Miller was an assistant foreman in the government bookbindery. He was discharged by the public printer, upon the demand of organized labor, on charges of "flagrant non-unionism," he having been expelled from Local Union No. 4 of the International Brotherhood of Bookbinders. His discharge was in defiance of the civil service laws, and the matter having come before the President, he ordered that he be reinstated. In doing so he pointed to this finding of the anthracite coal strike commission which organized labor had accepted:

It is adjudged and awarded that no person shall be refused employment or in any way discriminated against on account of membership or non-membership in any labor organization, and that there shall be no discrimination against or interference with any employé who is not a member of any labor organization by members of such organization.

"It is, of course," was the President's comment, mere elementary decency to require that all the government departments shall be handled in accordance with the principle thus clearly and fearlessly enunciated." But there are people who do not understand, on both sides of the line. Seventy-two unions in the

Central Labor Union of the District of Columbia "resolved" that to reinstate Miller was "an unfriendly act." The big leaders, including Mr. Gompers and Mr. Mitchell, came to plead with the President. Miller was not fit, they said.

That was another matter, replied the President. He would find out. As to Miller's being a non-union man, the law he was sworn to enforce recognized no such distinction. "I am President," he said, " of all the people of the United States, without regard to creed, color, birthplace, occupation, or social distinction. In the employment and dismissal of men in the government service I can no more recognize the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or against him than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him."

The newspapers did not tell us that the White House rang with applause, as did Clarendon Hall on that other occasion when he met the labor men as a police commissioner. I do not know whether it did or not, for I was not there. But if in their hearts there was no response

to that sentiment, they did not represent the best in their cause or in their people; for of nothing am I better persuaded than that, as the President said in his Labor Day speech at Syracuse," Our average fellow-citizen is a sane and healthy man who believes in decency and has a wholesome mind." And that was the gospel of sanity and decency and wholesomeness all rolled into one.

Well, these are his policies. Can any one who has followed me so far in my effort to show what Theodore Roosevelt is, and why he is what he is, conceive of his having any other? And is there an American worthy of the name who would want him to have any other? Cuba is free, and she thanks President Roosevelt for her freedom. But for his insistence that the nation's honor was bound up in the completion of the work his Rough-Riders began at Las Guasimas and on San Juan hill, a cold conspiracy of business greed would have left her in the lurch, to fall by and by reluctantly into our arms, bankrupt and helpless, while the sneer of the cynics that we were plucking that plum for ourselves would have been justified. The Venezuela imbroglio that threatened the

peace of the world has added, instead, to the prestige of The Hague Court of Arbitration through the wisdom and lofty public spirit of the American President. The man who was called hasty and unsafe has done more for the permanent peace of the world than all the diplomats of the day. The Panama Canal is at last to be a fact, with benefit which no one can reckon to the commerce of the world, of our land, and most of all to the Southern States, that are trying to wake up from their long sleep. I confess that the half-hearted criticism I hear of the way of the administration with Panama provokes in me a desire to laugh; for it reminds me of the way the case was put to me by a man, than whom there is no one in the United States who should know better.

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"It is just," he said, " as if a fellow were to try to hold you up, and you were to wrench the gun away from him, so "-with an expressive gesture; " and then some bystander should cry out, 'Oh, the poor fellow! you 've taken away his gun! Maybe he would n't have shot at all; and then it is his gun, anyway, and you such a big fellow, and he so small. Oh, shame!""

We can smile now, but Assistant Secretary

of State Loomis lifted the curtain enough, the other day, to give us a glimpse of what might have been, had the Colombian plot to confiscate the French canal company's forty millions of property, when the concession lapsed in another year, been allowed to hatch. Half the world might have been at war then. I think we may all well be glad, as he truly said, that "there was in Washington, upon this truly fateful occasion, a man who possessed the insight, the knowledge, the spirit, and the courage to seize the opportunity to strike a blow, the results of which can be fraught only with peace and good to the whole world."

I am not a jingo; but when some things happen I just have to get up and cheer. The way our modern American diplomacy goes about things is one of them. You remember, don't you, when the captains were conferring at Tientsin about going to the relief of the ministers there that were besieged in their embassies, and the little jealous rivalries of the powers would not let them get anywhere, the French and Russians pulling one way, the Germans another, the British another, and so on, how Captain McCalla got up and said: