I

VII

THE CLASH OF WAR

T sounded like old times, to us who had

stayed behind in Mulberry Street, when,

within a few months after his departure for Washington, the wail came from down there that Roosevelt was playing at war with the ships, that he was spoiling for a row, and did not care what it cost. It seems he had been asking a million dollars or so for target practice, and, when he got that, demanding more-another half million. I say it sounded like old times, for that was the everlasting refrain of the grievance while he ran the police: there was never to be any rest or peace where he was. No, there was not. In Mulberry Street it was his business to make war on the scoundrels who had wrecked the force and brought disgrace upon our city. To Washington he

had gone to sharpen the tools of war. War he knew must come. They all knew it; it was his business to prepare for it, since the first and hardest blows must be struck on the sea.

Here let me stop a moment to analyze his attitude toward this war that was looming on the horizon even before he left Mulberry Street. It was perfectly simple, as simple as anything he ever did or said, to any one who had ever taken the trouble to "think him out." I had followed him to Washington to watch events for my paper, and there joined the "war party," as President McKinley called Roosevelt and Leonard Wood, poking fun at them in his quiet way. There was not a trace of selfseeking or of jingoism in Roosevelt's attitude, unless you identify jingoism with the stalwart Americanism that made him write these words the year before:

"Every true patriot, every man of statesmanlike habit, should look forward to the time when not a single European power shall hold a foot of American soil." Not, he added, that it was necessary to question the title of foreign powers to present holdings; but "it certainly will become necessary if the timid and selfish

peace-at-any-price men have their way, and if the United States fails to check, at the outset, European aggrandizement on this continent."

That was one end of it, the political one, if you please; the Monroe Doctrine in its briefest and simplest form. Spain had by outrageous mismanagement of its West Indian colonies proved herself unfit, and had forfeited the right to remain. The mismanagement had become a scandal upon our own shores. Every year the yellow fever that was brewed in Cuban filth crossed over and desolated a thousand homes in our Southern States. If proof were wanted that it was mismanagement that did it, events have more than supplied it since, and justified the war of humanity.

Plain humanity was the other end of it, and the biggest. I know, for I saw how it worked upon his mind. I was in Washington when a German cigar-manufacturer, whose business took him once or twice a year to Cuba, came to the capital seeking an interview with Senator Lodge, his home senator, since he was from Boston. I can see him now sitting in the committee-room and telling how on his last

trip he had traveled to some inland towns where he was in the habit of doing business, but where now all had been laid waste; how when he sat down in the inn to eat such food as he could get, a famished horde of gaunt, half-naked women, with starving babies at barren breasts, crept up like dogs to his chair, fighting for the crumbs that fell from his plate.

I can

Big tears rolled down the honest German's face as he told of it. He could not eat, he could not sleep until he had gone straight to Washington to tell there what he had witnessed. see the black look come into Roosevelt's face and hear him muttering under his breath, for he, too, had little children whom he loved. And the old anger wells up in me at the thought of those who would have stayed our hand. Better a thousand times war with all its horrors than a hell like that. That was murder, and of women and innocent children. The war that avenges such infamy I hail as the messenger of wrath of an outraged God.

The war was a moral issue with him, as indeed it was with all of us who understood. It was with such facts as these-and there was no lack of them-in mind and heart that he

responded hotly to Senator Hanna pleading for peace for the sake of the country's commerce and prosperity, that much as he appreciated those blessings, the honor of the country was of more account than temporary business prosperity. It has slipped my mind what was the particular occasion,-some club gathering, -but I have not forgotten the profound impression the Naval Secretary's words made as he insisted that our country could better afford to lose a thousand of the bankers that have added to its wealth than one Farragut; that it were better for it never to have had all the railroad magnates that have built it up, great as is their deserving, than to have lost Grant and Sherman; better that it had never known commercial greatness than that it should miss from its history one Lincoln. Unless the moral overbalance the material, we are indeed riding for a fall in all our pride.

So he made ready for the wrath to come. And now his early interest in naval affairs, that gave us his first book, bore fruit. When the work of preparation was over, and Roosevelt was bound for the war to practice what he had preached, his chief, Secretary Long, said, in