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 asking McKinley's advisers to stay and be his, all of them. It was politically wise, for it allayed 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 inventing of it. What does that matter?

He found in Attorney-General Knox, for instance, a corporation lawyer whose very experience 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 dealings of organized wealth with the rest of mankind. 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

government of the people than to have the feeling 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 challenge 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 delegations, 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

ing than to fill pockets and belly while they last! In which case I pity them from the bottom 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 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 poorest 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, all 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 tell 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 because there is at last a man at the head who will not dodge, but deal squarely with them as they

come? How should he have "intended insult" 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 effort, 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 officials 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

re

ger down!" 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 condition of semi-slavery. That leads us farther in, because it does not stop there."

'

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

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