in his apologies to the church usher, and promised "it will never happen again." It never did.

He was a devout worshiper, participating in the service and most heartily in the singing. He was a keen listener and often took notes of things said and announced. Whenever there was a call to aid the poor, he responded next day with a generous check. He regularly participated in the quarterly celebration of the Holy Communion.

Doctor Schick was a straightforward, sterling character, and Roosevelt was very fond of him, always met him and had time for him when he called, however pressing the duties of the presidential office. Roosevelt participated in a number of special services at Grace Church, and gave the congregation a fine portrait of himself, painted just before he became Vice-president.

As we look back now, over the completed life work of Theodore Roosevelt, our opinions might differ as to what was the greatest contribution of his career to the world. But he himself, looking backward from the year 1920, reviewing his own efforts and weighing his many reforms, fixed upon the Panama Canal as his most noteworthy achievement, and so stated in his Autobiography.

After his term of office at the White House was ended, I read in several newspapers, which had been extreme in their opposition to him, that "The

most important contribution he has made to the well-being of the country has been his raising the moral standards of the youth of the land." What he would have said on that point I do not know. Certainly he had thought of such a matter, though briefly, for he thought of most sides of most matters, and always with acumen. But more interesting to him, because more definite and more fought for, was the great waterway between the two Americas, vainly dreamed of for centuries and by him created.

My own interest in the Canal had been sketchy indeed, but real. In 1881 I met the then aged Count De Lesseps in Paris, and I looked at his huge frame and blond, benign countenance with memories in my mind of the Suez Canal which had brought him, its projector, deserved renown. At that very time he was planning to cut a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama. But the Suez Canal, with its level territory and sandy soil, was mere play compared with the projected cut across that almost impossible Central American isthmus.

So the millions of francs poured by France into the Isthmian scheme were swallowed up, the work slackened, difficulties overwhelmed, and the canal was pushed only a few miles on its way across the obdurate country. I was reminded of De Lesseps and his failure a few years later, when in Palestine.

As we sought to travel from Jaffa up to Jerusalem, we were shown into a train of tiny cars, driven by a dwarf-like locomotive, on a narrow-gauge track. And when I inquired about this singular train, I was told that it had been sent from the Panama Canal region. Several of these cars and engines seemed the sole remnants of that unhappy Gallic enterprise.

The Panama Canal project, as taken up by President Roosevelt and pushed to a successful end, dragged its serpentine length through several years of Roosevelt's administration and beyond it. Also we may say that it had roots, antecedents, a history running back, at least in fancy, to Balboa's day. Treaties and revolutions had succeeded one another, and if Roosevelt had not been the genius of energy that he was, treaties would still be pending in Washington and revolutions would still be existent and tyrannous in Colombia. There was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, and the HayPauncefote Treaty, and the Hay-Herran Treaty and sundry other little tentative inquiries and understandings and questionings, stretching down over the decades like vines over a trellis. There was a steadily increasing conviction, evident among all the leading governments of the world, that some kind of canal could and should be constructed.

But there the matter hung, jealously watched by several interested nations.

Then Roosevelt, very soon after the untimely death of President McKinley, put into action ideas which had been germinating in his mind for several years past. In a characteristic address which he made in 1911, at the University of California, he gave a summary of his action, which was as clear and humorous as Lincoln's communications often He said:

were.

"I am interested in the Panama Canal because I started it. If I had followed traditional, conservative methods, I should have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to Congress, and the debate would probably be going on now. But I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate. And while the debate goes on, the Canal goes on also."

That was Roosevelt's way. He preferred, always, to move in harmony with established laws and precedents. But when these merely impeded him, when they were even thrown across the path of his plans by his enemies, like logs across a railroad track, he simply removed them and went ahead. As we look back at the childish, refractory conduct of elementary Colombia and its feather-brained revolutionists, we can face the problem in its large world-outlines. The industrial, commercial world

needed a canal cut through the isthmus. And all plans were being juggled and the world's needs were being disregarded by the unscrupulous, halfcivilized demagogues of that Central American country. It was, as happened before in Roosevelt's career, a Gordian knot. And he cut it. I believe that his action was entirely justifiable in the Court of Equity.

In his Autobiography he takes pains to say pleasant, approving things about certain superior social types and groups in Colombia; but in conversation, even in after-dinner speaking, he said - at least on one occasion - things which were not so complimentary. When I was at Trinidad, West Indies, in 1920, friends there told me about Roosevelt's brief visit to the island and about a formal dinner given him. In his address after the dinner, he spoke of local affairs and mentioned their neighbor, Colombia, saying casually that the Colombians were of light weight, scarcely capable of selfgovernment. But the Colombian consul happened, alas, to be among the guests; and naturally he resented any such opinion. He even sent to Mr. Roosevelt a challenge to mortal combat. But the veteran of San Juan gave no attention to it and departed, as he had planned, on the early morning

steamer.

Any one who knew Roosevelt's fine courtesy