of these. But the man who is born weak and who has acquired strength is proud of his achievement and is self-conscious of it. Sedulous self-development has caused Mr. Roosevelt to emphasize the physical life. Nothing with him counts for so much as power of endurance, the audacity to encounter danger, physical contest, the animal in man and their capacity to greatly propagate themselves. Ordinarily these feelings pass away with the period of adolescence, when the first rush of blood has subsided from the head. But Mr. Roosevelt has carried them over into his mature years and exploits them as peculiar wonders characteristic of himself. This is the meaning of the strenuous life. Amidst such tumultuous passions the writing of books is a pastime. The warfare against civic wrong and for civic righteousness must be waged with grim determination, with set teeth and scowling countenance. But at all events the courage and the strenuosity with which the attack is made must be emphasized more than the merit of the onslaught or the righteousness of the cause. Mr. Roosevelt's advice to speak softly but carry a big stick, his admonitions to avoid ignoble ease, to stand for civic righteousness, to back our words with deeds and to couple Christian principles with resolute courage sound hollow and puerile. There is too much of cruelty and tyranny in his self-vaunted courage. His pompous poses, his spectacular manner, and his exhibitions of power on all occasions suggest the strong little boy of the school yard, who, by a fair measure of strength and a large measure of fortune, is able

greatly to his own delight to cow the feelings of his associates.

But if a man possess courage how shall he use it? If he possess great energy of mind in what channels shall he direct it? What are courage and ability of themselves? Of what consequence is the strenuous life for its own sake? The world has seen its share of men who had courage on the wrong side and who were strenuous in behalf of the strong and wicked. Mr. Roosevelt's civic righteousness consists in straining at gnats. He is very much concerned about the vices of people and about crimes as well, if they happen to be committed by those with whom he is socially out of sympathy. But with the rarest opportunities for giving his country a new birth of righteousness and liberty, that has ever come to any man, he has done nothing. He has not justified the people of America in conferring their highest honor upon him. But as Aeschines said, when he debated the question whether Demosthenes should be crowned, he has left his country to be judged by its youth because of the man who has received its greatest honor. "When a man votes against what is noble and just," said Aeschines, "and then comes home to teach his son, the boy will very properly say, 'Your lesson is impertinent and a bore.'" Hence, what is courage without a cause; what is strenuosity without an ideal?

The temptation considered symbolically alone is the most searching analysis of every man's experience in the realm of literature. The Son of Man was an hungered and the tempter said "If thou be the son of God command that these stones be made bread." Again,

the Son of Man was tempted to use his power for a vain and foolish purpose, and by such use to place himself upon the level of mountebanks and magicians. Finally, empire over the world was offered him, if he would worship the principle of evil. In the resistance of these temptations is symbolized honorable poverty, dignified purpose and renunciation of political power rather than to sacrifice those principles without which political power is a curse.

One of Mr. Roosevelt's apologists has said that he compromised with his ideals in order to get power to carry some of them into effect. But this never has and never can be done. The man who thus sophisticates with his own mind has surrendered his power. He has fallen at the feet of evil in order to possess a kingdom; and he leaves behind him when he enters into possession, the only power by which he could serve the kingdom or glorify himself. If Mr. Roosevelt's pretensions to ideals in his earlier years may be considered seriously it only remains to say that in various books he stood against the flagrant evil of a protective tariff; that he denounced imperialism, that is, the acquisition of distant and heterogeneous territory by force; and that he never lost an opportunity to inveigh against the spoils system in the government service. When he capitulated upon these principles to get office, he had nothing left with which to seriously employ his courage or his strenuosity. It was a long step from the advocacy of expansion by the addition of sovereign and contiguous states to the advocacy of subjugating a whole nation at the farther side of the globe. Yet when Mr. Roosevelt parted

with his principles he did not abandon his intemperate hatreds. "Cowardly shrinking from duty," as applied to the policy expressed in the democratic platform of 1900 contains a good deal of sound and fury, but it signified nothing unless it drowned out the small voice in himself that appealed to his own utterances in favor of liberty in his biography of Thomas H. Benton. Hence did he compromise with his principles in order to get into power to do good? When his country hesitated before taking the plunge into national animalism he was present to denounce those as cowards who tried to restrain it. He became the loudest exponent of swaggering militarism. He has given repeated expression to that vulgarity which arrayed in garish colors sets up to despise the day of high thinking and noble simplicity. The strenuous life consists in hearty feeding, mighty hunting, desperate climbing, and daily exercise upon the mat or with the gloves. Yet he is the cynosure of vast numbers of the wealth and fashion of the country, who find in him a proud and distinguished interpreter of the cult of exuberant animalism. The slaughter of the ostrich, the rhinoceros and the elephant in the Roman amphitheater with the bow and arrow held by the skillful hand of the imperial hunter is out-done by the pursuit of bears and mountain lions with modern weapons before an audience of millions. The daily press with its pictorial facilities has increased the spectators and multiplied the marvels. Scattered through the various strata of society Mr. Roosevelt has found sincere admirers. A military spirit, which slumbers in the breast of the man below who loves to fight and the man above who loves

to see a fight, has leaped forward to claim Mr. Roosevelt as something typically American. Thus he is not without friends in any of the classes drawn according to the common standards. His election to the vicepresidency elated an exponent of the culture of the land, so that even beneath the shades of classicism he is not wholly proscribed. Churchmen, who, with a vague unrest, are ever reaching out for new realms of activity, and keener realizations of power, take him as the possible precursor of some destiny toward which they have hitherto drifted unconsciously. With his friends it is useless to point out that he has discarded the institutions of his country and broken its ideals. For principles of peace and good will toward all nations he has substituted military rivalry. He has transported hither the spirit of doubt which obtains among European nations whose proximity to each other and whose traditional jealousies have kept up a wearisome watchfulness.

Many things, which by reason of what Washington called our peculiar situation, are alien to us he has helped to cultivate among us. One hundred years have not sufficed to make these growths of old world conditions indigenous to this soil. We are yet what we were in Washington's day, a nation set apart from the quarrels of kings; and it is strange indeed if some dream of destiny which would have discredited Louis Napoleon, shall carry us far away from that simple. code which is logically evolved from our natural situation.

Mr. Roosevelt well illustrates the principle that the decay of liberty corrupts one of the noblest arts.