Courtesy of Brown Bros. Roosevelt with a group of East Side children.--Roosevelt believed in the doctrine of will for a man, and he had a conscience, and he helped New York grow a legislative conscience, beginning even before the day when he knew Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives. The following is one of the truest things Mr. Riis says of him in Roosevelt, the Citizen: The fact is he is a perfectly logical product of a certain course of conduct deliberately entered upon and faithfully adhered to all through life, as all of us are who have any character worth mentioning." New York's East Side gave genuine reverence to this character of Roosevelt which fearlessly righted wrongs in tenements and playgrounds, in liquor and police laws. He believed in the good in his fellow men, and his trust was never more fully justified than in his work on New York's East Side An inspiration back of Peary's work. It is easy to understand that with his admiration for courage and hardihood no man in America was more ready than Roosevelt to do homage to the great explorer. Also with his love of wandering alone in the wilderness, and in his experience in standing in positions of great personal responsibility, none would so well appreciate the wearing loneliness and responsibility of the life of the explorer. He compares the explorer and the soldier as to these qualities in his Introduction to Peary's Nearest the Pole 6 Theodore Roosevelt in California at the time of his administration (at the left stands Governor Pardee, at the right in order, John Muir; Dr. Butler, of Columbia; Secretary Loeb; and President Wheeler, of Berkeley).We can realize the delight that it was for John Muir to show his beloved Yosemite and Sequoia cañons and forests to a man of Roosevelt's appreciation and power of observation. They spent three days at this time tramping and camping together, sleeping in the open, between trunks of giant Sequoias-as Roosevelt said later "in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man." Roosevelt's initial work in conservation of natural resources, especially of forests, will go down in history as the greatest constructive legislation ever established by an executive in the United States. On the sixteenth of January, 1919, ten days after the death of Theodore Roosevelt, a bill designating the California giant redwood district as "Roosevelt National Park," passed the Senate of the United States unanimously. He said, in 1903, the Sequoias should be preserved because they are "the only things of their kind in the world," "monuments of themselves"-they now stand majestic monuments for him "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. And thus I swear." When Roosevelt became President in 1901 he was the youngest man who had ever taken the oath. His interest in natural history immediately recalled the administration of Thomas Jefferson; but he so far outstripped his predecessor that his seven and one half years in Washington marked a golden age for zoology, for exploration, and conservation, a time when scientific expeditions and publications were instigated and encouraged, and naturalists and explorers from all over the world were welcome guests at the White House. As to statesmanship, a man of great constructive imagination was at the helm. He studied the problems of the nation and the psychology of men. He made himself accessible to every man from every section of the country. He learned their points of view, their interests. He worked with an insatiable desire to understand the thought and feeling of all ranks. Then, like the great synthetic scientist, the true leader, he marshalled all his data before him, formulated conclusions, and led the people where it was best for the good of the country and themselves that they should go. But the greatest thing that Roosevelt did as President was to bring back to the mind of each man in the country a realization that the government is in truth "for the people, of the people, and by the people" Courtesy of Underwood and Underwood ROOSEVELT, THE THINKER AND WRITER. HE PREACHES READABLENESS IN SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS Theodore Roosevelt wrote plain prose, but which had the first characteristic of the highest type of writing, clearness. There was never anything uncertain or obscure about the meaning of what he wrote, any more than there was in his own mind about what he thought. And the meaning is always there, ideas jump out at us from the heat of his human experience to inflame our imagination and incite our action. Whether he wrote of the commonplace or the dramatic, it was with equal power -and sometimes also with great literary charm. He has expressed definitely his own opinion on the form writing should take: "If he [the writer.. possesses the highest imagination and literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks Otherwise no profit will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless unless they are read, and they cannot be read unless they are readable." From this as a theme he eulogizes "the lofty imagination" necessary for the great historical or scientific writer, and drives away the bugaboos of inaccuracy" and "shallowness" with which the technical writer often stigmatizes the "readable" book: "Very few great scientists have written interestingly, and these few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time will come when the mighty sweep of modern scientific discovery will be placed, by scientific men with the gift of expression, at the service of intelligent and cultivated laymen... Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it suspects to the unconscious literary power of some of its representatives [for instance, in regard to evolution]... where their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age... I believe that the chief explanation of the difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote was interesting to read. . ." SIMPLE DELIGHTS OF NATURAL HISTORY IN THE FIELD In the picture above-Roosevelt and a young heron encounter each other face to face in a Louisiana Bird Preserve. Mr. Herbert K. Job also was a member of the party and snapped the photograph. At the request of the National Association of Audubon Societies Roosevelt created the Louisiana Bird Preserves by Executive Order in 1904 and 1905. It was in 1915 that he made this tour of the islands with Mr. Job. Between March 14, 1903, and March 4, 1909, of his administration, he estab lished by Executive Order fifty-one National Bird Reservations, distributed in seventeen states and territories from Porto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska. The photograph below-One does not need to be a boy in years to enjoy a tour of discovery over the beaches of our Gulf Coast where great sea turtles have roamed when all was still and deposited their eggs under the sand |