Study Mr. Roosevelt over a space of sufficient breadth and length and the conflicts of his personality harmonize. There were certain traits that were high peaks in the range of his character. They must be studied above the common level.

He had great force. And men like force. The timid man shrinks from it when it has no visible orbit or is not running on steel rails bolted down to a secure roadway. But the average man likes force. That is why he chances the ditch and death in a motor car or a two thousand feet fall from an aeroplane. And force brings things to pass. It does not stop, fortunately does not, because of a wreck in the ditch or a fall from the clouds. But there is force in established orbits when it has taken form and retained energy, where it has come out of star mist and is a sun.

Colonel Roosevelt had force well in hand. It was an endowment. It was not idly exhausted if sometimes it seemed erratic. It did not exhaust those who came in contact with it. Its expression was greatest in himself.

But it was a tremendous magnet. No man drew such crowds without arts or tricks on all occasions. They rallied to him instinctively. Whether you agreed with him or not, he agreed with himself, and you found it difficult to get away from his forcible thinking.

He walked with a firm stride. He chopped a tree like a lumberjack on a wager. He liked a horse that would throw a good rider. You never heard of his hunting partridges. He hunted lions and tigers. The brook trout did not beguile him. He fished for tarpon and shark. Is it a wonder that the virile manhood of America followed such a leader? They could disagree with him, but they were forced by force to follow him.

Had he been President when Germany threatened little heroic Belgium a challenge would have been hurled across the ocean that would have prevented the war, or if not, we would have closed it two years sooner.

Colonel Roosevelt was a courageous man and the people like courage. It was not a blustering courage. It was not braggadocio. There was no swagger about it. Its highest test was in the face of dissenting public opinion. It never flinched in the face of the clamor of politics.

What is right? What ought to be done? That was enough. It is certain that men, whether in political agreement or political opposition, conceded his courage. He was

incapable of making the mistake of the trimmer. He never cultivated his fortunes or popular favor at the expense of his manhood. It is a fatal mistake, which has defeated many a great man, who was great in all but his courage. The people are always sensitive to this characteristic. It is as useless as the habit of the ostrich in putting his head in the sand to escape his pursuers.

The people will excuse mistakes, but they have contempt for a coward.

The man who dodges his vote, who hides his convictions lest some one disagrees with him, is always detected and quickly relegated to the rear. Respect a man who honestly disagrees with you. Despise a man who is afraid of you.

Roosevelt's courage was an element of strength. It was courage to defend an opinion, and it was courage to correct a mistake. Moral courage is greater than physical courage. "You are scared," said a soldier to a fellow soldier whom he saw white and trembling as the battle began. "Yes," was the reply, "if you were as scared as I am you would run."

When Roosevelt was about to give an interview on the piratical sinking of the Lusitania, an intimate friend, who wanted him to answer deliberately, suggested that there were four hundred thousand German votes in this country. Aroused, he said: "If there were four million I would condemn this fiendish act!" And he gave out that philippic which awoke the land to war.

He was clean. No bribe stuck to his hand. And the people like that. His domestic life required no apology. His personal life required no explanation nor apology. When he was away from home his face was always set homeward, and you could no more face him in the other direction than you could change the instinct of a carrier pigeon. And the people like that. The pure home is the foundation of civilization. The noblest thing about Roosevelt is his home life. It was a holy example.

Another trait was the buoyancy and fullness and exuberance of his life. No man enjoyed life more. And the people like that. You may say that it was a radiancy of health. We might think, so but for the last two or three years of fatal illness. Coming or going from the hospital, wrenched with rheumatic pains, burning with fever, he was always feeling "bully." It is a great thing in this world of so many

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.