where the combat work by his squadron was most strenuous and aided materially in the success of the battle.

"Lieutenant Roosevelt had already brought down one enemy plane and had aided the squadron in a number of flights against large enemy air formations where the American units dispersed the enemy and brought down a number of their aircraft. His work during the combats was exceptionally good, his endeavor being the success of the squadron rather than to get individual airplanes to his personal credit.

"His loss was deeply felt by his flying comrades in the squadron as well as by all officers and soldiers with whom he had ever come in contact."

In response Roosevelt wrote to Gen. Pershing on Sept. 27, 1918:

"We very much appreciate your letter of August 23 and the enclosures. Naturally, we value the photographs and the official report. It was most kind and considerate of you, my dear General, in the midst of your absorbing work, to think of us. Naturally, we are profoundly moved and profoundly pleased by the way in which Quentin's comrades, the soldiers of your army, have marked his grave and treated it, in a certain sense, as almost a place of pilgrimage.

"And now I wish to thank you most heartily for the news about Ted's promotion to the Lieutenant Colonelcy, of which you notified me in your cable.

"Well, my dear General, you are the American most to be envied of all the Americans since the close of the Civil War. You have done. the great deed in the great crisis, and you have made all of us debtors always. Of course, all the wars in which our nation has taken part, even in the Civil War itself, had nothing to show in any way resembling this war, or the fighting that you have yourself conducted."

The exaltation, the sublimity of Roosevelt's grief for Quentin, found expression in an editorial article which he

wrote for the Metropolitan Magazine, under the title of "The Great Adventure." This was published in the newspapers on September 17, 1918, and created a profound impression everywhere. It was subsequently published, with some other articles of Roosevelt's on the war, in a volume with the same title (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), and thus given a permanent place in literature. The universal verdict upon it was that in it Roosevelt struck a higher note than he had ever before reached. When I said as much to him, he replied: "Ah, that was Quentin!" here the opening and closing passages:

I quote

"Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are part of the same Great Adventure. Never yet was worthy adventure worthily carried through by the man who put his personal safety first. Never yet was a country worth living in unless its sons and daughters were of that stern stuff which bade them die for it at need; and never yet was a country worth dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life not as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual but as a link in the great chain of creation and causation, so that each person is seen in his true relations as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve the larger and continuing life of the whole."

"In America to-day all our people are summoned to service and sacrifice. Pride is the portion only of those who know bitter sorrow or the foreboding of bitter sorrow. But all of us who give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers. We run with the torches until we fall, content if we can then pass them to the hands of other runners. The torches whose flame is brightest are borne by the gallant men at the front, and by the gallant women whose husbands and lovers, whose sons and brothers are at the front. These men are high of soul, as they face their fate on the shell-shattered earth, or in the skies above or in the waters beneath; and no less high of soul are the

women with torn hearts and shining eyes; the girls whose boy lovers have been struck down in their golden morning, and the mothers and wives to whom word has been brought that henceforth they must walk in the shadow.

"These are the torch-bearers; these are they who have dared the Great Adventure.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

UNDIMINISHED ACTIVITIES OF HIS CLOSING YEARS

His grief at the death of Quentin did not permit Roosevelt to lessen his interest in the great war and the attitude of the nation toward it. He continued to write and speak with unabated zeal and undiminished force. When in the autumn news came of the deportation and enslavement of Belgians by Germany, he was among the first to utter a protest. In a letter that he wrote to Mr. F. W. Whitridge, the organizer of a great mass meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, on December 15, 1916, that had been called to express public indignation at Germany's conduct, he said:

"This action (by Germany) is paralleled by the action of the Assyrian conquerors of Syria and Palestine; but until the present war broke out it was supposed that such hideous infamies were effectively checked by the system of international law which has grown up under modern Christian civilization. But Germany has trampled under foot every device of international law for securing the protection of the weak and unoffending. She has shown an utter disregard of all considerations of pity, mercy, humanity and international morality. She has counted upon the terror inspired by her ruthless brutality to protect her from retaliation of interference.

"The outrages committed on our own people have been such as the United States has never before been forced to endure, and have included the repeated killing of our men, women and children. The sinking of the Marina and the Cheming the other day, with the attendant murder of six Americans, was but the most recent in an unbroken chain of injuries and insults, which by comparison make mere wrong to our property interests sink into absolute insignificance.

"As long as neutrals keep silent, or speak apologetically, or take refuge in the futilities of the professional pacificists, there will be no cessation in these brutalities. But surely this last and crowning brutality, which amounts to the imposition of a cruel form of state-slavery on a helpless and unoffending conquered nation, must make our people realize that they peril their own souls, that they degrade their own manhood, if they do not bear emphatic testimony against the perpetration of such iniquity. I am glad to be one among the Americans who thus bear testimony."

To Mr. Charles W. Farnham, the organizer of a similar meeting in St. Paul, Minn., he wrote a letter on January 19, 1917, which contains a notable expression of his views on International peace movements:

"If the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill and Trenton were right, then the Belgians are right now; and when we tamely acquiesce in such infamies as have been committed in Belgium-of course still more when we tamely acquiesce in such infamies as have been committed against our own people in cases like that of the Lusitania-we show ourselves unworthy to be the heirs of the Americans who followed Washington and upheld the hands of Lincoln. Since the days of Pontius Pilate neutrality between right and wrong has been recognized by all high-minded men and women as itself immoral.

"What we need is not to promise action in the nebulous future but to act now in the living present. Any promise of ours about entering into international peace leagues or guaranteeing the peace of the world or protecting small nationalities hereafter is worse than worthless, is mischievous and hypocritical, unless we make our words good by action in the case that is uppermost in the present. Until we can and do guarantee peace in Mexico let us not talk loudly and make empty gestures about guaranteeing the peace of the world. Unless we are willing to run some risk and make some effort to right the wrongs of Belgium in the present let us refrain from indulging in insincere declamation about