CHAPTER I

WASHINGTON-LINCOLN-ROOSEVELT

J

ULIUS and Augustus Caesar, the great emperors, 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,

but in mental characteristics, between these heroes. In purely intellectual force Washington was perhaps not the equal of Lincoln or Roosevelt. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall and Benjamin Franklin possibly had a sturdier type of intellect. But Washington's faculties were so evenly balanced and true, he was such a great general, such a wise statesman, so absolutely devoted to his country, that he took a place head and shoulders above them all as the leader in the founding of the republic.

Lincoln had one of the greatest intellects the world has ever known. Without schools, books, culture, or travel, by the sheer force of his mind and heart, he gripped the nation, commanded its armies and navies and saved the Union.

Theodore Roosevelt had a prodigious intellect. He did not think so. He insisted that it was only of the ordinary type, and that what he had become or done was the result of desperately hard work and dogged persistency. We decline to accept this estimate of him. He was an intellectual prodigy, if there ever was one. He had Lincoln's rugged, virile type of mind with an added versatility which reading, study, writing and travel alone can give. For nearly a score of years he did the hard thinking for the statesmen of the nation. Political friend and foe waited for him to solve the perplexing problems of state and announce the result.

A little over a year ago I called at Colonel Roosevelt's office on an important matter, and though the outer room was full of those who had appointments to meet him, he sent for me to come into his room. "Take that chair," he said, "and pull it up close to mine, and sit down and don't say a word to me. I have sent for you to come in and sit up close to me. It reminds

me of the good old times we had, and the good new ones we have been having as well." He said, "I have got to sign this big pile of letters here and get them into the mail, and then I will listen to what you have on your mind." I replied, "I have this which came into my mind since I entered the room; you can hear it while you write. It is this: I wonder what the people will pay for those letters and that signature a hundred, a thousand years from now. I venture to say that name scratched by your pen will bring from $100 up a hundred years from now, and many thousands of dollars five hundred or a thousand years from now.” I continued, "Your fame is secure for the centuries to come." I expected a witty answer, such as he usually gave me under such circumstances. But he did not give it. I looked at his face and it was serious. He saw I was serious and not joking, and he did not joke, but said, "It is lovely in you to say such nice things." And I said to myself while he went on signing his letters that he knew he belonged to humanity, to the universal heart, to the ages; that he felt within himself the symptoms of his earthly immortality, and that he would have a place in history with Washington and Lincoln.

Washington was courtly and serious, but devoid of humor when compared with the other two. Lincoln was at the same time the saddest and the funniest man in the country. His native wit has never been surpassed in our land. Roosevelt had a humor which, though perhaps not so irresistible as that of Lincoln, was just as abounding and healthful. Either could have made a Mark Twain in literature if he had cared to. Roosevelt, with all his desperate contests, with all his perplexing problems, with his incessant toils, was of a playful spirit, had a beautiful family life, and

was possibly the happiest man in the nation. He said he was.

These three national heroes, dissimilar as they were in earthly circumstances and intellectual characteristics, were similar in many regards; in all of those basic elements so necessary in the building up of individual character and a healthy state. The three were the greatest-hearted men the nation ever had. If their intellect was a huge mountain losing itself in the clouds, their affections were a deep blue, boundless sea. Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt were superlative in their truth and honesty. Washington's hatchet will cut its way down the centuries; Honest Abe will for ages be a title more honorable than any king ever wore; Roosevelt, "clean as a hound's tooth," will be known for generations to come.

Another element of immortality this trio had in common was absolute unselfishness. Neither the Father of his Country, nor the great Emancipator, nor Roosevelt ever lived a day for himself. Washington always lived for family, fellows and country. Lincoln was a martyr to his country, and so was Roosevelt, as much as though he had fallen on the field of battle. The fires of patriotism literally consumed him. If either of these men had been capable of telling a white lie, or had failed to fight. the wrong at any cost, or had cherished a personal motive of avarice or inordinate ambition, he might have gotten to be President, but he never would have been a national hero or remembered in history.

Our three heroes were similar in their deep religious instincts. They were all godly men, all Christian men. Each of these three captains carried the banner of the Cross. Washington set a beautiful example to the new republic by his religious devotion and