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assassinated by Thomas Jefferson and was the assassin of Aaron Burr; he commanded a regiment in the French and Indian wars, and was an arctic explorer in a period immediately after the Civil War. The defense of the examinations by Roosevelt is full of such specific examples, showing that he had an intimate acquaintance with the results of the work in his office.

It was Roosevelt who first introduced the form of examinations now so generally used by the commission to discover the peculiar fitness or unfitness of applicants for special lines of work to which they are to be assigned. It came about in a series of examinations in which Texas and the Southwest were interested. It was proposed to place the mounted inspectors of the government along the Rio Grande, in Texas, under the civil-service rules. These inspectors are men of rare courage and must necessarily be skilled in handling cattle, familiar with the different kinds of cattle brands, and excellent horsemen. They have to deal with the cattle rustlers on the Mexican border. When Roosevelt saw the questions which had been prepared for these men, bearing on history, rhetoric and mathematics, he declared the proposed examinations would be farcical, and, calling to his aid his own familiarity with the cattle country and the plains, he drew up a set of questions for the inspectors. The only intellectual test was that which was made by requiring a man to answer the questions in his own words and handwriting. The questions were something of a shock to those who had been conducting the examinations in accordance with the old methods. One of the questions. the men had to answer was this:

"State the experience, if any, you have had as a marksman with a rifle or a pistol; whether or not you have practiced shooting at a target with either weapon, or at game or other moving objects; and also whether you have practiced shooting on horseback. State the make of the rifle and revolver you ordinarily use."

Another of the questions read this way:

"State fully what experience you have had in horsemanship; whether or not you can ride unbroken horses; if not, whether you would be able, unassisted, to rope, bridle, saddle, mount and ride an ordinary cow pony after it had been turned loose for six months; also whether you can ride an ordinary cow pony on the round-up, both in circle riding and in cutting-out work around the herd."

Another question which Mr. Roosevelt framed was as to technical knowledge of the different brands of cattle in the cattle country, and it would be unintelligible to any but a cattle man or Roosevelt. When he submitted the question to his colleagues he declared that, to be a successful government inspector and shoot lawless Mexicans and prevent the

"running" of cattle over the border, it was not necessary for a man to discuss nebular hypotheses nor to have an intimate knowledge of the name and number of inhabitants of the capital of Zanzibar. In all sin cerity, he told his colleagues that he would like to make another requirement, and that was that each applicant be made to appear before those in charge of the examinations and lasso, throw and tie a steer in twenty minutes, but as he himself did not have time to preside at such feature of the examination he had left that out. That was the beginning of the practical methods of examinations by the civil-service commission, which have been followed up by Mr. Harlow and his colleagues on the commission until the scholastic element in the examinations has disappeared almost entirely, and they are now designed solely to establish the practical fitness that applicants have for the lines of work to which they are to be assigned.

FRIENDLINESS.

As Colonel Roosevelt was walking up Delaware avenue in Buffalo one day last week he passed an ancient negro raking leaves out of the grass between the sidewalk and the curb. The negro took off his hat and bowed low.

"Please, sir, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, "I'd like to shake hands with you, sir."

As he grasped the vice president's outstretched hand he added: "Look out they don't get you, Mr. Vice-President."

"Thank you," said Colonel Roosevelt, and started on.

Two men in overalls had stopped to watch his meeting with the negro, and as he turned to go on they stepped up to him, too, with their hands stretched out.

The colonel shook hands with them both and thanked them for their greetings.

"Ain't you afraid when a fellow comes up to you in the street like this?" asked one of them.

"Not a bit of it, sir," replied Colonel Roosevelt, with all his usual energy of utterance, “and I hope the time will never come when an officer of this government will be afraid to meet his fellow citizens in the street. The men of this country, all the people, are the guardians of the men they have elected to public office. If anything, the lives of the officers of the government are safer now than before that thing was done at the exposition the other day. Tell me," he asked, with a smile which showed his confidence that he would get a negative answer, "did it ever occur to either of you that violence would do any of our people any good?"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Theodore Roosevelt. Addresses, and Tributes to His

Character.

SPEECH BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT BEFORE THE HAMILTON CLUB, CHICAGO, APRIL 11, 1899.

FAMOUS LEADER OF THE "ROUGH RIDERS" ADDRESSES THE ASSEMBLAGE ON "THE STRENUOUS LIFE."

Governor Roosevelt was the central figure and chief speaker of the banquet. His address on "The Strenuous Life," to deliver which he came here from Albany, is printed in full as follows:

"In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort; of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

"A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself, and from his sons, shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace is to be the first consideration in your eyes-to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great. because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of nonremunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in histori

cal research-work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation.

ADMIRE VICTORIOUS EFFORT.

"We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period not of preparation but of mere enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth's surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a satisfactory life, and above all it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

NATION WITH GLORIOUS HISTORY.

"As it is with the individual so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things and war and strife the worst of all things and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heart-break of many women, the dissolution of many homes; and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it we would have shown that we were weaklings and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations

of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days-let us, the children of the men who carried the great civil war to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected, that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations.

THIS AGE HAS ITS TASKS.

"We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them! We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them; sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk; busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day; until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound in the end to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well

or ill. Last year we could not help being brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve. It we undertake the solution there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright, but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright.

THOSE WHO SHRINK NOW.

"The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country,

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