CHAPTER XXVI

ADDRESSES BY HON. CHAUNCEY DEPEW AND BISHOP WILSON

T

HE New York City Methodist Preachers' Meet

ing, composed of a thousand members, said to

be the largest ministers' meeting in the world, held a Roosevelt Memorial Service the Monday morning after the Colonel's death at which the Hon. Chauncey Depew and Bishop Luther B. Wilson made eloquent addresses.

Mr. Depew, though eighty-five years old, spoke with his old-time fire, humor and eloquence for over an hour. He cheerfully gave me the full text of his address. Much of Mr. Depew's address is here given:

MY FRIENDS: It is a very great pleasure for me to meet you here this morning. I am glad to comply with your request to join in your service for Theodore Roosevelt. Не was my friend from his boyhood until his death. No one could know him without having for him the profoundest affection and the greatest admiration. He was one of the most extraordinary men of our period, or of any period; he made history and was a most important factor in the history of his time. His whole publie career is lined with monuments in beneficent legislation and individual achievement testifying to services for his country and the world of the greatest value. He was born two years before the breaking out of the Civil War and was President of the United States when it was the necessity of the Executive

to have a united country in support of policies for the benefit of the whole United States. For this destiny he was fortunate in his ancestors: his father of Dutch and Scotch ancestry, was a leading citizen of New York and one of the most useful and prominent citizens of the North; his mother was from Georgia and represented the best blood and traditions of the South. He could appeal, as no President had been able to since the Civil War, to all sections of the country, North, South, East and West.

He had a consuming desire to be all the time doing something and producing something. When he was Governor, with all the exactions of the place, he, nevertheless, found time to write books. He was under contract with his publishers on both the African hunting trip and the Brazilian journey of exploration. After a day of rough travel and perilous adventure, when all his companions were used up and asleep, he sat by a box on which was a candle and by its flickering light wrote the day's chapter for his book. He was daily contributing to the press and to weekly and monthly magazines, constantly giving interviews and making speeches, and yet in some mysterious way found time for conferences with political leaders, with men of letters, with distinguished visitors, with his publishers, the managers and the editors of his magazines and newspapers.

He was a frequent attendant at social functions, and the most desired and welcomed of guests at public and private dinners. He was temperate in all things, but a glutton for work.

His activities were during the greatest period of industrial development which this country has ever known, a period in which masterful men developed in an unprecedented way our natural resources, our manufacturing and our transportation with results that were enormously beneficial to communities and multitudes of people, but yielded fabulous returns to the architects.

Colonel Roosevelt admired these men and their achievements, but always looked upon them and what they did from the standpoint of public safety and public service. His clear vision was never obscured. He had no fear of big business, and to his mind the bigger the better, if the best results for all could be had that way; at the same time,

if in his judgment the process was becoming dangerous to the public welfare because of its tendency to monopoly he became at once its enemy.

As New York Police Commissioner he startled, aroused and enraged a wide open city where the law against vice had always been laxly enforced, if at all, by announcing as his policy the rigid enforcement of the laws. Saloonkeepers and gamblers, votaries of pleasure and all that multitude who in a great city, if unrestrained, violate the law, were instantly up in arms. They formed a great parade for personal liberty, but to their amazement found occupying the front seat on the reviewing stand the new Police Commissioner. A German brewer shouting, "Where is Roosevelt now?" was amazed by hearing the Police Commissioner say, "Here I am, my friend, what can I do for you?" The surprise reversed the German mentality, the brewer called three cheers for Roosevelt and that part of the procession collapsed. Wherever in the district infested by gangs and gunmen the patrolman's life was always in danger, there, at all hours, would be found strolling along and in constant peril of assassination, Mr. Roosevelt. Discipline and efficiency soon made the New York police the finest body in the world.

In a few months after his inauguration, McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt became President and gave to the country seven years of the most eventful and fruitful Presidential terms in our history. An incident of the convention may be of interest. There being no contests because the nominations were unanimously agreed upon, the orators of the convention had no opportunity of presenting the claims of various candidates, so they exhausted themselves and exhausted the audience by making practically the same speeches over and over again for Mr. McKinley and Governor Roosevelt. The crowd had ceased to listen and had begun to scrape the speakers down, when a Western delegation came to me and said, "You never get out our way, and we would like to hear you speak." Roosevelt as a fellow delegate sat immediately in front of me. He turned around and said in his quick way, "Yes, yes, he will speak. He must give us something new; if these bores keep this up any longer it will beat the ticket." And he seized me and practically threw me upon the platform. It was one of those occasions where a story is the only sa

vation for a speaker. Near me sat a portentously solemn United States Senator whose platitudinous speech had already been delivered three times. As I started the story he turned to the Chairman and in a horrified and tragic voice said, "Great Heavens! The solemnity and dignity of this historie occasion is to be ruined by a story."

Great and successful leadership requires many qualities. I have known, beginning with Lincoln, with considerable intimacy every President of the United States. None of them had all these qualities except Mr. Roosevelt. He was a born leader of men. His industry was phenomenal, but in addition was that intelligent work which knew where to find what he wanted and his marvellous intelligence which grasped, absorbed and utilized this material with the precision of a machine.

He loved companionship and found time to enjoy his friends. When that friend left, he had contributed all he possessed to the materials useful to this great Executive. He might be a college professor, a United States Senator, a Foreign Ambassador, a State Governor, a Justice of the Supreme Court, a labor leader, a cowboy from the ranches, a hunter from the mountains, a traveler from overseas-all were equally welcome and all equal contributors.

In looking over the acts recommended and the laws passed during Roosevelt's administration, we find a mass of constructive work, of progress and reform, which gathers, condenses and puts in practice the accumulated necessities which had arisen since the close of the Civil War.

We rejoiced in our marvelous prosperity, at the same time it was our greatest peril. A few masterful men were combining the industries of the country and had almost perfected the consolidation of its transportation. Roosevelt alone, of his co-temporaries, with his unequaled insight into public opinion, saw a gathering storm. He sensed an unrest which was culminating into dangerous hatred of success. He set about vigorously to correct these evils and succeeded. His railway legislation did away with many of the abuses which had necessarily grown up with the rapid progress of railway building and consolidation. He put a curb on great Trusts and blocked the way of general monopoly. He incurred the bitter and venomous hostility of powerful interests in the financial world, in specu