CHAPTER XXIX ESTIMATES OF WILL H. HAYS AND B EING struck with a beautiful extract of an address on Theodore Roosevelt by Mr. Will H. Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committec, before the joint session of the Indiana State Legislature, February 7th, I wired Mr. Hays at his home in Sullivan, Indiana, asking for the text of that address. Immediately I received a telegram granting the request and use most of the address as follows: "I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was 21. That promise was to live my life to the hilt until I was 60, and I have kept that promise." These words Theodore Roosevelt said to his sister a few days before he died. And this, indeed, he did. To follow this man's life is a succession of steps from peak to peak; to describe his accomplishments is a review of superlatives. He had more knowledge about more things than any man, amazing all with whom he came in contact by the breadth of his knowledge, prodigious beyond comparison. He was intensely human in the freedom of his unselfishness, and his name is synonomous with courage and activity. He was as imaginative as a poet, as appealing as a child, loving to fight and fight close, at grips in the clinches, but with the deepest personal affections and the broadest love for all men. He wanted only real things. While always progressive and reaching out, quick to think and quick to act, he sought the practical method which would bring results. His alert and intense nature was always in tune to the needs of the moment, but he went deeper into the fundamentals than any one of his period. In office, while wise men were asking what might best be done, Roosevelt would reply, The best has been done— and he was right. He would approach with the same assurance and equal ease the settlement of the RussianJapanese war or a bout with a prize fighter, a social reception or the construction of the Panama Canal. As early as 1902 he spoke the language that the Kaiser understood, and never ceased to speak that language while he lived. There may have been doubt in Roosevelt's mind as to the outcome of his position in the Venezuelan matter, but there was never any wavering in his mental processes as to his duty in the premises nor any vacillation in his movements in execution. He summoned Dr. Holleben, the German Ambassador, to the White House and told him that if Germany would not consent to arbitrate in ten days Dewey would be ordered to Venezuela. When he did not hear from von Holleben for a week he called him and told him that instead of three days more it would be two days more and within thirty-six hours the Kaiser yielded. What a characteristic Roosevelt action! With equal ease and the same assurance he undertook the Panama Canal, after four centuries of failure, and made possible its completion to the practical satisfaction of the civilized world, when without him it would still be a subject of diplomatic discussion. And the voice that called his own babies about him and that cried for justice to little children was the same voice that thundered, "Perdicaris alive or Rasuli dead." His great fight for preparedness and Americanism in this country against professional pacifism and parlor Socialism was not the development of his later years, nor did it grow out of his conviction of the necessities of the recent period. When he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, in 1897, he cried for naval preparedness for the SpanishAmerican war, which he believed inevitable; he overhauled the navy; he got and spent the great appropriations for ammunition for target practice, and in his cable to Dewey, on February 25, 1898, two months before war was declared on Spain, in which the first step toward American occupation of the Philippine Islands was taken, he performed as naturally as when he left the New York Legislature and all behind him to go West and prepare physically for his career, and as fully as when, like a voice in the wilderness, in 1914, 1915 and 1916, he cried out, "Prepare, prepare, prepare!" By some he was called impetuous, yet when McKinley died he made the statement, "I promise to take over and continue to completion, so far as it lies within my abilities to do so, the policies of the great President who now lies dead." He was called war-like by some-yet he championed the cause of international arbitration of world differences of opinion and claims, both in and out of office, practiced what he preached by submitting the Pious Fund case, and kept the great part of the world peaceful during his régime. He was for peace when peace was right, but if to win right for right's sake war was necessary, then he was for war, or for whatever else was needed; and, above all, he was for America eternally, and there he was the severest partisan. I have heard the story that when Roosevelt decided very early to take part in politics his family was not immediately in sympathy with that form of public service; he was told by them that he would find no one at the meeting which he purposed attending but "grooms, liquor dealers and low politicians." "Well," Roosevelt replied, "if that is so then they belong to the governing class, and you don't, and I mean if I can to be of the governing class." And he was of the governing class from that moment until he died. He first governed himself, and at no time did he fail to apply to his own personal life, to his thought and to his actions, the same code he applied to others. Weak physically, he made himself strong. Whenever wrong, he made himself right. With an entire absence of any false pride, he would consult his friends, urge suggestions, and freely adopt them. He is said to have had from his earliest youth this characteristic of absorbing good from every one and everything with which he came in contact. He had it to the fullest in the wisdom of his maturity. He would discuss himself in as frank manner as he would discuss his opponents. His career as a member of the Legislature, as Civil Service Commissioner, Police Commissioner, Assistant |