ills and misfortunes and sorrows if one can carry hope on the outside and let any remnant of happiness shine through. No one can tell the agony of that solitary sorrow when a grave was made on a foreign battlefield. But he did not ask his fellowmen to help him carry it. He carried no emblem of death. He asked for more things to do, to think about and to say. He said that he could not expect that four sons could go into war with the peril of high explosives, and all return. It was the measure of his prompt sacrifice. He was driving on, giving his own life to force that war to its conclusions by matching his pen against the sword. He must be an intensely narrow partisan who does not feel the loss that has fallen upon his country by the death of ex-President Roosevelt. He could not be shut out of the counsels of his own country. He has sent over words that have burned into the brains of the most potent statesmen at the peace conference. He was tremendously needed in his own land in a time when latent Bolshevism and slumbering red socialism could be held in restraint only by men of the type of Colonel Roosevelt and men of whom he was the acknowledged captain. It is an hour that calls for brave men, wise men, American men without a taint or a remote mixture in its loyalty and with consecration to the principles of our fathers and mothers. Never have we needed as now a recrudescence of the old-time Americanism that has been overgrown with the poison ivy of imported destructive thought and teachings of the ignorant that threaten to choke and destroy its life. We had looked to Colonel Roosevelt as the man whom the remnant of thinking men would follow and whose clear voice would restrain the mad hordes plunging on behind the red flag they know not why, a man who would not sacrifice his flag to his personal ambition, a man whose words, weighed with the artisan and the working man because he never used them, but always served them, a man who in his one own personality would outnumber the thousands of riotous brutes, Hun-like in their instincts, seeking to apply the torch to the foundations of all government and law. |