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to the insolent falsehood of those who had assailed Admiral Schley in terms of opprobrium.

The Lieutenant General was received by the President with the respect due his rank, but no augmentation of the incident. Mrs. Roosevelt's greeting was, in a marked degree, cordial, to the General and the Admiral. She has the happy art of aptness. The press performed its part with impartiality, some saying the manner of the President was "forbidding," and others that he welcomed the heroic chieftains with "effusion." There is ample room to make choice.

All efforts to persuade the President to be guarded from possible anarchists were failures. Mrs. Roosevelt on this, as other occasions of public duty calling for her appearance, has made an exceedingly agreeable impression. She is a model of devotion as wife and mother, tactful and of the highest intelligence, active and painstaking, with a pleasant way of doing and saying that which is cleverly appropriate. Her spirited vivacity is tempered by her kindly consideration and gentle sympathy.

The appearance of the President's elder daughter in society was as simple in the appointments as if her father had been without official rank. The family life has the dignity of the avoidance of all pretension. The household has the soft illumination of unity and love. The order is perfect. There is no strife of variety or friction of display. The pathetic figure of Mrs. McKinley mourning for her children, and as a child in her broken health, but strong in her tenderness and sustained by the constant, affectionate care of her husband, will be long remembered as of saintly character. Her beauty, delicacy and grace will live forever in the stories of the tragedies of the White House, whose walls have witnessed, of the twenty elected Presidents, five who died in office, on the way to the graves at the end of the paths of glory.

The presence of the youngest of the Presidents, and the wife and children at home, comes to the people who are grateful that out of the gloom, that has overshadowed millions of firesides, there comes to the White House, with the President, a household representative of countless homes, the citadels of the Nation, and that the President's boys and girls play childhood's pretty games in the historic corridors.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PRESIDENT TAKES THE RESPONSIBILITY.

His Rapid and Rugged Style-Goes Right at His Work-Makes Frontal Attacks-Precedents of Public Policy as Governor of New York Have Application to All the States Secretary Long's Appreciation-Square Dealings with the People, Poor and Rich-There Is No Safety in Hiding or Running-The Final Responsibility for Reciprocity-Our Cuban Policy and the President's Ambition and Ideality.

W

HILE Governor of New York, President Roosevelt was even for him extraordinarily outspoken in reference to all matters of moment to the people. He searched the State for "problems," found them in abundance and exercised as great freedom of speech as if free from responsibility, though the most responsible man in the State, and constantly talked of as a candidate for President when he had reached a suitable age, which, as he was a child in arms when Lincoln was elected, he was not supposed to have attained in his early forties. President Grant was, when inaugurated, forty-seven years old, younger by one year than Pierce, and by two years than Garfield, when they reached the summit of American ambition.

The election of Roosevelt after McKinley's second term would have placed him in office at the same age Grant took up the command in chief of the Army and Navy. It was not presumed there could be a precedent that in the first year of the century would seat a President whose earliest personal recollection of the great war that took place in his infancy, could not date back beyond the closing scenes of Appomattox, where the conduct of the brave men on both sides made the treaty of peace that was well understood, though unwritten save in a military memorandum. There was that in the action of the Southern armies that made surrender glorious. There never was in American history proof more conclusive of the capacity of our people for self-government, than that when the Confederate forces disbanded, it was written for us, the sword should not devour forever.

President Roosevelt's term as Governor was a preliminary course that was most instructive to himself, and promises invaluable service to the country. There is an outspoken earnestness in his official productions that is unlike anything we have had from a public man. It has been the tradition, substantially the law of the land, that in high places there must be reserve-a cautious

weighing of words, an intent measuring of the consequences of acts upon the propriety that is all potential. The platforms of the political parties that believe in the possibility that they may come into power, have been laboriously constructed, that the refinements of interpretation should remove controversal ruggedness, and gather, perhaps it is fair to say, the unearned increments of the manhood suffrage, that obtains in theory and is recorded in constitutional law, but lost in the intricacies of administration, in our system of leaving to localities the determination of many knotty entanglements, in the supreme court of immediate public opinion.

No event we can reasonably consider, within range of probability, or possibility, would signal more wonderful work than that of the success of President Roosevelt in gaining approval of the bold course of a brave man in telling the people the whole case as he understands it, standing or falling with the truth. The public papers of Theodore Roosevelt are treasures for those who study his character, and calculate or conjecture what the result is to be of this stalwart manhood that asserts itself, not with the slow advances of zigzag approaches, but by frontal attack with banners officers to the front in full uniform, and presenting a fair mark for the sharp shooters of foes. The British Bull Dog Generals did not win at this game in South Africa, and had to call an old tactician to take advantage of the lay of the land, and not scorn cover under fire from invisible riflemen; but the Rough Riders did win in that very way with straightforward rushes in the thorny thickets of Cuba.

The strong hand and positive purpose with which President Roosevelt takes hold of a public abuse and nuisance, yields many examples in his administration of the State of New York. One in reference to a part of the country familiar to millions of our people is for that reason of unusual interest. There was a complaint about the nuisance in Saratoga Lake. The principal inlet of the lake is Kayaderosseras Creek, which flows through the village of Ballston Spa to the lake, and several brooklets flow into it near the Spa, and the sewers and drainage of the village carried by it. Banks of the creek and tributaries are largely occupied by manufacturing plants, productive of paper, sulphite pulp used in tanning leather, and the refuse goes into the creek, which is an open sewer from Ballston Spa to the lake. There is a tannery, whose yearly output is one and three-quarters of a million dollars, where an immense quantity of hides are handled, that go through what is called a depilatory condition. Next are put into barked liquor, a large quantity of the water containing salt and lime water, neutralized by lactic acid, and the tanning liquors, all discharged, highly colored, into the creek. There are many additional specifications of the items of the nuisance thus created. One relates to a paper mill, where from a hundred and fifty to two hundred cords of wood are ground up each week, treated with hot sulphurous acid and other chemicals,

which subdue the resin and vegetable nature of the wood, that is further treated with chloride of lime-three hundred pounds of sulphur used for the manufacture of a ton of the pulp. This goes into the creek. The Governor uses the names of the companies engaged in this profitable work, seems to be correctly informed as to the amount of their capital stock, states that the water of the creek, after acting as the solvent in the chemical processes, finds is way back into the stream, "carrying in solution acids, alkalis, organic and inorganic matter, in such large quantities that a decidedly acid reaction can be detected four miles down the stream." And these acids and alkalis, coming in contact with large quantities of sewerage, hasten chemical action and fermentation, generating gases and offensive odors, "often producing nausea;" and into the same creek is discharged the drainage of Saratoga Springs. The shores of the lake are lined with cottages and hotels, and the Governor touched this up by saying that those most bitterly complaining about the pollution of the lake, "seemed to forget the ancient rule established in Jerusalem that each person should sweep before his own door." Fish are killed by contamination with the water and ferment and decay "producing stenches more or less offensive, according to the customs and habits of those obliged to inhale them."

The waters of this creek and Saratoga Lake “are not directly used for potable purposes, but ultimately find their way into the Hudson river. And many other of the waters of the State, fresh and pure twenty-five or fifty years ago, have come to be open sewers, 'transmitting disease germs from one place to another.'"

The State Board of Health co-operated with the Governor, who declared that after July 1st, 1899, there should be a sweeping change along the shore of the lake, and the streams tributary thereto, and that no "raw sewerage" should be discharged into the lake or streams tributary, and that the villages of Saratoga and Ballston Springs and Ballston Spa, should provide works for the sanitary treatment of the nuisance they produced. The great tannery on Gordon Creek was declared a nuisance, and the firm ordered to abate it.

The language of the Governor was as follows: "That the discharge of effluent and waste material from the paper and sulphite mills"-the names and locations of the establishments given-were a nuisance to be abated on or before April 1st, 1900; and this, according to process, to be approved by the State Board of Health.

There has been widespread discussion abroad, as well as at home, about the public character of President Roosevelt, and the usual Americans who wish to enlighten Europe when there is a crisis in our country, have appeared in the usual way in the London newspapers.

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GOV. ROOSEVELT AND MAJ.-GEN'I ROE MARCHING IN FRONT OF 22 ND REGIMENT FROM STATE ENCAMPMENT

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