is, I confess, somewhat of a mystery to me. I have had some little opportunity of seeing him under various circumstances, and of judging whether he has acted hastily or simply with determination because he has the courage of his convictions. But one thing should not be forgotten, and that is the influence of blood, the strongest influence in forming a man's character and controlling his actions. He has in his veins the blood of a long line of Dutch ancestors, a race noted rather for their phlegm than for their impetuosity. He has the American vitality, initiative, and resourcefulness, tempered by Dutch caution; in him congenital traits are strongly marked. He is an idealist and yet intensely practical; both characteristics denoting his Dutch ancestry. The love of home and of family, the devotion to religion, the clinging with passionate vehemence to an ideal, combined with much good common sense, distinguish the Teutonic races from the Latins, whose emotions, easily aroused, are equally evanescent. The foundation of the President's character rests on this substratum of Dutch caution, a very solid foundation, on which has been builded the superstructure of American thought and American influence, which give the American the nervous energy that makes him enough like the other English-speaking peoples to emphasize the difference. This practical side of his nature is shown by the fact that he has done things done them in the very thick of the fray. As he said to a friend, who expressed surprise that he should give up literary work to reform the police department of New York: “I thought the storm centre was in New York, and so I came here. It is a great piece of practical work. I like to take hold of work that has been done by a Tammany leader and do it as well, only by approaching it from an opposite direction. A thing that attracted me to it was that it was to be done in the hurly-burly, for I don't like cloister life." No, decidedly, Mr. Roosevelt is not the man to meditate in a monastery when there is work to be done in the world.

The White House exercises a restraining influence upon its occupant. Every man who has sat in the chair of Washington has grown to the measure of his responsibilities. No man has left the White House who has not broadened; whose horizon has not been widened; who has not taken a more philosophic view of life; who has not come to understand, if he never understood it before, that nations have their obligations to other nations exactly as individuals have their obligations to society. The presidency has always left its impress upon the President. No man is exactly the same after being President as he was before he was elected; nor can anyone wonder at it. President Roosevelt, with all his vitality,

his cyclopean power of work, and his overflowing good spirits slightly tinged with a cynicism which makes him estimate both praise and criticism at about their true value, will not pass unscathed through the severest test that can be applied to any man. When he leaves the White House he will be graver and more sedate than he is to-day.

Although the youngest President, Mr. Roosevelt has a more comprehensive and intimate knowledge of the country than had any of his predecessors. It is somewhat remarkable that although Americans are a nation of travellers, although most Americans know from personal observation a great deal of their own country, the majority of Presidents have spent their lives, prior to their election, in the section of the country in which they had their homes; and the number who have known anything of foreign countries can, I believe, be counted upon the fingers of one's hands. President Roosevelt is the notable exception. A man from the East, his birth and position entitling him to admission to the best in its society, he knows the West as only men can know it who have lived there and come into intimate contact with its people. There is no section of the country that the President does not know; there is no class, from cow punchers to savants, among whom he has not his friends. He has seen much of Europe; he has travelled there and met its people; and he is no stranger to their ideas. He is one of the very few Presidents possessing a proficient knowledge of foreign languages. He is the only President who served an apprenticeship in one of the great departments. There have been men who went to the White House from the head of an Executive Department, but I do not now recall the case of an Assistant Secretary becoming President. His years of service as a Civil Service Commissioner and later as Assistant Secretary of the Navy have given him a knowledge of the minutiae of departmental affairs which will be of the greatest value to him now. The advantage which some of his predecessors possessed of having had experience in the House or Senate, and understanding from actual observation the idiosyncrasies of Congress, has been denied him.

Congress is the malignant influence in his horoscope. I venture the prediction that if President Roosevelt has trouble it will be caused by the Senate and not by the people. The Senate has gradually enlarged its powers until it has come to regard itself as a council of state as well as a legislative body, and in its capacity as a council of state seeks to control the actions of the Executive. Since the Senate has pronounced obsolete the doctrine that it has no greater powers than those vested in the House of Representatives, the relations between the Senate and the

President have not always been of the most intimate character. In fact, it can be said that during the last twenty years Mr. McKinley was the only President who never had any friction with the Senate. But Mr. McKinley had a peculiar genius for managing men, and a subtle tact in dealing with the Senate. He was such an accomplished diplomatist that he was able to avoid all clashing, principally because he was content not to try to force any line of policy to which the Senate objected. An instance of this was his skill in not taking issue with the Senate on the question of reciprocity. Although he believed in the wisdom of reciprocity, as his memorable speech at Buffalo showed, and refused to permit Mr. Kasson, the special reciprocity commissioner, to resign when the Senate refused to ratify the treaties which he had negotiated, he made no effort to secure the ratification of those treaties when the Senate refused to consider them. A man with less finesse or more obstinacy, who held himself in less careful restraint or was more indifferent about preserving the most cordial relations with the Senate, would have forced the issue, which would probably have led to a rupture with the leaders of his party in the Senate. Mr. McKinley had the additional advantage, possessed by no President in recent years, of having the confidence of the Senate, which had the highest respect for his wisdom and caution, and for the ability he had shown in the management of the war and of the great issues that followed.

Mr. McKinley could do many things that President Roosevelt cannot do. Age was in favor of the late President. The leaders of the Senate are men well advanced in years, and they accepted from a man of their own age advice which they will not accept from one who is their junior. Mr. Roosevelt will not be so docile as Mr. McKinley. Mr. Roosevelt will, of course, take counsel with the Republican leaders in the Senate; he will endeavor to secure their support for the policy which he advocates; he will make every effort to maintain the most friendly relations with them; but if the Senate attempts to interfere with the prerogatives of the President or to overstep the constitutional line dividing the legislative from the executive, the President will not be the first to yield. It is not in the nature of the man to do so. If a thing is to be done, and he believes it to be right, he will do it, and he will be indifferent as to what the Senate may think about it. There is a good deal of the Andrew Jackson about him; and if he should read the Senate a lecture, as Jackson did, it would not be surprising.

President Roosevelt's administration will be an interesting one, and not the least interesting feature will be the relations between him and

the Senate. That the Senate will endeavor to extend its power, to increase its influence, and to continue to be the dominant force in the government, no one who knows the Senate and the men who control it, or who has narrowly watched its course during the last few years, can for one moment doubt. Mr. Roosevelt will not be content with being merely the agent to execute the decrees of the Senate. He will respect it and he will treat it with the consideration that properly belongs to it under the Constitution; but he will also exact from it the constitutional deference that the Senate owes to the Executive. If he does not, if he surrenders to the Senate, if he is content with being merely its agent and allowing it to shape his policy to suit its views, one will be surprised and, perhaps, not a little disappointed. This will be the great test of his character, the proof whether he is the impetuous man some people have imagined, or whether he is the determined, positive, courageous man some of his friends believe him to be— cool enough to do nothing rash, tactful enough to yield non-essentials when concession is necessary, wise enough to understand human nature and mould it to his own purpose.

Many Presidents have had a "kitchen cabinet" which has been more powerful than the regular cabinet; most Presidents have had an intimate friend who, according to popular belief, has been the real power in the White House. People have asked who is to be the premier of the kitchen cabinet or the Warwick of the administration. The answer can be readily given. His name is Theodore Roosevelt.

A. MAURICE LOW.

PRESERVING A STATE'S HONOR.

"WELL! we have held the bridge; we have saved the honor of our State for two years more at least."

This was the greeting of probably the most distinguished Republican in the State of Delaware to the chairman of the Democratic State Committee, in a hotel lobby at Dover, on March 8 last; and, as they congratulated each other on the result of a political fight just ended, no one would have supposed that for years they had strenuously opposed each other as chairmen of the executive committees of hostile political parties. The Republican had gained distinction and the title of General as a dashing cavalry leader in the Civil War; and honorable service in Cuba, Porto Rico, and China had made him a Major-General. He had just retired as Delaware's member of the National Republican Committee, and had served as chairman of the Republican State Committee.

The political party to which he belonged was nominally in control of both Houses of the Delaware Legislature; and the last Joint Assembly of those two Houses had just met and adjourned, on the last day of the legislative session of 1901, after one ineffective formal ballot, having failed to elect a United States senator to fill either of the two existing vacancies. His party had failed to gather the fruits of a victory heralded as a great Republican success in the State election of 1900. The State would be entirely unrepresented in the Senate of the United States for two years at least; yet the Republican and Democrat congratulated each other as comrades in the fight just ended.

Both men were strong partisans, and each had received the votes of his party's representatives in the Legislature for senator. Neither had expected or even hoped to be elected, nor would either of them have opposed the election, if possible, of any honorable member of his political party, reasonably fitted for the place, to either vacant senatorship. Politically strong antagonists, neither asking nor giving quarter in fair political contests, chosen often to oppose each other, yet fighting now. together in a common cause, to avert dishonor from their State, supported each by his party organization, and unitedly by all that was sturdily honest, upright, and virile in the State-only startlingly strange