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has given the American people a new sense of its position in the world, and of its responsibilities and opportunities. They recognize in their new President the incarnation of these new ideas. The Hour has come and the Man.

"It cannot be too clearly understood abroad that on this class of subjects there is no real division among the American people. The division which existed has ceased to exist."

This writer says of the President:

"When the missionary spirit is upon him, silence becomes impossible to him. A friend whose position entitled him to speak, wrote: 'Is there no question, Theodore, upon which we may be allowed to decide without your intervention?' If at times his Americanism seemed to pass by imperceptible shades into jingoism, there was, I am sure, a physical reason for it. The energy of the heart was excessive; and this may be taken in either a muscular or spiritual sense at the will of the reader. The school to which he then belonged has had an immense influence on the fortunes of the Republic. It has transformed what was, down to three years ago, an established political system."

The story that Senator Lodge is to be "a sort of cross between a Warwick and a Hanna," is not largely credited, because the President listens to all, but the Englishman we are quoting says, "An intimate friend of the President said to me that there was but one person to whose judgment he really deferred, and that one person is Mrs. Roosevelt. That also is a trait of pure Americanism; perhaps nowhere else does the husband's loyalty to the wife include so much."

The President is endeared to the English by his love of sport on a great scale, because he is "a mighty hunter before the Lord; a good shot, a good horseman, tireless in the chase. He has written a big book on 'Big Game Hunting in the Rockies and on the Great Plains'-one of several. He says in the 'foreword' to this book, 'All the kinds of big game in these vast regions I have hunted and killed,' and adds:

"Mountain and plain, marsh and forest, have been mine to roam over, and I have followed the wild game for food and for sport where no man had property rights in a rood of ground. Such a life is of all lives the freest and most fascinating.'

"But 'the wilderness has been conquered and the game killed off,' and the Nimrod of earlier and recent days is President of the United States. There remains the extreme North, 'the land of the musk ox, the barren ground caribou, the Polar bear, the snow sheep, and the fish grizzly;' and the South, 'where the spotted jaguar is king.' I asked the President when he hoped to go afield again. His answer was like him. 'I must do my work here first, but I have planned a hunting trip with R. for next autumn.'

T. R.-18

“A many-sided, much-enduring, much-enjoying kind of man. Like Ulysses, he has known men and cities. The country he has now to govern he knows as few know it. Few Americans have seen so much of so many of the five-and-forty States of the Great Republic. Eastern by birth and training, he is Western by instinct and by much experience of Western life. Perhaps his greatest popularity was in the West; it was the delegates from plain and prairie that were most resolutely bent on nominating him at Philadelphia for Vice-President, whether he would or no. They suspended in his favor their inveterate inland distrust of what comes from the Atlantic, and their conviction that the progress of wisdom and of empire is toward the setting sun. A graduate of Harvard University, a member of its board of governors, a student, a writer of history and of essays, political and ethical, the biographer of Gouverneur Morris, on the one side, and of Cromwell, on the other, with pride of blood and of birth, and much of that culture for culture's sake which the cowboy despises, he nevertheless stands close to the heart of the Great West; which is so great that it sometimes forgets there is a Great East also. The President, and not as President only, stretches out a hand to both. He cannot, if he would, escape the influence of his descent, of his Dutch, and Huguenot and, I believe, Scottish blood also. Heredity is stronger than he.

"Believing himself, as I said, a democrat of democrats, he has the intuitive habit of command, and what does that rest on, if not on a just sense of superiority to the commanded? Ask the police of New York whether they were ever disciplined by a firmer hand than Roosevelt's. Ask the navy whether any civilian Secretary ever was more evidently born to the quarterdeck. Ask the Legislature of New York State what Governor ever imposed his will more relentlessly on the elected representatives of the people. Ask his regiment of Rough Riders-and they were rough—what kind of discipline ruled that unruly regiment, and by what stern methods it was enforced. Ask his friends and political associates whether they have found him a man easily turned from his purpose or ever reluctant to assert his own will. Search the records of the Civil Service, of which he was Commissioner for six years, for evidence of any feebleness of purpose in carrying out the measures of reform which the politicians of both parties most fervently detested.

"Chief servant of the Republic, yes; but Chief Magistrate also, and penetrated to the core with the conviction that the business of a Government is to govern. In these days, when so many flabby conceptions of authority prevail, we may be thankful for a ruler who has a backbone. It were better to be governed badly than weakly, and the worst government is surely better than none. But now comes a man who will rule strongly, and we all now think wisely. If it be true, as de Tocqueville long since warned us, that there is no tyranny like the tyranny of a democracy, it is surely better that this spirit of

dominance be concentrated and incarnated in the individual we have chosen to bear sway over us. He has to do the thinking for seventy millions of people, too much absorbed in the vast enterprises of a revolutionary civilization to think for themselves in matters of detail. Now there never has been a time in Roosevelt's life when he had not the true apostolic impulse to preach the gospel to all mankind. His books, his speeches, all his writings and sayings are full of it. He has thought himself into his beliefs, and he announces them in the tone which goes far to make them the beliefs of other people. The Presidency gives him an unequaled opportunity of stereotyping them into law.

""In this world,' wrote the President recently, 'the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity, coupled with the capacity, to do well and worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind.' That was said with reference to Mr. Taft's entrance upon the governorship of the Philippines; 'thrice fortunate is such an opportunity;' added the President. What he said of that difficult yet infinitely less. difficult post than the Presidency may stand well enough for himself. Young, as youth is now reckoned in public life-he is forty-three-with such health and power of sustained work as are granted to few, the road to further distinction and wider usefulness lies open before him; straight, broad, not smooth, full of great occasions for great mistakes or greater public service. Impulsive, impetuous at moments of his past career, he knows that he has been both, and he said of himself-not to me-that while his speech may have sometimes bewrayed him, and while many an act may have been ill-advised, when did he take any important decision rashly? For rashness, now, there is no room, and perhaps no man is less likely to do an unconsidered thing than he whose candid friends, and enemies more candid still, have so often warned of this tendency to yield to the suggestion of the hour. They said of McKinley that he kept his finger on the pulse of the nation. This is a President who knows that he has to keep his finger on his own. That lesson well learned, no man in this high office can well have too much of the vitality or buoyancy of soul which belongs to Mr. Theodore Roosevelt."

President McKinley left prosperity beaming upon the land in golden harvests, the public opinion that surrounded him with appreciation and an atmosphere of high regard and loving sympathy. Theodore Roosevelt, under the command of the Constitution, took the oath, and assumed the duty of the high office; and the crowning mercy is that the gain of the nation was not the loss of the State, for there was no friction in the succession-the highest testimony to the smooth working of our system-proving that safety is in the dynasties, not of families, but of the people; and the Vice President became President, not to change but to fulfill; and his earliest declaration was that he would pursue the lines marked down by his predecessor; and the Cabinet

was continued without the formality of resignation, the President's call to remain being an invitation to duty, the acceptance of which was commanded, not imperatively but inevitably.

The Governor of the Empire State, as President of the United States, has the evidence of his life's labors that he has pursued the right course to grasp the greater opportunities of usefulness; and his countrymen know, from his history, that he has not merely a very unusual and thorough preparation for his position, but most admirable aspirations. His hand is firm, and his good works praise him. Far more than that, the Honorable Seth Low, the fame of whose administration as Mayor of Brooklyn in his early manhood, helped the example of Theodore Roosevelt, as he wrought in the Assembly of the State, the Police Commission, the Gubernatorial integrity, with a strong hand, so that Tammany, with all the blandishments of infamous power, is overwhelmed in a flood, magnificent and beneficent as ever rises and rolls cleansing waters to wash away fetid accumulations and sweeps aside the rottenness that has caused our municipal governments to be reviled. The master representative and organizer of evil in New York, finds his shield and club battered and broken, and retires with the remark that there is a "silent vote," and "the people sometimes want a change." Seth Low, in November, 1901, was elected Mayor of New York, and Theodore Roosevelt is President of the United States, with the confidence of the country. Each has before him a prodigy of problems.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE QUESTION OF RACE.

It Is the Bequest of Slavery-Roosevelt a President without Prejudice-Phases of Racial Problem-The President's Oration on Frederick Douglass-Shall We Amend the Constitution?

TH

HAT Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-fifth President of the United States, has no prejudices against the white people of the South is as certain as that his mother was a Southern woman, and sympathized with the South in the war that raged between the brethren of sister States when he was a child in her arms. He believes, as the enlightened world believes, though States revolted against the constitutionally elected and benign Lincoln, who never ceased to love his native State, Kentucky, and never for a day was as angry as he was grieved, that it was the passionate act of misguided men that cost his countrymen so much precious blood, and gave the race the glory that has gone so far around.

This generation of Americans, in all the States, believes that the Southern Confederacy was a gigantic mistake, redeemed only by the valor of the fighting men who gave the lost cause a military history so brilliant that the whole people may be proud of it, though the beginning was in political error; and it is the accepted belief of enlightened mankind, that the States of the South, after all, won when they lost; and would have been infinitely injured if their genius for war had given them the victory. They had the honor as soldiers, and the faith of brave men, to be at peace when they surrendered; and can claim a share of the serene glory of Appomattox, because when they gave up the fight, they did not persist in a horrible war of heedless desolation. They maintained the honor of arms, and no men know better or honor more the tone of chivalry that abides with that sense of honor and was displayed by the vanquished army Lee surrendered. It was, as was said by Lee when he gave up the fight, that the blood shed in a lost cause was murder; and his conviction that the cause was lost made peace. Lincoln and Grant accepted victory as peace with honor. Grant held fast when Lincoln was no more, to the spirit of the terms of capitulation.

In the days before the war it was often said, with Southern pride, that the people of the South were less unjust to the blacks than the people of the

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