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ring to the Santiago campaign. Governor Roosevelt would have been the last man to pretend the conflicts at San Juan hill and at Las Guasimas were great battles. The percentage of fatality was larger than at Waterloo, it is true; but in the sense that Hohenlinden, Gravelotte or Gettysburg were battles, he would have been first to enter a disclaimer. Yet so far as heroism is concerned, a battle is an individual affair, and those men who went up that hill at San Juan, or through the jungle at Las Guaşimas, were equal in courage and in execution to the men who charged under Cardigan at Balaklava or with Pickett at Cemetery Ridge. There is a broad and generous sense of fairness in the minds of the American people; and they rated as a hero this man who had led the fighting force. They felt, and they always will feel, that whatever success was accomplished in those hot days on the land side of Santiago was the work of Roosevelt. They were not sure how much good had been secured by the victory, nor what disposition would be made of the positions gained. But they did know that American prestige had been advanced, and that the great Republic had been lifted in the eyes of the world, and in their own

eyes. So they rallied to the standard of this man who was strenuous in peace and efficient in war, and pledged their allegiance to him.

The day of voting came, and McKinley and Roosevelt were elected. The man who contributed largely to that success, as to most in which he had at all been a factor, resigned the work in New York State which he would have preferred to follow, and devoted himself to the less trying -and less useful-duties of the Vice-Presidency. It has been said he was not offensive even to his political opponents in the campaign. There was a day in Colorado when a hoodlum crowd jeered at him, and when a number of irresponsibles whom shame has hidden treated this candidate for the second office in the nation much as they might have treated a bad actor. But there never was a day when they planted in his mind an antipathy against them as members of the great body of American citizens. He knew the stress of partisan hatred in the heat of a campaign. He knew the West in particular; and the incident which affronted the nation waked no lasting resentment in the mind of Roosevelt. When he had been elevated to his high office, he was VicePresident of the United States-not the favored

choice of a party. He was an expression, so far as his office went, of the will and the desire, the purpose and the destiny, of the whole nation. Not one lingering trace of resentment lurked in his bosom. He was the elected of the whole people. He refused to harbor enmity.

When Congress assembled, he became the presiding officer of the Senate. No one knew better than he the small modicum of initiative accorded that officer. Yet there is something almost prophetic on this point in one of his articles, written in 1896. It was long before he could have had any thought of being elected to the office, and the point of view is, therefore, entirely outside the personal equation. Speaking of the nomination of some Vice-Presidential candidates previous to 1896, he said: "It will be noticed that most of these evils arise from the fact that the Vice-President, under ordinary circumstances, possesses so little real power. He presides over the Senate, and he has in Washington a position of marked social importance; but his political weight as Vice-President is almost nil. There is always a chance that he may become President. As this is only a chance it seems quite impossible to persuade politicians to give it the proper weight.

This certainly does not seem right. The VicePresident should, so far as possible, represent the same views and principles that have secured the nomination and election of the President; and he should be a man trusted and able in the event of any accident to his chief, to take up the work of the latter just where it was left."

It is a little curious that a man who could have said that in 1896 should have been the first VicePresident thereafter to realize that "chance of succeeding to the Presidency."

Through the months of his incumbency of the office, in the winter session, little can be said for Vice-President Roosevelt other than that he was fair in his judgments, courteous in his relations with the Senators, and always cognizant of the dignity of his position as next to the official head of the nation. Little can be said, except this: There was never a day when any band of politicians felt for a moment that he was under obligation; that he was owned. As he had been a stalwart and honest man from the beginning, so he continued in his high office. And the forces of the Senate knew that its presiding officer could neither be fooled nor flattered. He was still a member of his party, but he was at the same time

a Vice-President of the United States; and no influence could make him less than that!

When Congress adjourned, when the work of that notable session had ended, Vice-President Roosevelt took advantage of the vacation to engage in a hunt which he had been contemplating for years, and which possessed all possible attractiveness for a man of his mettle. Of the few big animals in the United States, still wild and defiant of the hunter, the grizzly bear and the mountain lion, the latter commonly called the cougar, are the most distinctive. He had made trial with the grizzly, and the result of his hunting has been told. There was a section of the country, in the wilds of Colorado, where the cougar had not been much hunted; and there he went in the late winter and early spring of 1901. He found a hunter who possessed the necessary pack of hunting-dogs, and who knew where the dangerous animals could be found. And there the two of them hunted for a month. In that time Mr. Roosevelt killed fourteen cougars, some at the expense of great peril, all at the expense of hardship and exposure. The story of that hunt has been admirably told by Mr. Roosevelt in Scribner's Magazine for October, 1901.

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