the globe in the tropics, realizing the prophecy of the ever westward emigration and the trade winds.

It was at this epoch that Theodore Roosevelt expanded his ideas of the Americans of America, and in their atmosphere finished the schooling for his great hereafter, leaving, though, to the last the final touch of the actualities of war. He was suddenly initiated into the life of the land of the coming time, and in tone with the people. The man of the metropolis and the university, the representative of an old and cultivated family, with a name the pride of the Knickerbockers, and the society of the affluent, scored the point that the least tender-footed of all men was the one who in his youth had seen other lands and people than this, and with the arts of science softened the rudeness of the strong; and the traveled and scholastic author paid this tribute to the cowboys, who were natural to the Cattle Country, but had not been native, because they hadn't had the time out there. He said:

"Everywhere among these plainsmen and mountain-men, and more important than any, are the cowboys-the men who follow the calling that has brought such towns into being. Singly, or in twos and threes, they gallop their wiry little horses down the street, their lithe, supple figures erect or swaying slightly as they sit loosely in the saddle; while their stirrups are so long that their knees are hardly bent, the bridles not taut enough to keep the chains from clanking. They are smaller and less muscular than the wielders of ax and pick, but they are as hardy and self-reliant as any men who ever breathed-with bronzed, set faces, and keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face without flinching as they flash out from under the broad-brimmed hats. Peril and hardship, and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, draw haggard lines across their eager faces, but never dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence. They do not walk well, partly because they so rarely do any work out of the saddle, partly because their chaperajos, or leather overalls, hamper them when on the ground; but their appearance is striking for all that, and picturesque, too, with their jingling spurs, the big revolvers stuck in their belts, and bright silk handkerchiefs knotted loosely round their necks over the open collars of their flannel shirts."

There is a refined wisdom about this that is rare in those who count their years in the early forties, and one goes on to read his estimation of great men with a curious stimulation of interest. A young man who assigns himself to his place and tells how he grew as a tree, and put forth new leaves in their season, has given vouchers that he can draw likenesses and evolution other than his own, with a lead pencil. Governor Roosevelt, April 27, 1900, in his address at the Grant Anniversary, Galena, Illinois, names the three great men of all time in our country, as he sees and sketches.

"As the generations slip away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with keener wisdom into the Nation's past, mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant. There are great men also in the second rank; for in my gallery of merely national heroes, Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson would surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken. their place among the great men of all Nations, the great men of all time. They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of human freedom under the law; for that spirit of orderly liberty which must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows.

"Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second and even greater struggle, the deeds of Lincoln, the statesman, were made good by those of Grant, the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the work that dropped from Lincoln's tired hands when the assassin's bullet went home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.

"It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them soldiers and one the great war President. It is only through work and strife that either Nation or individual moves on to greatness. The great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it is those who fearlessly turned away from them when they have not been earned, who in the long run deserve the best of their country. In the sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at times, yet in the long run it is far more bitter to eat of the bread that is unearned, unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose paths were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far from them. Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who, while they did not shrink from war, were nevertheless heartily men of peace.

"So it was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by peace, they would not have been justified. If the Great Silent Soldier, the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many conquerors in civil strife before him have done, to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union which so many men shed their blood to restore, were not

now a Union in fact, then the precious blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and West, are one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose, in fellow-feeling and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new century."

In an address which was a character study of General Grant, Governor Roosevelt gave an interesting account of a change of opinion in a relation that has indelibly colored his life and being. He tells with as sharp analysis as if he was writing of another person how he had been taught not to love cowboys less, but other human creatures more. And he appears to have regarded the plainsman as an incomparable creature, and thus explains how he kept his first love of the rude and tameless rough rider on his pedestal, but let him down from premiership by the elevation of other products by humanity under American conditions.

"The first time I ever labored alongside and got thrown into intimate companionship with men who were mighty men of their land, was in the cattle country of the Northwest. I soon grew to have an immense liking and respect for my associates; and as I knew them, and did not know similar workers in other parts of the country, it seemed to me then the ranch owner was a great deal better than any Eastern business man, and that the cow puncher stood on a corresponding altitude compared to any of his brethren in the East.

"Well, after a little while I got thrown into close relations with the farmers, and it did not take long before I had moved them up alongside of my beloved cowmen, and made up my mind that they really formed the backbone of the land. Then, because of circumstances, I was thrown into intimate contact with railroad men; and I gradually came to the conclusion that these railroad men were about the finest citizens there were anywhere around. Then, in the course of some official work, I was thrown into close contact with a number of the carpenters, blacksmiths and men in the building trades—that is, skilled mechanics of high order—and it was not long before I had them on the same pedestal with the others. By that time it began to dawn on me that the difference was not in the men but in my own point of view, and that if any man is thrown into close contact with any large body of our fellow-citizens, it is apt to be the man's own fault if he does not grow to feel for them a very hearty regard and, moreover, grow to understand that on the great questions that lie at the root of human well-being, he and they feel alike." He continued:

"I shall ask attention not to Grant's life, but to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them. Foremost of all, the lessons of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed as President no less than as general. He was no more to be influenced

by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in favor of a sound and stable currency, than he was to be influenced by a check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to allude when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose. It is the only quality, the lack of which is as unpardonable in the Nation as in the man. It is the antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms.

"There are not a few public men, not a few men who try to mould opinion within Congress and without, on the stump and in the daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby increase the thirst for over-statement of each situation as it arises, whose effort is, accordingly, to make the people move in zig-zags instead of in a straight line. We all saw this in the Spanish War, when the very men who at one time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything wrong in the army, at another time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything right.

"As the ages have rolled by the eternal problem forever fronting each man and each race, forever shifts its outward shape; and yet at the bottom. it is always the same. There are dangers of peace and dangers of war; dangers of excess in militarism and of excess by the avoidance of duty that implies militarism; dangers of slow dry rot and dangers which become acute only in great crises. When these crises come the Nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce statesmen like Lincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not back them up in their efforts. We do not need men of unsteady brilliancy or erratic powerunbalanced men. The men we need are the men of strong, earnest, solid character-the men who possess the homely virtues, and who to these virtues add rugged courage, rugged honesty and high resolve. Grant, with his self-poise, his self-command, his self-mastery; Grant, who loved peace and did not fear

war.

"Grant was not originally an abolitionist and he probably could not have defined his views as to State sovereignty; but when the Civil War was on, he saw that the only thing to do was to fight it to a finish and establish by force of arms and constitutional right to put down rebellion. It is just the same thing nowadays with expansion. It has come, and it has come to stay, whether we wish it or not. Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we cannot avoid performing them. All we can decide is whether we will perform them well or ill. We can not leave the Philippines. We have got to stay there, establish order and then give the inhabitants as much self-government as they show they can use to advantage. We can not run away if we

would. We have got to see the work through, because we are not a Nation of weaklings. We are strong men, and we intend to do our duty.

"Washington did not promise the people of this country what the leaders of the French revolution promised in 1789-90-91-92. They promised everything. They promised that every man should be absolutely happy. Washington promised only what he could perform. He promised honesty and common sense. He promised that he would take part in forming a government in which there would be prosperity, not for all men, whether they were intellectual or not, whether they were lazy or not, whether they were thrifty or not, but that there should be prosperity as a whole for the man who was honest, who was thrifty, who was hardworking, and who knew how to handle himself, and his promises were made good.

"Washington has won a deathless place in the annals of the best and wisest of mankind. He stands as the greatest of good men, and as the best of great men, because he did not play the part merely of the cloistered philosopher, but strove to achieve results; because he did the best he could with the means at hand, because he ever fixed his eye on the distant goal, and yet did not overlook the obstacles that lay between. He fixed his eyes on the stars, but fixing them there, did not forget to look where his feet trod."

In nothing that Roosevelt has written does he so perfectly reveal himself as in the golden sentences in which he gives his thoughts, bright and clean cut from the mint, and vividly sketches his ideals, or denounces that which is hateful to him. For example:

"If there be an even more obnoxious member of the body politic than the honest timid man, it is the dishonest man who has courage, for his courage simply makes him a more dangerous wild beast in the community. One of the things that it always grieves me most to hear from the lips of any American is that deification of what we call smartness, the deification of cunning, and craft which has been divorced from scruple.

"The man who is successful in politics at the cost of abandoning the very principles which we hold dear-that man does not merely damage that he has done by his own career, which may be but trifling; he does infinitely more. He lowers the standards of thousands of young men, of tens of thousands who are not able to see clearly, and who are blinded by the fact that he has succeeded to the further fact that his success was not worth having from any true standpoint.

"If you get together and ask for reform as if it was a concrete substance like cake, you are not going to get it. If you think you have performed your duty by coming together once in a public hall about three weeks before election and advocating something that you know perfectly well it is impossible to get, you are going to be fooled.