CHAPTER XXVII HENRY CABOT LODGE'S MEMORIAL S ORATION UNDAY, February 9th, was set apart by our nation as the Roosevelt Memorial Day. The services and tributes paid were world-wide. There was an impressive service in Westminster Abbey. The service held in the American church in Paris was attended by President Wilson, Secretary Lansing, and other distinguished Americans. In other cities of Europe and other countries befitting exercises were held. In nearly every farm district, village and city of our own country audiences met to sing, to weep and to talk about the great hero and leader who had been taken away. Of course the most impressive service in America was the one appointed by Congress which was held in the House of Representatives. This was the first time in a generation that the officials, legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government, the heads of the military and naval establishments, together with the diplomatic representatives of nations, convened in a state memorial service for a private citizen. No more appropriate selection of a speaker could have been made than that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a friend of Mr. Roosevelt at Harvard and throughout his life. While he was President of the United States Mr. Roosevelt made a speech at a Harvard dinner in which he said, "I shall not speak of the junior senator, another Harvard man, Cabot Lodge, because it would be difficult for me to discuss in public one who is my closest, staunchest, and most loyal personal friend." Senator Lodge's oration was a superb one, rising in grandeur to the man and the hour, which is the most that could be said of it. After reviewing the biographical details of the life of his friend, Mr. Lodge continued: There was no hour down to the end when Theodore Roosevelt would not turn aside from everything else to preach the doctrine of Americanism, of the principles and the faith upon which American government rested, and which all true Americans should wear in their heart of hearts. He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end. What a man was is ever more important than what he did, because it is upon what he was that all his achievement depends and his value and meaning to his fellow men must finally rest. Theodore Roosevelt always believed that character was of greater worth and moment than anything else. He possessed abilities of the first order, which he was disposed to underrate, because he set so much greater store upon the moral qualities which we bring together under the single word "character." Let me speak first of his abilities. He had a powerful, well-trained, ever-active mind. He thought clearly, independently, and with originality and imagination. These priceless gifts were sustained by an extraordinary power of acquisition, joined to a greater quickness of apprehension, a greater swiftness in seizing upon the essence of a question, than I have ever happened to see in any other man. His reading began with natural history, then went to general history, and thence to the whole field of literature. He had a capacity for concentration which enabled him to read with remarkable rapidity anything which he took up, if only for a moment, and which separated him for the time being from everything going on about him. The subjects upon which he was well and widely informed would, if enumerated, fill a large space, and to this power of acquisition was united not only a tenacious but an extraordinary accurate memory. It was never safe to contest with him on any question of fact or figures, whether they related to the ancient Assyrians or to the present-day conditions of the tribes of central Africa, to the Syracusan Expedition, as told by Thucydides, or to protective colorings in birds and animals. He knew and held details always at command, but he was not mastered by them. He never failed to see the forest on account of the trees or the city on account of the houses. He made himself a writer, not only of occasional addresses and essays, but of books. He had the trained thoroughness of the historian, as he showed in his history of the War of 1812 and of the "Winning of the West," and nature had endowed him with that most enviable of gifts, the faculty of narrative and the art of the teller of tales. He knew how to weigh evidence in the historical scales and how to depict character. He learned to write with great ease and fluency. He was always vigorous, always energetic, always clear and forcible in everything he wrotenobody could ever misunderstand him-and when he allowed himself time and his feelings were deeply engaged he gave to the world many pages of beauty as well as power, not only in thought but in form and style. At the same time he made himself a public speaker, and here again, through a practice probably unequaled in amount, he became one of the most effective in all our history. In speaking, as in writing, he was always full of force and energy; he drove home his arguments and never was misunderstood. In many of his more carefully prepared addresses are to be found passages of impressive eloquence, touched with imagination and instinct with grace and feeling. He had a large capacity for administration, clearness of vision, promptness in decision, and a thorough apprehension of what constituted efficient organization. All the vast and varied work which he accomplished could not have been done unless he had had most exceptional natural abilities, but behind them, most important of all, was the driving force of an intense energy and the ever-present belief that a |