CHAPTER T WASHINGTON-LINCOLN-ROOSEVELT J ULIUS and Augustus Caesar, the great em perors, were deified by the Romans, and they perpetuated their names in the months which the two emperors had named for themselves July, after Julius, and August, after Augustus. If we were giving names to the months in our country nowadays, we would call one Washington, another Lincoln, and another Roosevelt, the last, of course, for the month of June with its roses. The reverence and affection of Americans for these three heroes is akin to the devotion of the Romans for the Caesars. After the first agonizing cry at the sudden death of Theodore Roosevelt there burst forth spontaneously from the nation's heart praises of the departed hero that reached the borderline of idolatry. Roosevelt took his place instantly among the trio of immortals. He had been dead but one month and six days when the people indicated the place they intended to give him in permanent history. They hung up his picture on Lincoln's birthday with that of Washington and Lincoln. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes to the gulf, and throughout our island posses sions, in the halls of art, the palaces of the rich and the cottages of the poor, were hung the pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. These three heroes represented the three important eras of the nation's history-Washington, its birth; Lincoln, its salvation, and Roosevelt, its perpetuity. Washington had been dead only ten years when Lincoln was born, and Roosevelt was a boy six years old when Lincoln died, so that the lives of these three giants practically span the birth, the growth and the glory of the American commonwealth. It would be difficult to compare these national heroes. They were so singularly adapted to the periods in which they lived, and to the tragic services they were called upon to perform, that each seems complete and incomparable as a leader in his time. They were dissimilar in many particulars. Washington and Lincoln were each over six feet high; Roosevelt was comparatively short and stout. Washington was clean-shaven; Lincoln had a beard, and Roosevelt a mustache. Washington wore silk stockings and silver shoe buckles; Roosevelt belonged to the silk stocking colony in New York and wore fine shoes; Lincoln never had a pair of stockings on his feet till he was a man grown, and no shoes except in snowtime, and those rude ones made by his father's hand. Washington and Roosevelt wore fine clothes; Lincoln up to the time he was twenty-one years of age wore deerskin pants, deerskin vest and a coonskin cap with the tail left on, and his cabin was surrounded with wolves and bears. Lincoln's father was exceedingly poor; Washington's father was in comfortable circumstances; Roosevelt's father was counted a millionaire. There was not only a difference in surroundings, |