though, if he thought he detected the
signs of it, he quickly took himself out of the
way. With the children there was, of course,
never any peril of that, and they were chums
together without long introduction. " I sup-
pose we could not even go among them now-
adays without their having to call out the
police reserves," he complained in his letter.
Though he was followed by a cheering crowd
on our last visit to the Sullivan Street School,
it had not yet quite come to that. He pulled
his coat collar up about his face, and we es-
caped around the corner.

[S49]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The big brown eyes of the little lads grew
bigger and darker yet that day as he told
them of his regiment, and of his Itahan
bugler who blew his trmnpet in their first fight,
telling the Rough-Riders to advance under
cover, or to charge, until a Spanish bullet
clipped off the two middle fingers of the hand
that held the bugle. Then he went and had it
dressed and came back and helped carry in the
wounded, all through the rest of the fight, with
his damaged hand. He told them of his stan-
dard-bearer who carried the flag right through
a storm of bullets that tore it to shreds; of
how his men were such good fighters that they
never gave back an inch, though a fourth of
them all were either killed or wounded; and
yet no sooner was the fighting over than they
aU gave half of their hardtack to the starving
women and children who came out of San-
tiago. And he showed them that true manhood
and tenderness toward the weak go always
together, and that the boy who was good to
his mother and sister and little brother, decent
and clean in his life, would grow up to be the
best American citizen, who would always be
there when he was wanted. They almost f or-

[360]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

got to applaud when he stopped, so breathlessly
had they hung upon every word. But they
made good their omission. Talk about rous-
ing the military spirit which some of my good
friends so dread— I think he kindled some-
thing that day in those little hearts, whom,
unthinking, we had passed by, that will tell for
our country in years to come. I should not be
afraid of rousing any amount of the fighting
spirit that is bound to battle for the weak and
the defenseless and the right. And that is the
kind he stirs wherever he goes.

Sometimes, when I speak of the children of
the poor, some one says to me,— once it was the
great master of a famous school,—" Yes, they
have their hardships ; but God help the children
of the rich who have none 1 " And he is right.
In his life Theodore Roosevelt furnishes the
precise antidote for the idleness and the sel-
fishness that threaten to eat the heart out of
theirs. His published writings fairly run over,
from the earliest day, with the gospel of work,
and surely he has practised what he preaches
as few have. " Theodore Roosevelt, a bright
precocious boy, aged twelve," wrote a distin-
guished New York physician of him, in his

[851]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" case-book," thirty-odd years ago; and added
to his partner, '' He ought to make his mark
in the world but for the diflSculty that he has
a rich father" ; so he told me after Roosevelt
had become Governor. It was a difficulty, —
is with too many to-day. It is not Roosevelt's
least merit that he has shown to those how to
overcome it. But I own that my heart turns
to him as the champion of his poorer brother,
ever eager and ready to give him a helping
hand. When I read, in the accounts of his
journey in the West, of the crowd that be-
sieged his train, and how he picked out a little
crippled child in it, and took it up in his arms,
then I knew him as I have seen him over and
over again, and as I love him best. I knew him
then for the son of his big-hearted father, to
whom wrong and suffering of any kind, any-
where, appealed with such an irresistible claim
that in his brief lifetime he became the great-
est of moral forces in my city.

Then I see him as he stood that day on the
car platform at Greenport, shaking hands with
the school children that came swarming down
just as the train was going to pull out. I see
him spy the forlorn little^ girl in the threadbare

[852]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

coat, last among them all, who had given up
in dmnb despair, for how should she ever reach
her hero through that struggling crowd, with
the engineer even then tooting the signal to
start? And I see him leap from the plat-
form and dive into the surging tide like a
strong swimmer striking from the shore, make
a way through the shouting mob of youngsters
clear to where she was on the outskirts looking
on hopelessly, seize and shake her hand as if
his very heart were in his, and then catch the
moving train on a run, while she looked after
it, her pale, tear-stained face one big, happy
smile. That was Roosevelt, every inch of him,
and don't you like him, too?

People laugh a little, sometimes, and poke
fun at his " race suicide," but to him the chil-
dren mean home, family, the joy of the young
years, and the citizenship of to-morrow, all in
one. And I do not think we have yet made
out to the full what the ideal of home, held
as he holds it, means to us all in a man whose
life is avowedly given to public affairs, and
whose way has led him clear to the top. After
all, we smn up in the one word all that is worth
working for and fighting for. With that gone,

[353]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

what, were left? But it has seemed in this
generation as if every influence, especially in
our big cities, were hostile to the home, and
that was one reason why I hailed the coming
of this plain man of old-time ideals into our
people's life, and wanted him to be as close
to it as he could get. His enemies never un-
derstood either the one or the other. I re-
member when in the Police Department they
had him shadowed at night, thinking to catch
him "off his guard." He flushed angrily
when he heard it.

" What I " he cried, " going home to my
babies?."

But his anger died in a sad little laugh of
pity and contempt. That was their way.
They could not understand. And to-day he is
the beloved Chief of the Nation; and where are
they?

When he came home, his first errand, when
the children were little, was always to the nurs-
ery. Nowadays they are big enough to run
to meet him — and they do, with a rush. I came
home with him one day when he was in the
Navy Department, and he tempted me to go
up with him to see the babies.

[S64]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

" But not to play bear," said Mrs. Roose-
velt, wamingly; "the baby fa being put to
sleep/'

No, he would not play bear, he promised,
and we went up. But it is hard not to play
bear when the baby squirms out of the nurse's
arms and growls and claws at you like a veri-
table little cub ; and in five minutes Mrs. Roose-
velt, coming to investigate the cause of the
noise in the nursery, opened the door upon
the wildest kind of a circus, with the baby
screaming his dehght, I can recaU nothing
more amusing than that tableau, with the silent
shape upon the threshold striving hard to put
on a look of great sternness, and him, meekly
apologetic, on the floor with the baby, ex-
plaining, " Well, Edith, it was this way—"
We never found out which way it was, for the
humor of the situation was toa much for us,
—and the baby was thoroughly awake by that
time, anyway. I say I can think of nothing
funnier, unless it be Kermit taking his pet rat
out of his pocket at the breakfast-table in the
White House, and letting it hop across for my
inspection. It was a kangaroo-rat, and it
nibbled very daintily the piece of sugar the

[355]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

President gave it. But it was something new
to me then. I have heard of all sorts of things
in a boy's pocket,— fish-hooks and nails and
bits of colored glass. But a live rat, never I

Kermit was along, last sunmier, when the
President and Mrs. Roosevelt went down in
the Sylph to Twin Island, to visit the summer
home of my people in Henry Street.^ He is n't
a bit awed by the Presidency.

" U-ugh! " he said, with a look of comic con-
cern, as the President leaped into the launch,
" something heavy went over then."

That was the day the children of the East
Side will remember to the last day of their lives.
They absolutely deserted their dinner when
word was brought that the Sylph had hove to
outside the rocks, and with a wild rush made
for the shore, where they stood and waved their
flags and shouted their welcome. " Three
cheers for the red, white, and blue 1 " And his
foot had hardly touched the shore before there
were from six to a dozen youngsters hanging
to each hand, and plying him with questions as
they danced up the jungle-path to the house,

1 The Fresh Air Home of the Jacob A. Riis House in Henry
Street is on Twin Island in Pelham Bay Park.

[356]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

every one trying to look into his face while
they skipped and talked, so that at least half
of them were walking backward on the toes of
those next to them all the while. No fear of
patronizing there. They were chmns on the
minute. If anything, they did the patroniz-
ing, the while their mothers were escorting
Mrs. Roosevelt with simple dignity, proud of
their guest, and touched in their innermost
hearts by her coming among them.

" Was that your ship what was all lit up out
there last night? " I heard one of the young-
sters ask the President; and another, who had
hold of the skirt of his coat, took in the island
with one wide sweep of his unclaimed hand:
"Ain't it buUy?''

And it was. Not a sign " Keep off the grass"
on the whole island ; free license to roam where
they pleased, to wade and to fish and to gather
posies, or to sit on the rocks and sing. The
visitors went from the woods to the house, saw
the big bedrooms,— so big that when the trees
outside waved their branches in the patch of
moonlight on the floor, the children at first hud-
dled together, frightened, in a corner. They
felt as if they were outside in a strange coun-

[S57]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

try. The whole tenement flat in the stony
street could easily have been packed into one
of those rooms. They saw them eat and play
and skip about in happiness such as their life
had been stranger to before,— these children of
few opportunities; and the President turned
to me with a joyous little laugh:

" Oh, Jacob 1 what monument to man is there
of stone or bronze that equals that of the hap-
piness of these children and mothers? "

That was a great day, indeed. Twin Island,
the home of wealth and fashion till the city
made a park alongshore and gave us the use
of the deserted mansion, never saw its like.

The Christmas bells are ringing as I write
this, and they take me back to that holiday
season, half a dozen years ago, when I was mis-
taken for Mr. Roosevelt with startling results.
It happened once or twice, when he was Police
Commissioner, that people made that mistake.
They could not have been very discerning ; but,
whether or no, it did me no harm. I was glad
of the compliment. This time I had gone to
see the newsboys in the Duane Street lodging-
house get their Christmas dinner. There were
six or seven hundred of them, and as they

[358]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

marched past to the long tables where the
plates of roast turkey stood in expectant rows,
with a whole little mince-pie at each plate,
the little shavers were last in the line. They
were just as brimful of mischief as they could
be,— that was easy to see. The superintendent
pulled my sleeve as they went by, with a " Watch
out now and you 'U see some fun." What he
meant I did n't know then. I saw only a swift
movement of their hands as they went by the
table,— too swift for me to follow. I found out
when they sat down and eight grimy little
hands shot up and eight aggrieved httle voices
piped :

" Mister, I ain't got no pie 1 "

" What! " said the superintendent, with an-
other wink to me; "no piel There must be;
I put it there myself. Let 's see about that."

And he went over and tapped the first and
the smallest of the lads on the stomach, where
his shirt bulged.

"What 's that?" he said, feeling of the
bulge.

" Me pie," said the lad, unabashed. " I wuz
afeard it w'd get stole on me, and so I — "

They had " swiped » the pies in passing.

[M»]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Never mind," said the superintendent, —

never mind, we '11 forgive and forget. It 's
Christmas 1 Go ahead, boys, and eat," And
six hundred pairs of knives and forks flashed,
and six hundred pairs of jaws and six hundred
tongues wagged all at once, until you could n't
hear yourself think.

But one of the lads, who had not taken his
eyes from me, suddenly saw a light. He
pointed his knife straight at me and piped
out so that they all heard it :

" I know you 1 I seen yer pitcher in the
papers. You 're a P'lice Commissioner.
You 're— you 're— Teddy Roosevelt 1 "

If a bomb had fallen into the meeting, I
doubt if the effect would have been greater.
A silence fell, so deep that you would have
heard a pin drop — where, a moment before, the
noise of a dray going over the pavement would
have been drowned in the din. Glancing down
the table where the little shavers sat, I saw a
stealthy movement under cover, and the eight
stolen pies appeared with a common accord
over the edge and were replaced as suddenly
as they had gone !

He laughed, when I told him of it, as I had

[360]

CHILDREN TRUST HIM

seldom seen him laugh, and said it was a great
compliment. And so it was : it was evidence of
the respect he was held in as Police Com-
missioner. Twin Island told the other end of
the story, and it was even hetter.

[861 J

XV
THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

IS AID I would not meddle with the Presi-
dent's poUcies, and neither will I from the
point of view of statecraft; for of that I
know less than nothing. But how now, looking
at them through the man I have tried to show
you? Do his " policies " not become the plain
expression of his character, of the man? Ask
yourself and answer the question whether he
has " made good " the promise which any one
not wilfully blind could see. Lots of people
were uneasy when he became President. It
was natural, in the excitement over the murder
of President McKinley. Roosevelt was young,
he was hot-headed, hasty, things were going to
be upset— that was what we heard. Perhaps
they looked back and saw that no Vice-Presi-
dent had ever succeeded who did not dismiss

[365]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

the cabinet of his dead chief and set up for
himself. But this President did not let the day-
pass, upon which he took the oath, without ask-
ing McKinley's advisers to stay and be his,
all of them. It was politically wise, for it al-
layed the unrest. But it was something beside
that: it was the natural thing for Roosevelt
to do. He knew the cabinet, and what they
could do.

"You know well enough," he said once, when
we were speaking of it, " that I am after the
thing to be done. It is the fitness of the tool to
do the work I am concerned about, not my in-
venting of it. What does that matter? "

He found in Attorney-General Knox, for
instance, a corporation lawyer whose very ex-
perience as such had made him see clearly the
unwisdom, to look at it merely from the point
of view of their own security, of the arrogance
that lay ill concealed at the bottom of the deal-
ings of organized wealth with the rest of man-
kind. And splendidly has he battled for the
rights of us all— theirs and ours. The utter
mystery to me is that corporate wealth has not
long before this made out that there can be no
worse misfit and no greater peril to itself in a

[366]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

government of the people than to have the feel-
ing grow that money can buy unfair privilege.
" But it is true, and always has been," says my
Wall Street neighbor who has the courage of
his convictions. Then, if that be so, is he so
blind that he cannot see the danger of it, since
the very soul of the Republic is in the chal-
lenge that it shall not be true forever; that,
with every just premium on honest industry,
men shall have somewhere near a fair chance
at the start ; that they shall not be damned into
economic slavery any more than into political
slavery? Is he so blind that he cannot see that
the irrepressible conflict cannot be sidetracked
by any subterfuge, by the purchase of delega-
tions, the plotting of politicians, the defeat of
Presidents? I used to think that the great
captains of industry must be the wisest of men,
and so indeed they need be in their special
fields. But where is their common sense that
they cannot see so plain a thing?

Unless, indeed, they think that the Republic
is a mere fake, government by the people and
of the people and for the people a fad, a
phrase behind which to plot securely for a
hundred years more,— life with no other mean-

[367]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ing than to fill pockets and beUy while they
last I In which case I pity them from the bot-
tom of my heart. For what a meaning to read
into life, one little end of which lies within
our ken, with the key to all the rest, as far as
we are able to grasp it here, in fair dealing
with the brother I

I have said that I speak for myself in these
pages; but for once you may take it that I
speak for Theodore Roosevelt too. That is
what he thinks. That is the underlying thought
of his oft-expressed philosophy, that the poor-
est plan for an American to act upon is that
of " some men down," and the safest that of
" all men up." For, whether for good or ill, up
we go or down, poor and rich, white or black,
aU of us together in the end, in the things
that make for real manhood. And the making
of that manhood and the bringing of it to the
affairs of life and making it teU there, is the
business of the Republic.

How, so thinking, could he have taken any
other attitude than he has on the questions that
seem crowding to a solution these days be-
cause there is at last a man at the head who will
not dodge, but deal squarely with them as they

[368]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

come? How should he have "intended in-
sult " to the South, whose blood flowed in his
mother's veins, when he bade to his table one of
the most distinguished citizens of our day, by
whose company at tea Queen Victoria thought
herself honored because he represents the ef-
fort, the hope, of raising a whole race of men
—our black-skinned fellow-citizens— up to the
grasp of what citizenship means? And where
is there a man fool enough to believe that the
clamor of silly reactionists whom history, whom
life, have taught nothing, should move him one
hair's-breadth from the thing he knows is right
-even from "the independent and fearless
course he has followed in his attempt to secure
decent and clean ofiicials in the South "? I
am quoting from the Montgomery (Alabama)
" Times," a manly Democratic newspaper that
is not afraid of telling the truth. I have just
now read the clear, patient, and statesmanlike
answer of Carl Schurz to the question, " Can
the South solve the negro problem? " He
thinks it can if it will follow its best impulses
and its clearest sense, not the ranting of those
who would tempt it to moral and economic ruin
with the old ignorant cry of " Keep the nig-

[369]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ger down 1 " And I know that the South has
no truer and fairer friend in that cause than
the President, who believes in " all men up,"
and who with genuine statesmanship looks
beyond the strife and the prejudice of to-day
to the harvest-time that is coming.

" On this whole question," he sighed, when
we had threshed it over one day, " we are in
a back eddy. I don't know how we are going
to get out, or when. The one way I know that
does not lead out is for us to revert to a condi-
tion of semi-slavery. That leads us farther
in, hecauLse it does not stop there f*

Let the South ponder it well, for it is true.
And let it be glad that there is a man in the
White House to voice its better self. "A
nation cannot remain half free and half slave "
or half peon. And it can never throw off its
industrial fetters and take the place to which
it is entitled until it is willing to build upon
the dignity of manhood and of labor, of which
serfdom, by whatever name, is the flat denial.

Truly, the world moves with giant strides
once the policy of postponement is sidetracked
and notice is served that the man at the throttle
is willing to give ear. I wonder now how many

[S70]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

of us, when it comes right down to hard facts,
consider government, the Republic, the general
scheme of the world, a kind of modua wvendi
to make sure we are not interfered with while
we are at the game— never mind the rest? But
yesterday the shout arose that the President
was inviting " labor men " to break bread at the
White House— white men, these. Well, why
not labor men, if they are otherwise fit com-
panions for the President of the United
States? That these were, no one questioned.
It was at that luncheon, I suppose, that one
of them made the remark that at last there
was a hearing for him and his fellows. I have
forgotten the precise occasion, but I remember
the President's pregnant answer:

" Yes! The White House door, while I am
here, shall swing open as easily for the labor
man as for the capitalist, and no easier f'

It seems as if it was in the same week that
the President had been denounced in labor
meetings as "unfriendly" because he would
not let imion rules supersede United States law
in the oflSce of the public printer. Only a little
while before, resolutions of organized labor had
denoimced him as " unfair " because he had

[371]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

opposed mob-rule with rifles in an Arizona
mining dispute, and the editors of " organs ''
that had not yet got through denouncing him
as a time-server because of his action in the
anthracite coal strike were having a hard and
bewildering time of it. How many of their
readers they succeeded in mixing up beside
themselves, I don't know. Some, no doubt ; for
even so groundless a lie as this, that President
Roosevelt had jumped Leonard Wood over
four hundred and fifty veteran soldiers to a
major-generalship because he was his friend,
found believers when it was repeated day after
day by the newspapers that cared even less for
the four hundred and fifty veterans than they
did for Leonard Wood, merely using him as a
convenient screen from behind which to hit
Roosevelt. Whereas, the truth is that Gen-
eral Wood was not " jumped " a single num-
ber by his friend, but came up for confirma-
tion in the regular routine of promotion by
seniority of rank, all the jumping having been
done years before by President McKinley for
cause, and heartily applauded by the American
people. Of all this his defamers were per-
fectly well aware ; and so they must have been

[379]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

of the facts in the labor situation of which they
tried to make capital, if I may use so odd a
term. It was just as simple as all the rest of
President Roosevelt's doings.

Finance, tariff," he said to me once, —

these are important. But the question of
the relations of capital and labor is vital. Your
children and mine will be happy in this country
of ours, or the reverse, according to whether
the decent man in 1950 feels friendly toward
the other decent man whether he is a wage-
worker or not. * I am for labor,' or ' 1 sun for
capital,' substitutes something else for the im-
mutable laws of righteousness. The one and
the other would let the class man in, and letting
him in is the one thing that will most quickly
eat out the heart of the Republic. I am neither
for labor nor for capital, but for the decent
man against the selfish and indecent man who
will not act squarely."

To a President of that mind came the coal-
strike question in October, 1902, with its de-
mand for action in a new and untried field—
a perilous field for a man with political as-
pirations, that was made clear without de-
lay. Then, if ever, was the time for the policy

[373]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

of postponement, had his personal interests
weighed heavier in the scale than the public
good. To me, sitting by and watching the
strife of passions aroused all over the land,
it brought a revelation of the need of charity
for the neighbor who does not know. From
the West, where they burn soft coal, and could
know nothing of the emergency, but where
they had had their own troubles with the
miners, came counsel to let things alone. Men
who thought I had the President's ear sent
messages of caution. " Go slow," was their
burden; " teU him not to be hasty, not to in-
terfere." While from the Atlantic seaboard
cities, where coal was twelve dollars a ton, with
every bin empty and winter at the door, such a
cry of dread went up as no one who heard it
ever wants to hear again. From my own city,
with its three million toilers. Mayor Low tele-
graphed to the President:

I cannot emphasize too strongly the immense in-
justice of the existing coal situation to millions of
innocent people. The welfare of a large section of
the country imperatively demands the immediate re-
sumption of anthracite coal mining. In the name of
the City of New York I desire to protest through

[374]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

you, against the continuance of the existing situation,
which, if prolonged, involves, at the very least, the cer-
tainty of great suffering and heavy loss to the in-
habitants of this city, in common with many others.

Governor Crane of Massachusetts came on
to Washington to plead the cause of the East-
em cities, whose plight, if anything, was worse.
The miners stood upon their rights. Organ-
ized capital scouted interference defiantly,
threatening disaster to the Republican party if
the President stepped in. The cry of the cities
swelled into a wail of anguish and despair, and
still the mines were idle, the tracks of the
coal roads blocked for miles with empty cars.
In the midst of it all the " hasty " man in the
White House wrote in reply to my anxious
inquiry:

" I am slowly going on, step by step, work-
ing within my limited range of powers and en-
deavoring neither to shirk any responsibilities
nor yet to be drawn into such hasty and violent
action as almost invariably provokes reaction."

Long after it was over. Secretary of the
Navy Moody told me of what was happening
then in Washington.

" I remember the President sitting with his

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

game leg in a chair while the doctors dressed
it," he said (it was after the accident in Massa-
chusetts in which the President's coach was
smashed and the secret service man on the
driver's seat killed) . " It hurt, and now and
then he would wince a bit, while he discussed
the strike and the appeals for help that grew
more urgent with every passing hour. The
outlook was grave; it seemed as if the cost of
interference might be political death. I saw
how it tugged at him, just when he saw chances
of serving his country which he had longed for
all the years, to meet— this. It was human na-
ture to halt. He halted long enough to hear it
all out: the story of the suffering in the big
coast pities, of schools closing, hospitals with-
out fuel, of the poor shivering in their homes.
Then he set his face grimly and said:

" ' Yes, I wiU do it. I suppose that ends me ;
but it is right, and I will do it.'

"I don't agree with labor in all its demands,"
added the Secretary. " I think it is unreason-
able in some of them, or some of its represen-
tatives are. But in the main line it is eternally
right, and it is only by owning it and helping
it to its rights that we can successfully choke

[376]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

off the exorbitant demands." And in my soul
I said amen, and was glad that with such
problems to solve the President had f oimd such
friends to help.

Many times, during the anxious days that
followed, I thought with wonder of the pur-
blind folk who called Roosevelt hasty. For
it seemed sometimes as if the insolence of the
coal magnates were meant to provoke him to
anger. But no word betrayed what he felt,
what thousands of his fellow-citizens felt as
they read the reports of the conferences at the
White House. The most consimoonate states-
manship steered us safely between reefs that
beset the parley at every point, and the coun-
try was saved from a calamity the extent and
consequences of which it is hard to imagine.
Judge Gray, the chairman of the commission
that settled the strike, said, when it was all
history, that the crisis confronting the Presi-
dent " was more grave and threatening than
any since the Civil War, threatening not only
the comfort and health, but the safety and
good order of the nation." And he gave to the
President unstinted praise for what he did.
The London " Times," speaking for all Eu-

[S7T]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

rope in hailing the entrance of government
upon a new field full of great possibilities, said
editorially, " In the most quiet and unobtrusive
manner, President Roosevelt has done a very
big thing, and an entirely new thing."

He alone knew at what cost. Invalid, un-
dergoing daily agony as the doctors scraped
the bone of his injured leg, he wrote to the
Grovemor of Massachusetts, who sent him " the
thanks of every man, woman, and child in the
country " :

" Yes, we have put it through. But, hea-
vens and earth! it has been a struggle."

It was the nearest I ever knew him to come
to showing the strain he had been imder.

The story of the strike, and of how it was
settled by the President's commission, none of
us has forgotten. That commission did not
make permanent peace between capital and
labor, but it took a longer stride toward mak-
ing a lasting basis for such a peace than we had
taken yet; and I can easily understand the
President's statement to me that, if there were
nothing else to his credit, he would be content
to go out of office upon that record alone. For
it was truly a service to render. I had sup-

[378]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

posed that we all understood until I ran up
against a capitaHstic friend of the " irrecon-
cilable " stripe. He complained bitterly of the
President's mixing in; had he kept his hands
off, the strike would have settled itself in a very
little while; the miners would have gone back
to work, I said that I saw no sign of it.

No, he supposed not; but it was so, all the
same, " We had their leaders all bought," said
he.

He lied, to be plain about it, for John Mitch-
ell and his men had proved abundantly that
they were not that kind. And, besides, he could
not speak for the mine-operators; he was not
one of them. But the thing was not for whom
he spoke, but what it was he said, with such
callous unconcern. Think of it for a mo-
ment and tell me which was, when all is said
and done, the greater danger: the strike, with
aU it might We stood for, or the cynicism
that framed that speech? The country might
outlive the horrors of a coal-famine in mid-
winter, but this other thing would kill as sure
as slow poison. Mob-rule was not to be feared
like that.

There comes to my mind, by contrast, some-

[S7»]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

thing John Mitchell said to the Southwestern
miners* convention, after the strike, that shows
the quality of the man and of his leadership.

" Some men," he said, " who own the mines
think they own the men, too; and some men
who work in the mines think they own them.
Both are wrong. The mines belong to the
owners. You belong to yourselves."

Upon those who said that the President had
surrendered the country, horse, foot, and dra-
goons, to organized labor, his action a few
months later, in sending troops within the hour
in which they were demanded to prevent vio-
lence by miners in Arizona, ought to have put a
quietus. But it did not; they gibbered away
as before. The reason is plain: they did not
themselves believe what they said. The Miller
case followed hard upon it, with no better ef-
fect. But the Miller case is so eloquent both
of the President's stand upon this most urgent
of all questions in our day, and of his diplo-

■

macy,— which is nothing else than his honest
effort, with all the light he can get upon a
thing, to do the right as he sees it,— that it is
worth setting down here as part of his record,
and a part to be remembered.

[380]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

Miller was an assistant foreman in the gov-
ernment bookbindery. He was discharged by
the public printer, upon the demand of organ-
ized labor, on charges of " flagrant non-imion-
ism,'' he having been expelled from Local
Union No. 4 of the International Brotherhood
of Bookbinders. His discharge was in defiance
of the civil service laws, and the matter having
come before the President, he ordered that he
be reinstated. In doing so he pointed to this
finding of the anthracite coal strike commis-
sion which organized labor had accepted :

It is adjudged and awarded that no person shall
be refused employment or in any way discriminated
against on account of membership or non-member-
ship in any labor organization, and that there shall
be no discrimination against or interference with any
employe who is not a member of any labor organization
by members of such organization.

" It is, of course," was the President's com-
ment, "mere elementary decency to require
that all the government departments shall be
handled in accordance with the principle thus
clearly and fearlessly enunciated." But there
are people who do not understand, on both
sides of the line. Seventy-two unions in the

[381]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Central Labor Union of the District of Co-
lumbia "resolved'' that to reinstate Miller
was " an unfriendly act." The big leaders,
including Mr, Gompers and Mr. Mitchell,
came to plead with the President. Miller was
not fit, they said.

That was another matter, replied the Presi-
dent. He would find out. As to Miller's be-
ing a non-union man, the law he was sworn to
enforce recognized no such distinction. " I
am President," he said, " of all the people of the
United States, without regard to creed, color,
birthplace, occupation, or social distinction. In
the employment and dismissal of men in the
government service I can no more recognize the
fact that a man does or does not belong to a
imion as being for or against him than I can
recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a
Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or
against him."

The newspapers did not tell us that the White
House rang with applause, as did Clarendon
Hall on that other occasion when he met the
labor men as a police commissioner. I do not
know whether it did or not, for I was not there.
But if in their hearts there was no response

[389]

TH:E PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

to that sentiment, they did not represent the
best in their cause or in their people; for of
nothing am I better persuaded than that, as
the President said in his Labor Day speech
at Syracuse, " Our average fellow-citizen is a
sane and healthy man who believes in decency
and has a wholesome mind." And that was the
gospel of sanity and decency and wholesome-
ness all rolled into one.

Well, these are his policies. Can any one
who has followed me so far in my effort to
show what Theodore Roosevelt is, and why he
is what he is, conceive of his having any other?
And is there an American worthy of the name
who would want him to have any other? Cuba
is free, and she thanks President Roosevelt for
her freedom. But for his insistence that the
nation's honor was bound up in the comple-
tion of the work his Rough-Riders began at
Las Guasimas and on San Juan hill, a cold
conspiracy of business greed would have left
her in the lurch, to fall by and by reluctantly
into our arms, bankrupt and helpless, while the
sneer of the cynics that we were plucking that
plum for ourselves would have been justified.
The Venezuela imbroglio that threatened the

[S83]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

peace of the world has added, instead, to the
prestige of The Hague Court of Arbitration
through the wisdom and lofty public spirit of
the American President. The man who was
called hasty and unsafe has done more for the
permanent peace of the world than all the
diplomats of the day. The Panama Canal is
at last to be a fact, with benefit which no one
can reckon to the conunerce of the world, of our
land, and most of all to the Southern States,
that are trying to wake up from their long
sleep. I confess that the half-hearted criti-
cism I hear of the way of the administration
with Panama provokes in me a desire to laugh ;
for it reminds me of the way the case was put
to me by a man, than whom there is no one in
the United States who should know better.

" It is just," he said, " as if a fellow were to
try to hold you up, and you were to wrench the
gun away from him, so "—with an expressive
gesture; " and then some bystander should cry
out, * Oh, the poor fellow ! you Ve taken away
his gun 1 Maybe he would n't have shot at all ;
and then it is his gun, anyway, and you such a
big fellow, and he so small. Oh, shame I ' "

We can smile now, but Assistant Secretary

[884]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

of State Loomis lifted the curtain enough, the
other day, to give us a glimpse of what might
have been, had the Colombian plot to confiscate
the French canal company's forty millions of
property, when the concession lapsed in an-
other year, been allowed to hatch. Half the
world might have been at war then. I think
we may all well be glad, as he truly said, that
"there was in Washington, upon this truly
fateful occasion, a man who possessed the in-
sight, the knowledge, the spirit, and the cour-
age to seize the opportunity to strike a blow,
the results of which can be fraught only with
peace and good to the whole world."

I am not a jingo ; but when some thmgs hap-
pen I just have to get up and cheer. The way
our modern American diplomacy goes about
things is one of them. You remember, don't
you, when the captains were conferring at
Tientsin about going to the relief of the
ministers there that were besieged in then- em-
bassies, and the little jealous rivalries of the
powers would not let them get anywhere, the
French and Russians pulling one way, the Ger-
mans another, the British another, and so on,
how Captain McCalla got up and said:

[885]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" Well, gentlemen, you have talked this mat-
ter over pretty thoroughly and have come to
no decision. And now I will tell you what I
am going to do. My minister is in danger, and
I am going to Peking." Wherefore they all
went.

I had to cheer then, and I have to give a
cheer off and on yet for the man at the helm,
and to thank God that he sent me over the sea
to cast in my lot with a country and with a
people that do not everlastingly follow worm-
eaten precedent, but are young enough and
strong enough and daring enough to make it
when need be.

^'But about his financial policy, about his
war upon the trusts, the corporations, which
they say is going to defeat him for reelection,
you have said nothing. You have offered no de-
fense." Well, good friend, if you have found
nothing in these pages that answers your
question, I am afraid there is little use in my
saying anything now on the subject. Defense
I have not offered, because, in the first place,
I am quite unable to see that there is need of
any. If there were, I should think the coal
strike experience, or, later yet, the disclosures

[886]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

in the ship-building trust case as to what it is
that ails Wall Street, would have given every-
body all the information he could wish. The
President is not, Congress is not, making war
upon corporations, upon capital. They are
trying to hold them— through publicity, by
compelling them to obey the laws their smaller
competitors have to bow to, and in any other
lawful and reasonable way— to such respon-
sibility that they shall not become a power
full of peril to the people and to themselves.
For that might mean much and grave
mischief,— would mean, indeed, unless the
people were willing to abdicate, which I think
they are not. That mischief I should like to
see averted.

" It is not designed to restrict or control the
fullest liberty of legitimate business action," —
I quote from the President's last message, —
and none such can follow. " Publicity can do
no harm to the honest corporation. The only
corporation that has cause to dread it is the
corporation which shrinks from the light,
and about the welfare of such we need not be
over-sensitive. The work of the Department
of Commerce and Labor has been conditioned

[387]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

upon this theory, of securing fair treatment
alike for labor and capital."

That is all, and nothing has been done that is
not in that spirit. Perhaps it is natural that a
corporation like the Standard Oil Company,
which has amassed enormous wealth through
a monopoly that enabled it to dictate its own
freight rates to the utter annihilation of its
competitors, should object to have the govern-
ment step in and try to curtail unfair profits.
Perhaps it is natural for it to object to the anti-
rebate law, though it comes too late to check its
greed.

Perhaps it is natural for some speculating
concerns to wish to keep their business to them-
selves ; but it seems to me we have seen enough
swindling exposed, to be plain about it, these
last few months, to make a good many people
wish there had been some way of finding out
the facts before it was too late. That, again,
is all there is to that. Nobody is to be hurt,
nobody can be hurt, except the one that de-
serves to be. I have faith enough in the Amer-
ican people to believe that the time has not yet
come, and will not soon come, when the specu-
lators can defeat a man running for the Presi-

[388]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

dency on the platform of an equal chance to all
and special favors to none. If they can, it is
time we knew it.

And, in the next place, I have not the least
idea in the world that the men who are plotting
against the President do, or ever did, seriously
question the fairness of his policy. It is him
they do not want. Let a witness that is cer-
tainly on the inside tell why. I quote from
an editorial in the " Wall Street Journal " —
another newspaper that dares to tell the truth,
it seems :

It is not because President Roosevelt is antago-
nistic to capital, or a partner in that hatred of wealth
which is so odious and so threatening, that certain
financial interests, expert in the manipulation of the
markets, are scheming to prevent his election to a
second term. They know very well that he is no
enemy to capital. They know that by birthright,
by education and by long political training he is a
supporter of sound money, an advocate of a protec-
tive tariiF, a firm upholder of the rights of property.
They know that he is the last man in the world to lead
in an €issault on capital lawfully applied to the devel-
opment of the commercial enterprises of the country.
They have no fear that he will be led by ambition or
impulse into paths of socialism, or that he will, for
one moment, give the authority of his name and

[389]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

office to the aid of organized labor in any movement
to crush out competition, and thus to establish a mo-
nopoly more destructive to the interests of the coxm-
try than even the most corrupt, oppressive, and pow-
erful trust.

What, then, is the reason why these financial in-
terests are scheming to defeat him? The answer is
plain.

They cannot control him.

All efforts to control him through his ambition
have failed. Any attempt to control him by grosser
forms of bribery would, of course, be useless. Ef-
fort to move him by sophistical arguments framed
by clever corporation lawyers into departure from
the paths of duty and law have not succeeded. He
is a friend of capital. He is a friend of labor. But
he is no slave of either.

And so those Wall Street interests have de-
cided that he is to be driven out of office. They
will prevent his renomination, if they can. If
not, they will try to beat him at the polls with
money. "All the money is to be on the other
side this year." They made the beginning in
New York this last fall. It is no secret that
enormous amounts of money were thrown into
the campaign in the last two weeks to turn the
election. Low and reform were sacrificed.

[390]

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES

Next it is to be Roosevelt. " Money talks," is
their creed. Other arguments are wasted.

Well, as to that, we shall see. There is still
the American people to hear from.

[301]

XVI
A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

1HAVE told you what Theodore Roose-
velt is like as I see him. I have told of
the man, the f riend, the husband and fa-
ther, because back of his public career, of his
great office, I see himself always; and to my
mind so it must be that you wiU take him
to your heart as the President, also, and fiiid
the key to all he is and stands for. Knowing
him as he really is, you cannot help trusting
him. I would have everybody feel that way
toward him who does not do so already ; for we
are facing much too serious times, you and
he and all of us, to be honestly at odds
where we should pull together. As for the
others who are not honestly at odds with him,
who are "working for their own pockets all
the time," who are kin to the malefactors who

[395]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

burned up four thousand Christmas-trees in
Philadelphia the other day to reduce the sup-
ply and force up the price of the remaining
ones — what sweet Christmas joys must have
been theirs!— I care nothing for them. I
would as lief have them all in front and within
fighting reach from the start. They belong
there, anyhow.

And now, what does it aU mean ? Why have
I written it? Just to boom Roosevelt for the
Presidency in the election that comes soon?
No, not that. I shall rejoice to see him elected,
and I shall know that never was my vote put
to better use for my coimtry than when I cast
it for him. To have him beaten by the Christ-
mas-tree cabal would argue an unpreparedness,
an unfitness to grapple with the real problems
of the day, that might well dishearten the pa-
triot. But this not because of himself, much
as I like to hear the whole coimtry shout for the
friend I love, but because of what he stands
for. It matters less that Theodore Roosevelt
is President, but it matters a good deal that
the things prevail which he represents in the
nation's life. It never mattered more than at
this present day of ours — right now. Yester-

[ 3961]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

day I spoke in a New England town, a pros-
perous, happy town, where the mills were all
running, property booming, the people busy;
but there was a fly in the ointment, after all.
It came out when I expressed my pleasure at
what I had seen.

" Yes," they said, " we are all that; and we
would be perfectly happy but for the meanest
politics that ever disgraced a town."

When I settled into my seat in the train to
think it over, this paragraph from a sermon on
" Money-madness " stared me in the face-
curiously, it was preached by the pastor of the
biggest money-king of them aU, so the paper
said:

In these days there is such a hunt after wealth that
the efforts of our best men are withdrawn from the
public service. The men of the stamp of Jefferson, of
Washington, who gave themselves to their country,
are not now to be foimd in legislative halls ; they are
corporation lawyers.

And before I had time to run over in my
mind the shining exceptions I knew, the Roots,
the Tafts, the Knoxes, the Garfields, and the
rest of them, and who only brought out more

[397]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

sharply the truth of the general statement, in
comes my neighbor with whom just now I
fought shoulder to shoulder against Tammany
in New York, as good and clean and honest
a fellow as I know, and tells me it is all over.
Clean discouraged is he, and he will never
spend his time and money in fighting for de-
cency again.

" What 's the use? " says he. ' It is all waste
and foolishness; and, after all, how do I lose
by some one getting what he wants and pay-
ing for it? I know this blackmailing business,
a wide-open town, and aU that,— I know it ii^
wrong when you come to high principle; but
we live in a practical, every-day world. Let
us live and let hve. I get what I want, the
other fellow gets what he wants; and if it is
worth my paying the price to get it, how am
I hurt? Is n't it better than all this stew for
nothing? Tammany 's in and back, and we
will never win again. I am done with reform."

He is not; I know it, for I know him. He
is just tired, and he will get over it. But he
speaks for a good many who may not get over
it so easily, and that is exactly what Tam-
many banks upon. It is what the enemy hopes

[306]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

for in all days : that he may tire out the good,
convince them that the game is n't worth the
candle. And right here is the imjnense value
of the man whom you cannot tire out, who
will stand like a rock for the homely virtues,
for the Ten Comimandments, in good and evil
report, and refuse to budge. For, though men
sneer at him and call him a grand-stand player,
as they will, the time will come when he will
convince them that there is something more
important than winning to-day or to-morrow,
where a principle is at stake ; that the function
of the Republic, of government of the people,
shall, please God, yet be to make high prin-
ciple the soul and hope of the practical every-
day world, even if it takes time to do it; and
that it is worth losing all oiu: lives long, with
the lives thrown in, if that be necessary, to have
it come true in the end. The man who will do
that, who will take that stand and keep it, is
beyond price. That is Theodore Roosevelt
from the ground up. And now you know why
I have written of him as I have.

There was never a day that called so loudly
for such as he, as does this of oiurs. Not that
it is worse than other days ; I know it is better.

[S99]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I find proof of it in the very fact that it is
as if the age-long fight between good and evil
had suddenly come to a head, as if all the
questions of right, of justice, of the brother-
hood, which we had seen in glimpses before,
and dimly, had all at once come out in the
open, craving solution one and all. A battle
royal, truly! A battle for the man of clean
hands and clean mind, who can think straight
and act square; the man who will stand for
the right " because it is right "; who can say,
and mean it, that " it is hard to fail, but worse
never to have tried to succeed." A battle for
him who strives for " that highest form of suc-
cess which comes, not to the man who desires
mere easy peace, but to him who does not shrink
from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil,
and who out of these wins the splendid ulti-
mate triumph." I am but quoting his own
words, and never, I think, did I hear finer than
those he spoke of Governor Taf t when he had
put by his own preferences and gone to his
hard and toilsome task in the Philippines; for
the whole royal, fighting soul of the man was
in them.
" But he undertook it gladly," he said, " and

[400]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

he is to be considered thrice fortunate; for in
this world the one thing supremely worth hav-
ing is the opportunity coupled with the capa-
city to do well and worthily a piece of work the
doing of which is of vital consequence to the
welfare of mankind."

There is his measure. Let now the un-
derstrappers sputter. With that for our young
men to grow up to, we need have no fear for
the morrow. Let it ask what questions it will of
the Republic, it shall answer them, for we
shall have men at the oars.

This afternoon the newspaper that came to
my desk contained a cable despatch which gave
me a glow at the heart such as I have not felt
for a while. Just three lines ; but they told that
a nation's conscience was struggling victori-
ously through hate and foul play and treason :
Captain Dreyfus was to get a fair trial.
Justice was to be done at last to a once despised
Jew whose wrongs had held the civilized world
upon the rack ; and the world was made happy.
Say now it does not move! It does, where
there are men to move it,— I said it before:
men who believe in the right and are willing to
fight for it. When the children of poverty and

[401]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

want came to Mulberry Street for justice,
and I knew they came because Roosevelt had
been there, I saw in that what the resolute,
courageous, unyielding determination of one
man to see right done in his own time could ac-
complish. I have watched him since in the
Navy Department, in camp, as Governor, in
the White House, and more and more I have
made out his message as being to the young
men of our day, himself the youngest of our
Presidents. I know it is so, for when I speak
to the yoimg about him, I see their eyes kindle,
and their hand-shake tells me that they want
to be like him, aud are going to try. And then
I feel that I, too, have done something worth
doing for my people. For, whether for good
or for evil, we all leave our mark upon our day,
and his is that of a clean, strong man who fights
for the right and wins.

Now, then, a word to these young men who,
all over our broad land, are striving up toward
the standard he sets, for he is their hero by
right, as he is mine. Do not be afraid to own it.
The struggle to which you are born, and in
which you are bound to take a hand if you
would be men in more than name, is the strug-

[409]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

gle between the ideal and the husk; for life
without ideals is like the world without the hope
of heaven, an empty meaningless husk. It
is your business to read its meaning into it
by making the ideals real. The material things
of life are good in their day, but they pass
away; the moral remain to bear witness that
the high hopes of youth are not mere phan-
tasms. Theodore Roosevelt Uvea his ideals;
therefore you can trust them. Here they are
in working shape : " Face the facts as you find
them; strive steadily for the best." " Be never
content with less than the possible best, and
never throw away that possible best because it
is not the ideal best." Maxims, those, for the
young man who wants to make the most of
himself and his time. Happily for the world,
the young man who does not is rare.

Perhaps I can put what is in my mind in no
better shape than by giving you his life-rules,
to which I have seen him live up all these years,
though I have not often heard him express
them in so many words. Here is one :
" It is better to be faithful than famous."
Look back now upon his career as I have
sketched it, and see how 'in being steadfastly

[403]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

one he has become both. What better character
could you or I or anybody give our day, which
the croakers say worships only success? Put
it the other way, that we refuse to accept the
goodness that is weak-kneed and cowardly,
that we demand of the champion of right that
he shall believe in his cause enough to fight
for it, and you have it. Look at him in every
walk of life, from boyhood, when by sheer will-
power he conquered his puny body that he
might take his place among men and do a man's
work, and see how plain, straightforward man-
liness won its way despite the plotters. See him
going on his way, bearing no grudges, nursing
no revenge,— you cannot afford those things if
you want to make the most of yourself, — be-
lieving no evil, but ever the best, of his neigh-
bor, and craving his help for the best. The
secret of the ages which the wise men sought
with toil and trouble and missed, he found in his
path without seeking. The talisman that turns
dross to gold is your own faith in your fel-
low-man. Whatever you believe him to be,
with the faith that makes you love your neigh-
bor in spite of himself, that he will become. He
wiU come up or come down to it, as you make

[404]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

your demand. Appeal to the animal, and
watch the claws come out ; appeal to the divine
in him, and he will show you the heart of your
brother. As the days passed in Mulberry
Street, Roosevelt seemed to me more and more
like a touchstone by rubbing against which the
true metal of all about him was brought out:
every rascal became his implacable enemy; the
honest, his followers almost to a man.

When, then, you have a bird's-eye view of
Theodore Roosevelt's career, cast your eye
down it once more and mark its bearings as a
" pathway to ruin." That, you remember, was
what the politicians called it, from the early
years in Albany down to the present day,—
honestly enough, after their . fashion, for they
are the keepers of the husk I spoke of, and
of the power of the ideal they have, can have
no conception. Study their " path to ruin "
carefully, and note whither it led, despite the
" mistakes " with which it was thickly strewn.

Mistakes! Roosevelt is no more infallible
than you or I, and no doubt he has made his
mistakes, though they were not the ones the
politicians picked out. There is a use for
mistakes in his plan of life: they are made to

[405]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

leaxn from. Here is another of his maxims:
'' The only man who makes no mistakes is the
man who never does anything." He has made
fewer than most people, because he has taught
himself from the very start to think quick and
straight. He makes sure he is right and then
goes ahead. The snags, if there be any in the
way, do not trouble him. Dodge them he never
does, but shoulders the responsibility and goes
ahead. That is one reason why he has been
able to do so much in his brief life: he never
has to be on the defensive, to cover his retreat,
but is ever ready to go ahead, to attack.

He is always fair. That is a cardinal virtue
in a fighter of Anglo-Saxon blood, for we all
have the love of fair play in us. He never hits
a man below the belt. Even to the policemen
whom he searched out at night in the old days
when as Commissioner he made a rounds-
man of himself, he gave a fair show. He was
not out to " make a case " against them, but
to see that they did their duty. Of every man
he demands the best that is in him, no more,
no less. For himself, there is nothing that is
worth doing at all that is not worth doing as
well as it can be done. When he was a boy the

[406]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

wonders of electricity aroused his interest, and
he pelted a friend, a medical practitioner, with
questions concerning it. " Other boys asked
questions," the doctor said, recalling the ex-
perience; " but Theodore wanted to know the
nature of the force." There he came to the
limit of knowledge. But it was so with every-
thing. What he knows he knows thoroughly,
because he has learned all he could learn about
it; and so he is able to give points to his oppo-
nent and win. For just as in boxing it is
science, not slugging, that wins, so in life it is
the man who knows who carries off the prizes
worth having. He gets all the rewards, the
other fellow the hard knocks.

When the work in hand has beei;! done he
believes in having a good time. No man has
a better. He put it in words once in my hear-
ing : " Have all the fun you honestly and de-
cently can; it is your right." It is part of the
perfect balance that gets things done, and done
right. Above all, his conception of life is a
sane, common-sense one. It is the view which
leaves the fun out that makes all the trouble.
Somewhere I have told of my experience in
Denmark, my old home, where they make but-

[40T]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ter for a Kving. I had been away more than
twenty years, and many things had changed.
I found the country divided into two camps,
in matters of religious practice, when in my
childhood we were one. Now there were the
" happy Christians," and the " hell-preachers "
who saw only the wrath to come. Speaking
with an old friend about the dairy industry, he
gave me, quite unconsciously, directions that
were good beyond the borders of the Danish
land : " If you want good butter," said he,
" go to the happy Christians. They make the
best." Of course they do. They make the
world go round. It is the honest fun that
keeps life sane and sweet, butter and all.

One more of his life-rules, and this one you
may fairly call his motto: " Be ready! " Am-
munition fixed, canteen filled, knapsack slung,
watch for the opportunities of life that come,
and seize them as they pass. They are for the
one who is ready for them. Lose no time; a
man can lose a fortune and make another ; but
the time that is lost is lost forever. It does
not come back. Waste no time in grumbling.
Roosevelt never does. The man who is busy
helping his neighbor has no time to growl.

[408]

A YOUNG MEN'S HERO

Growling holds up progress and never helps
anything. Be ready, and when the order comes
fall in. Fighting for the things worth while,
hit the hardest licks you know how and never
count the odds against you. They have no-
thing to do with it. If you are right, just fight
on, "trying to make things better in this
world, even if only a little better, because you
have lived in it." Let that be your watchword,
and all will come out right.

My story stops here. There is nothing in
it, as I have shown you Roosevelt and his life,
that is beyond the reach or strength of any one
who will make the most of himself with deter-
mined purpose. " He stands," some one has
said, " for the commonplace virtues ; he is great
on lines along which each one of us can be great
if he wills and dares ! " It is for that reason
above all significant that he should be the
young man's President, the type and hero of
the generation that is to shape the coming day
of our Republic as it is entering upon its world-
mission among the nations. When Theodore
Roosevelt first came into my life, he " came to
help." How he has helped me I can never telL
He made my life many times richer for his

[409]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

coming. Of how he has helped all of us we
heard the echo in the resolution that instructed
the delegates of Luzerne County, Pennsyl-
vania, the first to be chosen anywhere to the
National Convention of the Republican party,
to vote for him for President.

"We admire the courage," it ran, "that
prompts him to do right to all men, without
respect to race, color, or condition. We trust
that he may long be spared to stand as an ex-
ample of virile American manhood, fearing
nothing but failure to do his duty toward God
and man."

When that can be truly said of a man, the
rest matters little. To him apply the words of
Washington, which wiU never die :

" Let us raise a standard to which the wise
and the honest can repair. The event is in
the hand of God."

[410]

XVII

ROOSEVELT AS A SPEAKER AND

WRITER

XVII

ROOSEVELT AS A SPEAKER AND

WRITER

ft .

PRESIDENJ ROOSEVELT flferii^ v
as he '"^ifi^ That tells the story, u \~' ^ •>
He makei^ no pretense to being an
orator. Critics sometimes say that his books :
are not " literature," by which they apparently
mean words strung together to^ sound well.
They are not. But what he wrftes no one can
misunderstand, and the style seems to the
reader unimportant, though it is notably direct, \
terse and vigorous. When he speaks, there is
not often much applause, and when there is, he
often raises his hand with a waming^esture to
stop it. Both his hearers and he|ll|^emuch too t^^ r ^j
interested in the thing he pfj/F^ pay great Soiii^
heed to the way ht^fi^^ii. But when it is ia.i€*

1413]

THEODOREJEIOOSEVELT

over, his hearers ^& away, thinMng. They
kofrv exactly what hfi^noyeOTll;,^^
of reasons — he did. J I cannot think of a better
prescnpfaon lor speechmaking of the present
day that is meant to qpnvince. And no one
ever winksfVhen he spedks.

Another thing: he is all the time growing.
The man who does not grow in the White House
is not fit to be there. "A full-grown man who is
growing still," an Eastern newspaper that is
not exactly a champion of Roosevelt called him
after his Chamber of Commerce speech in New
York. One of the brightest of the newspaper
men who went with him on his long Western
trip said to me, when they were back East:
** I don't think any sane man could be with him
two week, with Jt getting to like him; but
the thing that struck me on that trip was the
way he grew; the way an idea grew in his
mind day by day as he lived with it imtil it took
its final shape in speech. Then it was like a
knock-down blow.*'

Then they express the man. Phrases like
this: " It is the shots which hit that count," and
to the boys of his coimtry : " Hit the line hard;
don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line

[4U]

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

hard," are Theodore Roosevelt all over. From
time to time I have made notes from his
writings and speeches. I am going to set
_ down a few of the extracts here. Very likely
they are not the ones that would appeal to
many of my readers. They did to me; that
was why I wrote them down. And Roosevelt
is in them aU, every one. Let the first one be
the extract from Ws speech at the opening of
the New York Chamber of Commerce, on
November 11, 1902. It has been called " The
Roosevelt Doctrine " :

" It is no easy matter to work out a system
or rule of conduct, whether with or without the
help of ttie lawgiver, which shaU minimize that
jarring and clashing of interests in the indus-
trial world which causes so much individual
irritation and suffering at the present day, and
which at times threatens baleful consequences
to large portions of the body politic. But the
importance of the problem cannot be over-
estimated, and it deserves to receive the careful
thought of all men. There sho uld be no yield-
ing to wrong; but there should most certainly
be not only desire to do right, but a willincmeM

«»nf»h *n fry f/i nnrffi^nyjf^ th** /^C ypoiPt of hiS

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" No patent remedy can be devised for the
solution of these grave problems in the indus-
trial world ; but we may rest assured that they
can be solved at all only if we bring to the
solution certain old-time virtues, and if we
strive to keep out of the solution some of
the most familiar and most undesirable of
the traits to which mankind has owed imtold
degradation and suffering throughout the
ages. ArrogaBce. suspicion, brutal envy of
the well-to-do, brutal indifference toward
those who are not well-to-do, the hard refusal
to consider the rights of others, the foolish
refusal to consider the limits of beneficent
action, the base appeal to the spirit of selfish
greed, whether it take the form of plunder of
the fortunate or of oppression of the unfor-
tunate — from these and from all kindred vices
this nation must be kept free if it is to remain
in its present position in the forefront of the
peoples of mankind.

" On the other hand, good will come, even
out of the present evils, if we face them armed
with the old homely virtues; if we show that

X*i«l

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

we are fearless of soul, cool of head, and kindly
of heart; if, without betraying the weakness
that cringes before wrongdoing, we yet show
by deeds and words our knowledge that in such
a government as ours each of us must be in very
truth his brother's keeper.

" At a time when the growing complexity of
our social and industrial life has rendered inevi-
table the intrusion of the state into spheres of
work wherein it formerly took no part, and
when there is also a growing tendency to de-
mand the illegitimate and unwise transfer to
the government of much of the work that
should be done by private persons, singly or
associated together, it is a pleasure to address
a body whose members possess to an eminent
degre the traditional American self-reliance of
spirit which makes them scorn to ask from the
government, whether of state or or nation,
anything but a fair field and no favor — ^who
confide not in being helped by others, but in
their own skill, energy, and business capacity
to achieve success.

" The first requisite of a good citizen in this
republic of ours is that he shall be able and
willing to pull his weight; that he shall not be

1417]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

a mere passenger, but shall do his share in the
work that each generation of us finds ready to
l»nd; <»Ki,furlermore,«.at in doing hU work
he shall show, not only the capacity for sturdy
self-help, but also self-respecting regard for
the rights of others/'

Here are some observations of the President
on national duties and expansion:

" Nations that expand and nations that do
not eipand may. both ultimately go down, but
the one leaves heirs and a glorious memory, and
the other leaves neither."

" We are strong men and we intend to do
our duty/'

" We cannot sit huddled within our own bor-
ders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage
of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for
what happens beyond. Such a policy would
defeat even its own ends; for as the nations
grow to have ever wider and wider interests
and are brought into closer and closer con-
tact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle
for naval and commercial supremacy, we must
buHd up our power withm our own borders."

" We have but little room among our people

[4181

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

for the timid, the irresolute and the idle; and
it is no less true that there is scant room in the
world at large for the nation with mighty
thews that dares not to be great."

" It is not possible ever to insure prosperity
merely by law."

" This government is not and never shall be a
plutocracy. This government is not and never
shall be ruled by a mob."

" Woe to us all if ever as a people we grow to
condone evil because it is successful."

" The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully
barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy
and vigorous community."

" Success comes only to those who lead the
life of endeavor."

" Our interests are at bottom common; in the
long run we go up or go down together."

" No prosperity and no glory can save a
nation that is rotten at heart."

" Ultimately no nation can be great imless its
greatness is laid on foundations of righteous-
ness and decency. We cannot do great deeds
as a nation unless we are willing to do the small
things that make up the sum of greatness, im-
less we believe in energy and thrift, unless we

[419]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

believe that we have more to do than to simply
accomplish material prosperity; unless, in short,
we do om* full duty as private citizens, inter-
ested alike in the honor of the state."

" A nation's greatness lies in its possibility of
achievement in the present, and nothing helps
! it more than consciousness of achievement in
the past."

" Boasting and blustering are as objection-
able among nations as among individuals, and
the public men of a great nation owe it to their
sense of national self-respect to speak cour-
teously of foreign powers, just as a brave and
self-respecting man treats aU around him
courteously."

i\\ The famous phrase, " the strenuous life," is
..^ ' from his speech to the Hamilton Club, in Chi-
cago, in 1899. This was the sentence in which
it occurred :

" I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble
ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the
life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to
preach that highest form of success which
comes, not to the man who desires mere easy
peace, but to the man who does not shrink from

J 420]

I
I

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

danger, from hardships, or from bitter toil, and
who out of these wins the splendid ultimate
triumph,"

On practical politics and Christian citizen-
ship he has this to say :

I am a loyal party man, but I believe very
firmly that I can best render aid to my party by
doing all that in me lies to make that party
responsive to the needs of the state, responsive
to the needs of the people, and just so far as I
work along those lines I have the right to chal-
lenge the support of every decent man, no mat-
ter what his party may be/'

" I despii . man who surrender, his con-
science to a multitude as much as I do the one
who surrenders it to one man."

" If we wish to do good work for our country
we must be unselfish, disinterested, sincerely
desirous of the well-being of the common-
wealth, and capable of devoted adherence to a
lofty ideal ; but in addition we must be vigor-
ous in mind and body, able to hold our own in
rough conflict with our fellows, able to sufi^er
pimishment without flinching, and, at need, to
repay it in kind with full interest."

[4S1]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

" You can't govern yourselves by sitting in
your studies and thinking how good you are.
YouVe got to fight all you know how, and
you'll find a lot of able men willing to fight
you."

" A man must go into practical politics in
order to make his influence felt. Practical
politics must not be construed to mean dirty
politics. On the contrary, in the long run the
politics of fraud and treachery and foulness is
impractical politics, and the most practical of
all politicians is the politician who is clean and
decent and upright."

" The actual advance must be made in the
field of practical politics, among the men who
are sometimes rough and coarse, who some-
times have lower ideals than they should, but
who are capable, masterful and eflScient."

" No one of us can make the world move on
very far, but it moves at all only when each one
of a very large number does his duty."

** Clean politics is simply one form of applied
good citizenship."

" A man should be no more excused for lying
on the stump than for Ijdng off the stump."

" It is a good thing to appeal to citizens to

[4,22]

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER ,

work for good government because it will
better their state materially; but it is a far
better thing to appeal to them to work for
good government because it is right in itself
to do so."

" Morally, a pound of construction is worth
a ton of destruction-"

On Expediency: " No man is justified in
doing evil on the ground of expediency. He is
bound to do all the good possible. Yet he must
consider the question of expediency, in order
that he may do all the good possible, for other-
wise he will do none. As soon as a politician
gets to the point of thinking that to be * practi-
cal ' he has got to be base, he has become a nox-
ious member of the body politic. That species
of practicability eats into the moral sense of the
people like a cancer, and he who practices it
can no more be excused than an editor who
debauches public decency in order to sell his
paper."

On Cynicism : " Cynicism in public life is
a curse, and when a man has lost the power of
enthusiasm for righteousness it will be better

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

for him and the country if he abandons public
life."

On Labor (from the President's Labor Day
speech at Syracuse, 1908) : " No man needs
sympathy because he has to work, because he
has a burden to carry. Far and away the best
prize that life offers is the chance to work hard
at work worth doing/'

" We can keep our government on a sane and
healthy basis, we can make and keep our social
system what it should be, only on condition of
judging each man, not as a member of a class,
but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous
thing in our American Ufe, and fundamentaUy
treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any
man any test save that of his personal worth,
or to draw between two sets of men any dis-
tinction save the distinction of conduct, the
distinction that marks off those who do well
and wisely from those who do iU and foolishly.
There are good citizens and bad citizens in
every class, as in every locality, and the attitude
of decent people toward great public and social
questions should be determined, not by the
accidental questions of employment or locality.

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

but by those deep-set principles which repre-
sent the innermost souls of men."

" The average American knows not only that
he himself intends to do about what is right,
but that his average fellow-countryman has the
same intention and the same power to make his
intention effective. He knows, whether he be
business man, professional man, farmer, me-
chanic, employer or wage-worker, that the
welfare of each of these men is bound up with
the welfare of all the others; that each is
neighbor to the other, is actuated by the same
hopes and fears, has fundamentally the same
ideals, and that all alike have much the same
virtues and the same faults.

" Our average fellow-citizen is a sane and
healthy man, who believes in decency and has a
wholesome mind."

On Coepobations (in speech to the City
Club, New York, when he was Governor) :
" I hope no party will make a direct move
against corporations. . . . Make the man
who says he is for the corporation see to it that
he doesn't give those corporations undue pro-
tection, and let the man who is against cor-

[495]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

porative wealth remember that he has no right
to pillage a corporate treasury."

From the President's Message, January,
1904: *^ Every man must be guaranteed his
laerty «d J right to do « hfuke, with his
property or his labor, so long as he does not
infringe the rights of others. No man is above
the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask
any man's permission when we require him to
obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as
a right, not asked as a favor."

On Immigeation: "We cannot have too
much imimgration of the right kind, and we
should have none at all of the wrong kind.
The need is to devise some system by which
undesirable immigrants shall be kept out en-
tirely, while desirable immigrants are properly
distributed throughout the country."

On Bribery: " There can be no crime more
serious than bribery. Other offences violate
one law, while corruption strikes at the founda-
tion of all law. The stain lies in toleration, not
in correction."

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

On Fellowship (in address to New York
State Conference on Church Federation):
*' People make an unspeakable mistake when
they quarrel about the boundary line between
them. They have a common enemy to face,
who demands united attention and united
action."

On How to Help a Neighbor: "In
charity the one thing always to be remembered
is that while any man may slip and should at
once be helped to rise to his feet, yet no man
can be carried with advantage either to him or
to the community."

" If a man permits largeness of heart to de-
generate into softness of head he inevitably
becomes a nuisance in any relation of life."

" If, with the best of intentions, we can only
manage to deserve the epithet of * harmless,*
it is hardly worth while to have lived in the
world at all."

I X On Success in Life (in speech at La
Crosse, Wis., 1908) : " If you want your chil*
dren to be successful, you should teach them
the life that is worth living, is worth working

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

for. What a wretched life is that of a man
who seeks to shirk the burdens laid on us in the
world. It is equally ignoble whether he be a
man of wealth or one who earns his bread in the
sweat of his brow."

On Lynching : " The worst enemy of the
colored race is the colored man who conmiits
some hideous wrong, especially if that be the
worst of aU crimes : rape ; and the worst enemy
of the white race is the white man who avenges
that crime by another crime, equally infamous.
• . . Shameless deeds of infamous hideous-
ness should be punished speedily, but by the
law, not by another crime."

Two things which Mr. Roosevelt did when
Governor of New York, among the countless
minor details of his official life, always seemed
to me so characteristic of him that I have kept
the record of them.

When Mrs. Place was to be executed for the
murder of her step-daughter, after a period of
great public excitement, he wrote to the war-
den of Sing Sing: " I particularly desire that
this solemn and awful act of justice shall not

[438]

AS A SPEAKER AND WRITER

be made an excuse for the hideous sensational-
ism which is more demoralizing than anything
else to the public mind/*

A biU had passed the Assembly, giving
directions as to the wearing of gowns by attor-
neys practicing in the Supreme Court. Gov-
ernor Roosevelt returned it without his ap-
proval, but with this endorsement :

" This bill is obviously and utterly unneces-
sary-. The whole subject should be left and
can safely be left where it properly belongs —
to the good sense of the judiciary/'

I shall set down last the closing words of
the speech in which Theodore Roosevelt sec-
onded the nomination of WiUiam McKinley,
whom so soon he was to succeed, at the Phila-
delphia Convention, in June, 1900. They
contain his prophecy of

The New Century.

" We stand on the threshold of a new cen-

^ry, a century big with fate of the great

lations of the earth. It rests with us to decide

whether in the opening years of that century

e shall march forward to fresh triumphs, or

whether at the outset we shall deliberately crip-

[ 439 ]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

pie ourselves for the contest. Is America a
weakling to shrink from the world-work to be
done by the world powers? Nol The yomig
Giant of the West stands on a continent and
clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand.
Our nation, glorious in youth and strength,
looks into the future with fearless and eager
eyes, and rejoices as a strong man to run a
race. We do not stand in craven mood, asking
to be spared the task, cringmg as we gaze on
the contest. No! We challenge the proud
privilege of doing the work that Providence
allots us, and we face the coming years high
of heart and resolute of faith that to our peo-
ple is given the right to win such honor and
renown as has never yet been granted to the
peoples of mankind/'

1480]

XVIII

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S

FATHER

XVIII

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S

FATHER*

ON the rocky point of Lake Wah-
waskesh, across from where I have
been idling in my canoe all morning,
angling for bass, there stood once a giant pine,
a real monarch of the forest. The winter
storms laid it low, and its skeleton branches
harass the inlet, reaching half-way across.
Perched on the nearest one, a choleric red
squirrel has been scolding me quite half an hour
for intruding where I am not wanted. But
its abuse is wasted ; my thoughts were far away.
From among the roots of the fallen tree a
sturdy young pine has sprung, straight and
shapely, fair to look at. The sight of the two,
the dead and the Kving, made me think of two

^Written in camp, in Canada, when Mr. Rooserelt was a candidate (or
the Vice-Presidency.

[4SS]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

at home who loved the wildwood well. Father
and son, they bore but one name, known to us
all — Thepdore Roosevelt. There came to my
mind the pronunciamento of some one which I
had read in a New York newspaper, that Theo-
dore Roosevelt's day was soon spent, and other
less recent deliverances to the same effect.
And it occurred to me that these good people
had probably never heard the story of the other
Theodore, the Governor's father, or else had
forgotten it. So, for the benefit of the pro-
phetic souls who are always shaking their heads
at the son, predicting that he will not last, I
tell the story here again. . They will have no
trouble in making out the bearing of it on their
pet concern. And they will note that the father
** lasted " well, which was giving the commu-
nity in which he lived a character to be proud
of. He did more. " He grew on us continu-
ally," said one who had known him well, " im-
til we wondered with a kind of awe for* what
great purpose he had been put among us."
The people " resolved " at his untimely death
that it " involved a loss of moral power and
executive efficiency which no community can
weU spare."

[4S4]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT^S FATHER

Theodore Roosevelt was a glass importer in
Maiden Lane, having taken over the business
after his father, Cornelius. The Roosevelts
had always borne an honored name in New
York. Two of the sons of Jacob Roosevelt,
who in the early part of the last century bought
land " in the swamp near the cripple bush *' and
had the street that still bears the family name
cut through, were Aldermen when the office
meant something. Isaac Roosevelt sat in the
Constitutional Convention with Alexander
Hamilton. He had been the right-hand man
of Governor Moore in organizing the New
York hospital corporation, and President of
the Board of Governors. Organizers they ever
were, doers of things, and patriots to a man.
It was a Roosevelt who started the first bank in
New York and was its first president. Theo-
dore came honestly by the powers which he
turned to such account for his city when it
needed him. He had in him the splendid
physical endurance, the love of a fight in the
cause of right, and the clear head of his Dutch
ancestors, plus the profound devotion that
" held himself and all he had at the service of
humanity." With such an equipjnent a college

[435]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

education matters little. Theodore's father
thought it might spoil his boys, and took no
chances. But exclusion of college did not
mean to them loss of culture. That was their
birthright.

The war came, with its challenge to the youth
of the land. I fancy that Theodore Roosevelt
fought and won a harder fight in staying
home than many a one who went. There were
reasons why he should stay, good reasons, and
he stayed. But if he could not fight for his
country, he could at least back up those who
did. He set himself at once to develop prac-
tical plans of serving them. He helped raise
and equip regiments that went out — ^the first
colored one among them; he jomed in orga-
nizing the Union League Club, the strong
patriotic center of that day; he worked with
the Loyal Publication Society, which was doing
a great educational work at a time when there
was much ignorance as to the large issues of
the conflict ; he had a hand in the organization
of the sanitary commission that saw to the
comfort of the soldiers in the field. And when
he had made sure that they were well fed and
cared for, he turned his attention to those they

[436]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

had left behind. It was then he did the work
for which he and his colleagues received the
thanks of the Legislature of the State in joint
session, much to its own credit.

Many of the soldiers' families were suffering
for bread, while they wasted it by the cart-load
in the army. The Government paid millions each
month to the men, only to see the money squan-
dered in riotous living at the sutlers' tents. Very
little of it, if any, ever reached home. There
were enough to offer to start it out, but the
chances were greatly against its getting there.
The sutler who sold forbidden rum in hollow
loaves or imitation Bibles was not one to stop at
a little plain robbery. The money was lost or
wasted, the families starved, and the morale of
the army suffered. Mr. Roosevelt drafted a
bill to establish " allotment commissions," and
took it to Washington. It was a plain measure
authorizing commissioners appointed for each
State to receive such a proportion of the sol-
dier^s pay as he wished to send home, and to
forward it without cost or risk to him. He
simply gave notice how much he wanted the
wife to have, for instance ; the general Govern-
ment handed the amount to them, and they

[437]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

saw that she got it. But it was not plain sail-
ing to get the bill passed. The men who were
robbing the soldier denounced it as a swindle.
Congressmen rated it a " bankers' job/' unable
to understand why any one should urge a bill
at much personal inconvenience when "there
was nothing in it " for him. The biU provided
for unsalaried conmiissioners. But Mr. Roose-
velt persisted. In the end, after three months
of hard work, he got his bill through. Presi-
dent Lincoln, who understood, appointed Theo-
dore Roosevelt, William E. Dodge, and Theo-
dore B. Bronson the commissioners from New
York. They went to work at once.

It was midwinter. During the first three
months of 1862 they traveled from camp to
camp, visiting the eighty regiments New York
had in the field, and putting the matter to them
personally. In the saddle often all day, they
stood afterward in the cold and mud sometimes
half the night, explaining and persuading,
bearing insults and sneers from many of those
they wished to benefit. The story of that win-
ter's campaign is a human document recom-
mended to the perusal of the pessimists and
the head-shakers of any day. They had soon

[438]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

to give up the plea that they received no pay
for their services, " because it aroused only sus-
picion." But they did not quit on that account.
There was this thing to be done, by such means
as they could. They learned, when any one
asked how they benelfited by it, to tell them that
it was none of their business. "The money
does not come out of your pocket; if we are
satisfied, what is it to you? " They won their
fight, as they were bound to, saved thousands
of homes, and raised the tone of the army, in
spite of snubs and predictions of failure. Even
their own city sent rival commissioners into the
field at one time, discrediting their work and
their motives.

Other States heard of the great things done
in New York, and followed suit. Great good
resulted. In New York alone the amount
saved to those in dire need of it ran up in the
millions. It is recorded of Theodore Roosevelt
that through it all he never lost his temper or
his sunny belief in his fellow-men whom he had
set out to serve. Conscious zeal did not sour
him. It is easy to believe the statement that it
was he who, with a friend, persuaded President
Lincoln to replace Simon Cameron with Stan-

[«9]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

ton in the War Department. That lonely man
had few enough of his kind about him. At a
time when the camps were gloomy and the out-
look dark, it was Roosevelt who got up the —
I came near saying the round-robin to his eoim-
trymen ; it is not always an easy thing to keep
the two Theodores apart. But that was not
what was wanted at that time ; it was a message
of cheer from home, and it came in the shape of
a giant Thanksgiving dinner sent from the
North to the Army of the Potomac. Veterans
remember it well, and how it revived flagging
spirits and put heart into things, though grum-
blers were not wanting to dub it fantastical.
Mr. Roosevelt got that up. He collected the
funds, and, with his marvelous faculty for get-
ting things done, made it the rousing success
it was. Perhaps it is not a great thing to
give a dinner; but just then it was the one
thing to be done, and he did it. Then, when
the fight was over, he had a hand in organizing
the Protective War Claims Association, which
collected the dues of crippled veterans and of
the families of the dead without charge, and
saved them from the fangs of the sharks. It
was at Mr. Roosevelt's house that the Soldiers'

[440]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

Employment Bureau was organized, which did
so much toward absorbing into the population
again the vast army of men who were in dan-
ger of becoming dependent, and helped them
preserve then- self-respect.

That issue was not so easily met, however.
The heritage of a great war was upon the land.
The community was being rapidly pauperized.
Vast simis of money were wasted on ill-con-
sidered charity. Fraud was rampant. Mr.
Roosevelt set about weeding it out by organiz-
ing the cit/s charities. We find him laboring
as a member of a " conmaittee of nine," with
Protestants, Jews, and Roman Catholics, to
ferret out and arraign the institutions " exist-
ing only to furnish lazy managers with a liv-
ing." He became the Vice-President of the
State Charities' Aid Association, a member of
the Board of United Charities, and finally the
head of the State Board of Charities, for the
creation of which he had long striven. Wher-
ever there was a break to be repaired, a leak to
be stopped, there he was. He founded a hos-
pital and dispensary for the treatment of hope-
less spine and hip diseases. He pleaded, even
on his death-bed, for rational treatment of the

[441]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT S FATHER

unhappy lunatics in the city's hospitals; for
a farm where the boys in the House of Refuge
might be fitted for healthy country life; for
responsible management of the State's Orphan
Asyliuns, for decent care of vagrants, for im-
proved tenements. In all he did he was sen-
sibly practical and wholesomely persistent.
When he knew a thing to be right, it had to be
done, and usually was done. With all that, he
knew how to allow for differences of opinion in
others who were as honest as he. Those who
were not, expected no quarter and got none.
Mr. Roosevelt's good sense showed him early
that the problem of pauperism with which he
was battUng could not be run down. It had to
be headed off if the fight was to be won. So
he became Charles Loring Brace's most ener-
getic backer in his fight for the children. He
was a trustee of the ChUdren's Aid Society,
and never in all the years missed a Sunday
evening with the boys in the Eighteenth
Street lodging-house which was his particu-
lar charge. He knew them by name, and
was their friend and adviser. And they
loved him. When he lay dying, they bought
rosebuds with their spare pennies and sent

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

them to his house. Many a time he had come
from the comitry with armfuls of flowers
for them. The little lame Italian girl for
whom he had bought crutches wrote him with
infinite toil a tear-stained note to please get
well and come and see her. His sympathy with
poverty and sufi^ering was instinctive and in-
stant. One day of the seven he gave, however
driven at the ofiice, to personal work among
the poor, visiting them at their homes. It was
not a penance with him, but, he used to say, one
of his chief blessings.

He was rich and gave liberally, but always
with sense. He was a reformer of charity
methods, as of bad political methods in his own
fold. For that cause he was rejected by a
Republican Senate, at the instance of Roscoe
Conkling, when President Hayes appointed
him Collector of the Port. Mr. Roosevelt had
accepted with the statement that he would
administer the ofiice for the benefit, not of the
party, but of the whole people. That meant
the retirement of the Custom-House influence
in politics, and civil service reform, for which
the time was not ripe. It was left to his son
to carry out, as was so much else he had at

[443]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

heart. So far as I know, that was the elder
Roosevelt's only appearance in poUties, as poli-
ticians understand the term. Always a Re-
pubB«m, he hM gone to fte CincinLti Con-
vention, which nominated Mr. Hayes, as a
representative of the Reform League.

Church, Mission, and Sunday-school had in
him a stanch supporter. He was a constant
contributor with counsel and purse to the work
of the Young Men's Christian Association. I
like to think that the key to all he was and did
is in the answer he gave his pastor when once
the latter said that he liked his name Theodore,
with its meaning, " a gift of God." " Why
may we not," replied Mr. Roosevelt, " dbange
it about a bit and make it * a gift to God ' ? "
No man could have said it imless he meant just
that. And, meaning it, his life must be exactly
what it was.

This is the picture we get of him : a man of
untiring energy, of prodigious industry, Uie
most valiant fighter in his day for the right,
and the winner of his fights. Mr. Brace said
of him that it would be difficult to mention
^^y good thing attempted in New York in
twenty years in which he did not have a hand.

[444]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

With it all he enjoyed life as few, and with
cause: he never neglected a duty. He drove
a four-in-hand in the Park, sailed a boat, loved
the woods, shared in every athletic sport, and
was the life and soul of every company. At
forty-six he was as strong and active a^ at
sixteen, his youthful ideals as undimmed* I
have had to suffer many taunts in my days on
account of my hero of fiction, John Halifax,
from those who never found a man so good.
I have been happier than they, it seems. But
perhaps they did not know him when they saw
him. Some of them must have known Theo-
dore Roosevelt, and he was just such a one.
He would go to a meeting of dignified citizens
to discuss the gravest concerns of the city or of
finance, with a sick kitten in his coat-pocket,
which he had picked up in the street and was
piloting to some safe harbor. His home life
was what you might expect of such a man.
His children worshiped him. A score of times
I have heard his son sigh, when, as Governor
or Police Conmaissioner, he had accomplished
something for which his father had striven and
paved the way, " How I wish father were here
and could see it! " His testimony of filial love

[4A6}

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

completes the picture. " Father was," he said
to me, '' the finest man I ever knew, and the
happiest."

His power of endurance was as extraordi-
nary as his industry. In the last winter of his
life, when he was struggling with a mortal
disease, his daily routine was to rise at 8:80,
and after the morning visit to his mother, which
he never on any account omitted, to work at the
office tiU six. The evening was for his own
and for his friends until eleven o'clock, after
which he usually worked at his desk until 1 or
2 A.M. Several years before, he had had to
give up his father's business to attend to the
many private trusts that sought him as his
influence grew in the community. A hundred
public interests demanded his aid besides. He
helped to organize the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and the Museum of Natural Sciences,
and kept a directing hand upon them up to his
death. When mismanagement of the Ameri-
can department at the Vienna Exhibition
caused scandal and the retirement of the direc-
tors, it was Mr. Roosevelt who straightened out
things. Were funds to be raised for a charity,
he was ever first in demand. His champion-

[446]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

ship of any cause was proof enough that it was
good. His sunny temper won everybody over.
" I never saw him come into my office/' said a
friend about him, " but I instinctively took
down my check-book." He surrendered at
sight.

The news of his death, on February 9, 1878,
came home to thousands with a sense of per-
sonal bereavement. Though he was but a
private citizen, flags flew at half-mast all over
the city. Rich and poor followed him to the
grave, and the children whose friend he had
been wept over him. In the reports of the
meetings held in his memory one catches Ae
echo of a nature rarely blending sweetness with
strength. They speak of his stanch integrity
and devotion to principle; his unhesitating
denunciation of wrong in every form; his
chivabic championship of the weak and op-
pressed wherever foimd; his scorn of mean-
ness; his generosity that knew no limit of
sacrifice; his truth and tenderness ; his careful,
sound judgment; his imselfishness, and his
bright, sunny nature that won all hearts. The
Union League Club resolved " that his life was
a stirring summons to the men of wealth, of!

[447]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

culture, and of leisure in the community, to a
more active participation in pubUc affairs " as
a means of saving the State.

Four years later his son Theodore was
elected to the Assembly, and entered upon the
career of public service which, by his exercise
of the qualities that made his father beloved,
set him in the Governor's Chair of his State.
Other monmnent the people have never built to
the memory of the first Theodore ; but I fancy
that they could have chosen none that would
have pleased him more; and I am quite sure
that he is here to see it.

This is the story, not of a people in its age-
long struggle for righteousness, but of a single
citizen who died before he had attained to his
forty-eighth year, and it is the material out of
which real civic greatness is made. I know of
none in all the world that lasts better, prophets
of evil and pessimists generally to the contrary
notwithstanding. I have been at some pains
to tell it to this generation, out of charity to
the prophets aforesaid. Let them compare
now the son's life as they know it, as we all
know it, with the father's, point for point, deed
for deed, and tell us what they think of it.

[448]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S FATHER

The truth, mind ; for that, with knowledge of
what has been, is, after all, the proper basis
for prophecy as to what is to be. Or else let
them come squarely out and declare that they
have lived in vain, that ours is a worse country,
every way, than it was twenty years ago, and
not fit for a decent man to live in. That is the
alternative, as they will see — ^unless, indeed,
they prefer to do as the squirrel does, just sit
and scold.

[440]

THE ROOSEVELT CHRONOLOGY

(feom congeessional dieectoey)

Bom in New York City - - Oct. 27, 1858
Entered Harvard College - - - - 1876
Graduated from Harvard - - - - 1880
Studied law.

Elected to New York Legislature - - 1881
Re-elected to New York Legislature - 1882
Re-elected to New York Legislature - 1888
Delegate to State Convention - - - 1884
Delegate to National Convention - - 1884

Ranching in West 1884-1886

Nominated for Mayor of New York - 1886
Appointed member of United States Civil

Service Conmiission - - - May, 1889
Appointed President New York Police

Board May, 1895

Appointed Assistant Secretary of the

Navy, April, 1897

[453]

THE ROOSEVELT CHRONOLOGY

Appointed Lieutenant-Colonel if First
Volunteer Cavalry - - - May 6, 1898

Promoted to Colonel of First Volunteer
Cavalry July 11, 1898

Mustered out with Regiment at Montauk
Point September, 1898

Elected Grovemor of New York,

November, 1898

Unanimously nominated Vice-President,

June, 1900

Elected Vice-President - - November, 1900

Succeeded to Presidency - - Sept 14, 1901

1454]

BOOKS BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

COMFIIiED FROM THE CATAIiOGUE OF
THE CONGRESSIONAIi LIBRARY

In each case the date given is of the first published edition. For
complete editions see at the end of tliis bibliography.

The Naval Opebations of the Wae
Between Gbeat Britain and the
United States— 1812-1815- G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York. iVol. . 1882

Hunting Trips of a Bakchman.
G- P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
1 Vol 1886

Life of Thomas Hart Benton. (Vol.
14 of American Statesmen Series.)
Houghton, Mijffllin & Co., Boston.
Cloth 1887

Life of Gouverneur Morris. (Ameri-
can Statesmen Series.) Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., Boston 1888

Ranch Life and Hunting Trail.
The Century Co., New York . . . 1888

[457]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Essays on Practical Politics. (Ques-
tions of the Day Series.) G. P. Put-
nam's Sons, New York. (Reprinted in
"American Ideals.'*) 1888

New York City: A History. Long-
mans, Green & Co., New York . . 1891
(Witib postscript to date.) .... 1896

American Big-Game Hunting. (Book
of the Boone and Crockett Club. ) For-
est and Stream PubUshing Company,
New York 1898

Liber Scriptorum. A shot at a bull-elk;
Roosevelt; pp. 484-487 189S

The Wilderness Hunter. G. P. Put-
nam's Sons, New York 1898

Hero Tales from American History.
H. C. Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt.
The Century Co., New York . . . 1895

Hunting m Many Lands. (The book
of the Boone and Crockett Club.)
Foiest and Stream Publishing Com-
pany, New York 1895

Winning of the West. G. P. Put-
nam's Sons, New York. 4 Vols. . 1896

[458]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

American Ideals, and Other Essays.
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York . • 1897

CONTENTS VOLUME I

Biographical Sketch, by Gren,
F. V. Greene.

American Ideals. Forum . . . 1895

True Americanism. Forum . . 1894

The Manly Virtues and Practical
Politics. Forum 1894

The College Graduate and Public
Life. Atlantic 1894

Phases of State Legislation. Cen-
tury 1886

Machine Politics in New York

City. Century 1886

The Vice-Presidency and the Cam-
paign of '96. Review of Re-
views 1896

CONTENTS ^VOIiUME H

Six Years of Civil Service Re-
form. Scribner's 1895

Administering the New York Po-
lice Force. Atlantic Monthly . 1897

How Not to Help Our Poorer
Brother. Review of Reviews . 1897

The Monroe Doctrine. Bachelor
of Arts 1896

Washington's Forgotten Maxim.
Address, Naval War College,
June ......... 1897

National Life and CKaracter. Se-
wanee Review 1894

[469]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

American Ideals^ and Other Essays

CONTINUED

Social Evolution. North American
Review 1896

The Law of Civilization and De-
cay. Forum 1897

Trail and Camp-fire. (The book of
the Boone and Crockett Club.) For-
est and Stream Publishing Company,
New York 1897

History of the Royal Navy of Eng-
land. (6 vols.) From the earliest
times to the present day. By W. L.
Clowes, assisted by Sir C. Markham,
Captain A. T. Mahan, H. W. Wilson,
Theodore Roosevelt, L. C. Langton
and others. (Mr. Roosevelt wrote part
of the sixth volume on the War of
1812.) Little, Brown & Co., Boston . 1898

Big Game Hunting in the Rockies
AND on the Great Plains. (Includ-
ing " Hunting Trips of a Ranchman *'
and " The Wilderness Hunter.") G.
P. Putnam's Sons, New York . . 1899

Rough RroERS. Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York 1899

Episodes from the "Winning of the
West." (The Knickerbocker Litera-
ture Series.) G. P. Putnam's Sons,
New York 1900

[460]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The Strenuous Life. The Century
Co., New York. 225 pp 1900

CONTENTS

The strenuous Life. Speech.
Hamilton Club, Chicago, April
10 1899

Expansion and Peace. Independ-
ent, Dec. 21 1899

Latitude and Longitude of Re-
form. Century, June . . . 1900

Fellow Feeling a Political Factor.

Century, Jan 1900

Civic Helpfulness. Century,
Oct 1900

Character and Success. Outlook,
March 31 1900

Eighth and Ninth Command-
ments in Politics. Outlook,
May 12 1900

The Best and the Good. Church-
man, March 17 1900

Promise and Performance. Out-
look, July 28 1900

The American Boy. St. Nicholas,
May 1900

Military Preparedness and Un-

preparedness. Century, Nov. . 1899

Admiral Dewey. McClure's, Oct. 1899

Grant. Speech at Galena, 111.,
April 27 1900

The Two Americas. Buffalo,
N. Y., May 20 1901

Manhood and Statehood. Colo-
rado Springs, August 2 . . 1901

[4611

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The Stbenuous Life

CONTINUED

Brotherhood and the Heroic Vir-
tues. Vermont, Sept. 5 . . . 1901

National Duties. Minnesota, Sept.
8 1901

Christian Citizenship. New York
Y. M. C. A., Dec. SO • • . 1900

Labor Question. Chicago, Sept.
8 1900

(Character and Success is issued by the Phil-
adelphia Institution for the Blind in raised
letters.)

Cameba Shots at Big Game. By Allen
Grant Wallihan; introduction by
Theodore Roosevelt. Doubleday, Page
& Co., New York 1901

Oliver Ceomwell. Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, New York. (Also in
French.) 1901

La Vie Intense, &c. (19 essays.) E.
Flammarion, Paris 1902

The Deee Family. By T. Roosevelt,
T. S. Van Dyke, D. G. Elliot and
A. J. Stone. ( The Deer and Antelope
of North America, by Mr. Roosevelt. )
Macmillan & Co., New York • . . 1902

The Philippines: The First Civil
Governor. By Theodore Roosevelt.
Civil Government in the Philip-
pines. By William H. Taft. The
Outlook Company, New York . . . 1902

[469]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Maxims of Theodore Roosevelt. The
Madison Book Co., Chicago • • , 1903

The Woman Who Toh.s. By Mrs. Van
Vorst and Marie Van Vorst. (Ex-
perience of two ladies as factory
girls.) Introduction by Theodore
Roosevelt, in which occurs the famous
Race Suicide phrase. Doubleday,
Page & Co., New York 1903

COMPLETE EDITIONS

KNICKERBOCKER PRESS EDI-
TION. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New
York. 14 Volumes. American Ideals ;
Administration — Civil Service ; The
Wilderness Hvmter; Hunting the
Grizzly; Hunting Trips of a Ranch-
man; Hunting Trips on the Prahies;
and in the Mountains. Winning of
the West (6 Vols.). Naval War of
1812 (2 Vols.) 1908

SAGAMORE EDITION. G. P.

PuTN Air's Sons. 15 Volumes. (Same
as EJaickerbocker Edition, but includ-
ing " The Rough Riders.") .... 1900

STANDARD LIBRARY EDI-
TION. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
(Same volumes as Sagamore Edi-
tion.) 1900

1468]

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

UNIFORM EDITION, Gebbie &
Co., Philadelphia, 20 Volumes.

1902 and 1908
(Same as Knickerbocker Press Edi-
tion, but including besides: Rough
Riders, 2 vols.; New York: A His-
tory ; Life of Thomas Benton ; Life of
Gouvemeur Morris; Hero Tales from
American History.)

[464]

INDEX

Advocate, Harvard . . .

Aldermen, Board of —
power over Mayor's ap-
pointments

"Allotment Commissions"
biU 437,

Anthracite Coal Strike,
President's interference
with . . 373, 375, 376,

Arizona mining troubles —
Roosevelt's interference

372,

Assistant Sec'y of the
Navy . . 64, 157, 161,

Astor, William Waldorf

47, 48,

Bad Lands .... 73,

" Bath-house John " of
Chicago

" Battle with the Slum '* .

Bell, Sherman . . S03,

Bellevue Hospital and
Sunday closing . . •

BiU on wearing of gowns
by attorneys in Supreme
Court — Roosevelt's dis-
approval

Bismarck

Blaine's nomination . . .

Bliss, George

PAOB PAOB

S5 Bourke^ Policeman . . . 23S

Brace, Mr. 444

Bribery — Roasevdt quot-

63 ed 496

Bronson, Theodore B. . 438

438 Brown, Chaplain 184, 185, 187

Bullard, Major .... 49

Bulloch, Irwin S. ... 19

379 Byrnes, the " Big Chief " . 130

380
169

976
109
904

139

498

990

Camp Wikoff 179

Cameron, Simon .... 439
Candidate for legislature 47
Candidate for mayoralty,

75, 96, 99

Cary, Edward 108

Central Association of Li-
quor Dealers .... 136
Central Labor Union of

the District of Columbia 389
Chamber of Commerce
speech — ^the " homely
virtues " . . 968, 414, 416

Charities, United Board
of 441

Charity — Roosevelt quot-
ed 496

Charter Revision Commit-
tee 141

Children's Aid Society 11,' 347

[465]

INDEX

PAOB PAGB

Chiistian Citizenship — Corporatioiis — ^President's

Roosevelt Quoted . • • 430 policy toward . 386, S87

Christian Endeavorers . . 134 Corporations — Roosevelt

CSiurch Federation, New quoted ^25

York State Conference Cortelyou, Secretary . . 245

on — ^Roosevdtfs speech Cowl s, Mrs 8

at 496 Crane, Governor of Mas-
Church membership • . 37 sachusetts 375

City Club, Speech to, by Croker, Richard . . 136, 304

Roosevelt 435 Cuba's freedom .... 383

Civil ServiceCommissioner Cuban conditions . 159, 160

64, 104, 108, 115, Curtis, George WUHam--

119, 131, 135, 309, 393 estunate of Roosevelt 68, 69

Civil Service reform Custom Houses N. Y. —

63, 104, 106, 108, 116, poUtical blackmaU in . 105

119, 133, 333, 333, 443 Cutting, R. Fulton ... 101

Clarendon Hall — ^Labor Cynicism — Roosevelt

men's meeting with quoted 433

Roosevelt . . . 153, 383 ^ „^ „

Classmates' estimates 36, 67 Becatur at Tripoli ... 397

Clay, Henry 339 I>epartment of Commerce

Cleveland, Grover " *nd Labor 387

91, 93, 93, 131, 133, 133, 337 " Deveiys '•.... • • .147

Coal strike commission Dewey, Admiral

103, 377, 378, 381, 386 163, 164, 165, 397

Collector of the Port— re- Dewey, the engineer . . 305

lection of Roosevelt the Diwer, Paddy . . 375, 376

elder by Senate ... 443 r>odge, William E ... 438

Color question . 119, 130, r>raft riots 36

369, 370 Dreyfus, Captain . . . 401

Colored soldier in Spanish Duane Street lodging

war ... . 193, 194, 195 house 358

Columbian plo^ the ... 385 Electoral Commission . . 35

Committee of Nine . . .441 Elevated railroad ring .. 53

Comimttee of One Hun- ^Uot, President .... 360

dred . . . . ... 100 Elizabethanpoetry— Fond-

Comnuttee to investigate nessfor f ..... 37

city departments . 61, 139 eUis Island, President's

Conference with labor ^g||. ^^ g^g

leaders as governor . . 314 Emperor William 373, 373^ 394

Congress and corporations 387 England, relations with . 394

Congressional Library . . 116 Expansion — Roosevelt

Conklin^, Roscoe ... 443 quoted 418

Convention of 1884 ... 66 Expediency — Roosevelt

Cooper Institute . . . . 340 ^^^^^ / 433

Cooper, J. Fenimore . 18, 19 ^

Corbin, Adjutant-General Facsimile of a letter from

370, 371, 373, 87^ Roosevelt 114

[466]

INDEX

TAOa

Factory Department —
Roosevelt's judgment
on disputes with . . . 315

factory law — enforce-
ment of . . . ... .916

Farragut .... 161, 997

Federal Club 65

"Federalist" read . . . S9

Fellowship — Roosevelt
quoted 496

Ferguson, Lieutenant . . 186

Fight against corruption
in the Legislature . 54, 57

Financial policy — Roose-
velt's 386, S89

First literary work ... 39

First Presidential message 106

France, relations with . . 994

Franchise tax . 990, 991, 935

** Four-eyed tenderfoot " . 83

Garfield, President . 47, 397
Garlin, Hamlin .... 145
George, Henry .... 100
Germany, relations with . 994
Germany, study in . . . 40

GUder, R. W 300

Gompers, Samuel . . . 389
Governor .... 173, 907

Grace, Mayor 49

Grant 161, 339

Gray, Judge 377

Greeley, Horace .... 109

Hague Court of Arbitra-
tion 384

« Halifax, John " ... 445

Hamilton, Alexander . . 435

Hamilton Club speech,
Chicago 490

Handwriting of Roosevelt 114

Hanna, Senator . . . .161

Hannigan, Pcdiceman —
pardon of . . . 995, 996 Labor Day Speech at Sy«

** Haroun-al-Roosevelt " . 144 racose . 103, 956, 31^ 4M

Harrison, Mayor, of Chi- Labor men and capital-

cago 977 ists — Roosevelfs attl-

Haxnaoa, President . . 107 lade toward • 871f 878^ 888

[467]

Harvard . . . 99, 95, 98, 48
Hayes, Mrs. — story of

sideboard presented to

986,987
Hayes, President . 443, 444
Health Commissioner

61, 144, 151, 998
Heffner, Private . . • . 188
Hess, '* Jake " . .49, 51, 59
Hewitt, Abram S. . • • 100

Hill, David B 136

History of New York . . 96
" Honest Money " • • • 808
Hospital founded by

Theodore Roosevelt, the

President's father . . 441
"How the Other Half

Lives" 61, 188

Immigration — Roosevelt
quoted 498

Inaugural address as Gov-
ernor 997

International Brotheriiood
of Bookbinders • • • 881

" Isolated Peak, The,"

58^ 59, 60, 67

Issbell, the Indian • • • 188

Jackson, Andrew • ISl^ 889
Jacob A. Riis House • • 856
James' history . • • • 88
Jefferson, the America of 984
Josiah the Badger . • . 818

King Christian's cross • • 889
King's Mountain . • • • 181
Kishineff petition , , • 188
Kishineff petition td^
graphed to St. Peters-
burg 991

Knox, Attorney-General

866,897

INDEX

ijAbor laws conferred orer
LaCrosse^ WiSd — speech at
Lambert, Dr. Alexander .
Las Guasimas

174, 181, 188, 191, 199,
Leatherstocking Tales . .
Lexow Committee . . .
Life-rules of Roosevelt
403, 406, 407,
Lincoln

1«1, 211, 986, 996,
390, 339, 438,

quoted

Lincoln, Roosevelt quoted

984,
Line and Engineer Corps
—contention in Navy

163,
Literary work, 39, 73, 116,
Lodge, Senator . . 159,
Loeb, Secretary 948, 949,
London "Times" quoted

377,
Long, Secretary ....
Loomis — Assistant Secre-
tary of State ....
Loyal Publication Society
Low, Mayor . . . 374,
Lynching — R o osevelt
quoted

Madison Street Theater —
address

''Making of an American,
The " . 134, 141, 151,

Manila

Martin, Police Commis-
sioner

Maxims of Roosevelt

403, 406, 407,

McCalla, Captain . . .

McKinley, WiUiam

76, 191, 158, 936, 943,
945, 946, 949, 348, 365,

366, 379,

McNaughton, James 944,

Merit system in Police
Department . . 146,

PAGE PAGI

914 Methodist ministers . . 1S4
497 Metropolitan Museum of
145 Art 446

" Mike " CaUahan's sa-

383 loon 938

18 Militia iomed 26

130 MiUer Case . . 380, 381, 389

Mitchell, £d 50

408 MitcheU, John . 379, 380, 389

Monroe Doctrine .... 159

Montauk Point .... 173
439 Montgomery (Alabama)
139 Times— quoted ... 369

Moody, Secretary of the
985 Navy— quoted . . 375, 376

Moore, Governor .... 435

Mores, Marquis de . 81, 89
164 Mount Marcy . . . 943, 944
413 Mulberry Street
396 199, 130, 136, 138, 147,

987 148, 150, 151, 157, 158,

169, 405

378 "Murphys" 147

161 Murray, "Joe" 49,50,61, 59

Museum of Natural Sci-

385 ences 446

436

391 Napoleon .... 190, 997

National duties — ^Roose-
MQff velt quoted 418

" Naval War of 1819 " . . 39

Negro problem — Roosevelt
109 on the . . 119, 190, 369, 370

"New Century, The"—
g24 Roosevelt quoted . . . 499
Igg New York Hospital Cor-
poration 435

13g Nominated for Collector
of the Port of New

408 York 69

3g5 Nomination for vice-pres-
idency . . 33, 933, 934, 935

Northern Securities suits 309

. gg Olympia ordered home . 165

946 Panama Canal .... 384

Panama Canal Company . 385

147 Parkhurst, Dr. . . . 61, 130

[468]

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