The use of this text or audio material is subject to the TR American Patriot user agreement located at: TR American Patriot.com 

CHAPTER TWELEVE 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

ROOSEVELT AND TREVELYAN: 

No part of Theodore Roosevelt's voluminous correspondence is more interesting than that which he conducted with the literary men and women of his time. In this the catholic intellectual side of the man, his eager and all-embracing joy in the things of the mind, is revealed. An insatiable reader of books, he rejoiced greatly in the society of the writers of them. Whenever a book appeared that pleased him, the author, if within hailing distance, was certain to receive a letter of cordial appreciation and an urgent invitation to the White House or Oyster Bay in order that personal acquaintance might be made. While he was President there was scarcely a writer of even moderate fame with whom he had not established friendly relations. Many a young American author was both enchanted and amazed at discovering the minute knowledge which Roosevelt had of his works, and the genuine personal interest he took in him and in them.

To his intimate friends it seemed, literally, that he read every book that was published the day after it appeared, so rare was it that one could be named to him which he had not read. His usual reply was that he had not only read that particular one but several others on the same subject or by the same author. "Were you ever able to mention a book to the President that he had not read?" asked a lady of her neighbor at a dinner in the White House during the Roosevelt administration. When the reply was in the negative, the lady continued: "I have dined here many times and talked much with him, and I have never discovered a book that was unknown to him. On one occasion I thought I had found one which he surely could not have seen. It, was a rare book by an Icelandic author, and I came here confident that I should at last be able to tell the President something that he did not know. Luckily, I found myself seated next to him at table and when what seemed to be the opportune moment came, I said: 'Mr. President, are you interested in Icelandic literature?' With a bounce in his chair he turned an eager countenance upon me and said: 'Am I not!' and then proceeded to tell me not only all about my one lonely Icelandic book but dozens of others that I had never heard of."

He did not merely read books—he absorbed them and made their contents a part of his knowledge for all time, ready for instant use at a moment's notice. A book on a particular subject aroused thoughts of his own along the same lines, and when he wrote a letter of praise to the author the chances were that he gave him at the same time ideas and suggestions more or less novel to him, for the wide range of his reading had left few fields of knowledge untouched.

During the years of his presidency and those which followed he was in regular correspondence with the leaders in literary and intellectual life both in this country and in Europe. A bulky volume could be made of his correspondence with English writers alone. Among these the one with whom letters were most frequently exchanged, and during the longest period, was the Eight Honorable Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Baronet, 0. M., the English statesman and writer of many books, including 'The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay,' 'The Early History of Charles James Fox,' and 'The History of the American Revolution.' It was while Trevelyan was engaged in the preparation of the last-named work that the correspondence became intimate.
In this series of letters, covering a period of nearly twenty years, Roosevelt's characteristics as a letter-writer are conspicuously displayed, because in Trevelyan he had a correspondent who was peculiarly responsive to his own intellectual tastes and knowledge. "Thurlow is a, fine fellow," says Doctor Johnson. "He fairly puts his mind to yours.'' Roosevelt might have said the same of Trevelyan. Each put his mind to the other's, and the result was a correspondence of rare interest and value. Trevelyan himself said of it in a letter to me under date of April 23, 1919, gladly granting me permission to quote from his letters: "My vocation was only to return the balls struck over the net by the hand of a master! I deliberately think that better letters of that class were never written. Take for instance that one shortly before his Presidential contest, when he says that he would rather be a real President for three years and a half than a figurehead for seven years and a half. What wisdom is in this letter, and what courage! If there is a finer and truer description of a statesman's creed extant in the world, I do not know it."
The passage referred to was in a letter which Roosevelt wrote to Trevelyan on May 28, 1904, from which I shall quote again presently: "I certainly would not be willing to hold the Presidency at the cost of failing to do the things which make the real reason why I care to hold it at all. I had much rather be a real President for three years and a half than a figurehead for seven years and a half. I think I can truthfully say that I now have to my credit a sum of substantial achievement—and the rest must take care of itself."
The correspondence began while Roosevelt was Governor of New York, and I am much indebted to Sir George for an account of its beginning and the original of the first letter which Roosevelt wrote to him. He had sent to the Governor a copy of the first part of 'The American Revolution,' and on January 16, 1899, Roosevelt wrote:
My dear Sir George:
I have just received a copy of 'The American Revolution,' for which pray accept my sincere thanks. I am rather busy now, but as I have never failed hitherto to read everything you have written, I doubt if more than a day or two passes before I have gone through your whole book. You are one of the few blessed exceptions to the rule that the readable historian is not truthful. I think that in point of combining literary interest with historic accuracy you must come near satisfying even Mr. Frederick Harrison!
At the bottom of the letter there appears this memorandum :
"This is the hero! I suppose he will some day be President. I sent the book to him as he was so kind to Charles.''
Writing to me in explanation of this, on June 6, 1919, Sir George says: " At the foot of the 1899 letter there is a curious contemporary pencil note in my handwriting with a prophecy that came off. By 'the hero' I suppose I referred to his conduct in the Spanish war.''

Roosevelt's enjoyment and approval of Trevelyan's 'History of the American Revolution' was warmly expressed in a letter that he wrote to him on December 12, 1903, after he had finished reading the second part. "I feel," he said, "that it is far and away the best account of the Revolution written by any one. For interest, for delightful humor, for absolute fairmindedness, for exactness of narrative, for profound insight (and for the English!)—• why, my dear Sir, no other book on the Revolution so much as approaches it. There are two or three points you raise which I should like to discuss with you, but they are not important,''
Writing again to Trevelyan, on January 23, 1904, he attributed to Sir George a published article entitled 'Clio' which had been written by his youngest son, George Macau-lay Trevelyan, himself an author of distinction. In this letter Roosevelt gave expression with much feeling and spirit to his views on the proper writing of history, with lively comments upon pedantic writers of it:

"In a very small way I have been waging war with their kind (pedants) on this side of the water for a number of years. We have a preposterous little historical organization which, when I was just out of Harvard and very ignorant, I joined. Fortunately I had enough good sense, or obstinacy, or something, to retain a subconscious belief that inasmuch as books were meant to be read, good books ought to be interesting, and the best books capable in addition of giving one a lift upward in some direction. After a while it dawned on me that all of the conscientious, industrious, painstaking little pedants, who would have been useful people in a rather small way if they had understood their own limitations, had become because of their conceit distinctly noxious. They solemnly believed that if there were only enough of them, and that if they only collected enough facts of all kinds and sorts, there would cease to be any need hereafter for great writers, great thinkers. They looked for instance at a conglomerate narrative history of America—a book which is either literature or science in the sense in which a second-rate cyclopedia is literature and science—as showing an 'advance' upon Francis Parkman— Heaven save the mark! Each of them was a good enough day laborer, trundling his barrowful of bricks and worthy of his hire; so long as they saw themselves as they were they were worthy of all respect; but when they imagined that by their activity they rendered the work of an architect unnecessary, they became both absurd and mischievous.

"Unfortunately with us it is these small men who do most of the historic teaching in the colleges. They have done much real harm in preventing the development of students who might have a large grasp of what history should really be. They represent what is in itself the excellent revolt against superficiality and lack of research, but they have grown into the opposite and equally noxious belief that research is all in all, that accumulation of facts is everything, and that the ideal history of the future will consist not even of the work of one huge pedant but of a multitude of articles by a multitude of small pedants. They are honestly unconscious that all they are doing is to gather bricks and stones, and that whether their work will or will not amount to anything really worthy depends entirely upon whether or not some great master builder hereafter arrives who will be able to go over their material, to reject the immense majority of it, and out of what is left to fashion some edifice of majesty and beauty instinct with the truth that both charms and teaches. A thousand of them would not in the aggregate begin to add to the wisdom of mankind what another Macaulay, should one arise, would add. The great historian must of course have the scientific spirit which gives the power of research, which enables one to marshal and weigh the facts; but unless his finished work is literature of a very high type small will be his claim to greatness."
This letter deeply interested Trevelyan, who greatly admired Roosevelt's eloquent disquisition on history, which struck him as very unlike the letters written by the rulers of states on the European side of the Atlantic; at all events, since Frederic the Second of Prussia brought his literary correspondence to a close. In regard to the mistake about authorship, Sir George wrote, February 10, 1904:

"A letter has seldom given greater pleasure than yours to me. In the first place I entirely concurred in all you wrote, and was greatly stirred and fired by the style in which it was written. And, in the next place, the article was not by me, but by my youngest son. He is called George Macaulay Trevelyan; and he is the first who ever gained a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, for history; and that fellowship he obtained two years younger than others. His life and times of Wickliffe, which had a really great success, was written at one and twenty; and this year he is going to publish a book which he will, no doubt, do himself the honor to send you; and which I think will justify the praise you give to his article. Next month he will marry (young for an Englishman) the youngest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward—She pleases herself by the recollection that her grandfather, Doctor Arnold, saw the Lays of Rome in Manuscript, and persuaded their author to publish them. Macaulay had doubts whether they would take a place in English literature. He had the same apprehension with regard to the Essays. I shall show George your letter; but I am very careful to keep what you write to me for my own private delectation.

"We have just parted from Henry James. He comes to us every year, and is never tired of this beautiful and classical neighborhood. In one of his early books he gives a charming description of Warwickshire and Stratford-on-Avon;—in his 'Portraits of Places,' which, with the little companion volume, 'Foreign Parts,' forms what is, personally, my favorite book of travels. I thank you once more for the immense pleasure which your letter gave to me and my wife, and will give to my son."
Replying to this letter, on May 28,1904, Roosevelt wrote: "My blunder in my last letter brought me a better reward than I deserved, because owing to it I have read your son's 'Age of Wickliffe' with great pleasure. Pray congratulate him from me upon all that he is doing.''
It was a standing wonder with Roosevelt's intimates that such a thing as intellectual weariness was unknown to him. Beading never tired him as it does most persons, and the reason why it did not he gave in this letter to Trevelyan, on May 28, 1904:
"I find reading a great comfort. People often say to me that they do not see how I find time for it, to which I answer them (much more truthfully than they believe) that to me it is a dissipation, which I have sometimes to try to avoid, instead of an irksome duty. Of course I have been so busy for the last ten years, so absorbed in political work, that I have simply given up reading any book that I do not find interesting. But there are a great many books which ordinarily pass for 'dry' which to me possess much interest— notably history and anthropology; and these give me ease and relaxation that I can get in no other way, not even on horseback!"
In the same letter he made an allusion to a difference between the governmental systems of the United States and England which called out an interesting comment from Trevelyan. The President wrote:
'' There is one point of inferiority in our system to yours which has been very little touched upon, and that is the way in which the Presidential office tends to put a premium upon a man's keeping out of trouble rather than upon his accomplishing results. If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies; and unfortunately human nature is such that more enemies will leave their party because of enmity to its head than friends will come in from the opposite party because they think well of that same head. In consequence, the dark horse, the neutral-tinted individual, is very apt to win against the man of pronounced views and active life. The electorate is very apt to vote with its back to the future! Now all this does not apply to the same extent with your Prime Minister. It is not possible for the politicians to throw over the real party leader and put up a dummy or some gray-tinted person under your system; or at least, though perhaps it is possible, the opportunity and the temptation are much less.''
To this Trevelyan replied under date of November 10, 1904:
"With regard to what you say of the difference between us and you in the selection of the man who is to govern, I should express it by saying that in America the country elects the ruler, and in England the country elects the party."
Referring to the visit of John Morley to the "White House, a short time previous, Trevelyan wrote in the same letter:

"There is much for which you are to be envied; and among other things, for having John Morley as a guest. Thirty years ago I thought him and Henry Sidgwick the most delightful company of our generation; and Sidgwick is gone. For ten years I sat next Morley in the House of Commons, and it was a great antidote to the dreariness and bad rhetoric which was the prevailing atmosphere of that, as I suppose of all national assemblies. I have never heard from him a sentence, or read from him a letter, which was dull or common.''
Roosevelt's reply to this letter, under date of November 24, 1904, gives an interesting glimpse of his reading during the campaign for his election to the presidency:
"I was saying the other day to John Morley how much I regretted that it did not seem likely that you could get over here. By the way, Morley spent three or four days with us, and I found him as delightful a companion as one could wish to have, and I quite understand the comfort he must have been to you when you sat beside him in the House. Incidentally, it is rather a relief to have you speak as you do about the tedious and trivial quality of most of the eloquence in the House. I am glad to find that it is characteristic of all parliamentary bodies, and not merely of those of my own country!
"In my hours of leisure (during the campaign) I did a good deal of reading. I re-read your history of our Revolution and liked it more than ever, but came to the conclusion that you had painted us a little too favorably. I also re-read both your Macaulay and your Fox, and then re-read Macaulay's 'History.' When I had finished it I felt a higher regard for him as a great writer, and as in the truest sense of the word a great philosophical historian, than I have ever felt before. It is a pretty good test of such a history to have a President who is also a candidate for the Presidency read it in the midst of a campaign.

"I read a number of other books during the campaign; Rhodes's excellent history, for instance, and a good deal of Dickens. In the American characters in 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' Dickens made a mistake in generalizing and insisting that all Americans were represented by his figures, which, of course, is as nonsensical as to say that Pecksniff, Bill Sykes, and Sir Mulberry Hawk, taken in the aggregate, typify all of English society. But all the same I would like to have 'Martin Chuzzlewit' studied as a tract in America."
Roosevelt's allusions to Macaulay called forth from Trevelyan this remarkably interesting reply:
wallington, northumberland,
December 8, 1904.

I ventured to copy out and read to my sister, Lady Knutsford, the passage in your letter about your re-reading ' of Macaulay's history. It is a curious proof of Macaulay's goodness that, as she and I get old—older than he ever was —our affection for him seems rather to grow than to lessen. To those whom he loved, he was the most lovable of mankind. This would be a good house in which to read him; for the place was a seat of Sir John Fenwick, whose fate Macaulay described with such fulness. A few years before the Act of Attainder Wallington was bought by my great grandfather's great grandfather, Sir William Blackett, from Sir John Fenwick; a principal part of the purchase money being an annuity on Sir John Fenwick's life of 2,000 pounds a year. Blackett pulled down the castle, and built the house in which I live. He was a famous Whig, and (I suppose) voted in every division with his party on Fenwick's Bill of Attainder. But I hope not.

There is a still older literary association with Wallington. In the 'Beeves Tale' of Chaucer, about the two young rascals who went out to " Trompington, not fer fro Cantebrigge," the leading scapegrace of the pair of undergraduates is called "Alein de strother," and Chaucer says that he came "Of a town" (township) "Far in the North, I cannot tellen where." This was Allan de Strother, a very great personage indeed, who lived at Wallington, and was a friend of Chaucer's at Edward the Ill's court. The story is taken from Boccaccio, and Chaucer evidently put in deStrother's name as chaff. There can be no other explanation. A Fenwick married the Strother heiress; and from the Fenwicks the place came into our family. I should dearly love to show it you, and still more to show you Macaulay's books with their marginal notes. Personally, I think those notes better than his writings, his speeches, his conversation, or his letters. Goodness, how they light the books up! Frederick Myers said to me of Macaulay: "He always seems to have read in the state of eagerness in which I am during the first five minutes of a great author.''

I write about these things inasmuch as I am sure you have enough about politics from your other correspondents. But I must express the delight with which I read the sentence: "A great free people owes it to itself and to mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil." In the present state of the world that makes for peace, and not for war; and it is one of the phrases which will stick to the memory of mankind.
A few days after his inauguration as President, March 9, 1905, Roosevelt wrote a long letter to Trevelyan, giving a description of the inauguration exercises, mentioning his efforts to bring about peace between Russia and Japan, and saying:
"Of course I greatly enjoyed inauguration day, and indeed I have thoroughly enjoyed being President. But I believe I can also say that I am thoroughly alive to the tremendous responsibilities of my position. Life is a long campaign where every victory merely leaves the ground free for another battle, and sooner or later defeat comes to every man, unless death forestalls it. But the final defeat does not and should not cancel the triumphs, if the latter have been substantial and for a cause worth championing.

"I suppose that almost always and in almost every country there has been cause for anxiety. The most marvelous growth in population and material prosperity, and, I believe, in the average of human happiness, that the world has ever seen in any race, has taken place among the English-speaking peoples since the time when Goldsmith gave poetic expression to the general feeling of gloom which prevailed among educated men at what they were pleased to consider the morbid growth of the cities and the decadence of the men in England. Much good has gone hand in hand with the evil of the tremendous industrial development of the day. I do not think the average American multimillionaire a very high type, and I do not much admire him. But in his place he is well enough; and I am inclined to think that on the whole our people are, spiritually as well as materially, on the average better and not worse off than they were a hundred years ago."
Trevelyan's reply to this letter contained, as usual, much interesting material:
london, March 30, 1905.

Always and especially now that you have such an all important role as the newspapers indicate with reference to Russia, it is certainly a great advantage to be exempt from the wearing, distracting, and sometimes most ignoble details of parliamentary warfare. It was very painful to see Mr. Gladstone exposed to such an ordeal when he had affairs of vast moment upon his hands. I really think that you can have no conception what he went through when he was conducting such pieces of work as the Alabama Treaty; the Egyptian Occupation; the life and death crisis with Russia over the affairs of Pendjdeh;. and (above all) in his old age, the frightful problem of Ireland.
Think only of one circumstance, that, while he was passing his last very great measure, the Irish Land Act of 1881, and at the same time was face to face with what was practically a fierce revolution in Ireland, he was daily involved in the sordid detraction and humiliation (if a great man who is doing his duty according to his lights can be humiliated) of the Bradlaugh difficulty with all its clouds of calumny and virulence.

   I know that you have your own share of the troubles and annoyances which beset every ruler who is working for the country, and not for himself; but I am glad to think that you can choose your own time for making a communication to the public, and are not bound to engage in controversy with every coxcomb in a white tie and evening clothes who comes down after dinner to worry a Minister who has been working continuously since he rose from a bad night's sleep.

I have ventured to send you a small book, ' Cawnpore.' I wrote it at five and twenty, having lived for a year in India, which was still scarred with the mutiny, among friends, many no older than myself, who had played a part all through that extraordinary period. One of them told me that the twelve months, during which the crisis lasted, flew like as many weeks. He was in Calcutta. If he had been in Lucknow, or outside Delhi, the time might have seemed longer. An Irish member of Parliament, who served with the French army in 1870 and 1871, told me that he was in Dijon during the battle. He and another officer were posted in a high church tower to observe the field of action, and send expresses to the generals engaged. All of a sudden the two officers were surprised by an ominous and sudden darkening of the atmosphere, which seemed to be an unnatural and unaccountable phenomenon. As a matter of fact, it was the approach of night; so absorbing was the interest of watching a battle without sharing the bodily danger. I do not know whether that effect is usual; but people whose business kept them in Calcutta appear to have felt it during the mutiny.
I do not know whether I am correct in addressing you as "Excellency" but I like doing it because of Charles Lee's objecting to that title being applied to Washington.
Trevelyan's inquiry about the title of "Excellency" touched a sensitive point with the President, for almost from the moment of taking office he had protested against its use. Replying on May 13, 1905, he wrote:

   "I would rather not be called Excellency, and this partly because the title does not belong to me and partly from vanity! The President of the United States ought to have no title; and if he did have a title it ought to be a bigger one. Whenever an important prince conies here he is apt to bring a shoal of 'Excellencies' in his train. Just as I should object to having the simple dignity of the White House changed for such attractions as might lie in a second-rate palace, so I feel that the President of a great democratic republic should have no title but President. He could not have a title that would not be either too much or too little. Let him be called the President, and nothing more.

"I suppose each of us is inclined to envy the advantages of a system different from that under which he himself lives. I was much struck by your congratulations upon my being free from 'the wearing, distracting, and sometimes most ignoble details of parliamentary warfare.' They must be wearing and distracting, and often ignoble, but upon my word I can hardly believe they are worse than what conies to any American President in the matter of patronage. I have done all I could, and I think I may say more than any other President has ever done, in the direction of getting rid of the system of appointing and removing men for political considerations. But enough remains to cause me many hours of sordid and disagreeable work, which yet must be done under penalty of losing the good will of men with whom it is necessary that I should work.
"I can quite understand how Mr. Gladstone suffered at some great crisis like that with Russia, or in the Egyptian matter, or the Irish matter, when he was forced to submit to the insolence of men his inferiors in every respect, men not deserving serious notice by him, who yet had the power to force him into controversy. But as I say, each man knows where his own shoe pinches. I have had a most vivid realization of what it must have meant to Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the heartbreaking anxieties of the Civil War, to have to take up his time trying to satisfy the candidates for postmaster at Chicago, or worse still in meeting the demands of the Germans or the Irish, or one section or another of Republicans or War Democrats, that such and such an officer should be given promotion or some special position. It is of course easy for the mugwump or goo-goo who has no knowledge whatever of public affairs to say that the proper thing is to refuse to deal with such men or to pay any heed to such considerations. But in practical life one has to work with the instruments at hand, and it is impossible wholly to disregard what have by long usage come to be established customs. Lincoln had to face the fact that great bodies of his supporters would have been wholly unable to understand him if he had refused to treat them with consideration when they wished to discuss such questions of patronage. You have your difficulties from men who are thrust into positions to which they are not entitled because of their social standing, or the social standing of those on whom they are dependent or with whom they are connected. We have our difficulties with men of an entirely different class for whom the demands are made because of the political services which they have rendered. I suppose that those suffering from either system are tempted at times to think that they would prefer the other. But after all the great fact to remember is that really we are both living under free government, and while both of these governments, and the people behind the governments, differ somewhat from one another, they are closer kin than either is to any other folk. There are numerous and grave evils incident to free government, but after all is said and done I cannot imagine any real man being willing to live under any other system."
The news of John Hay's death called forth from Trevelyan one of the most notable letters of the correspondence:
wallington,
July 15, 1905.

I have felt very much for you about John Hay; the more so as the last letter with which you honored me was hopeful with regard to him. Some of his recent letters were very interesting. In 1903, speaking of my having left politics, he says: "As for me, like the Thane of Cawdor, 'I am chained to the stake, and bear-like must fight my course.' I am tired—even to the marrow of my bones; but at present there seems no way out; and in truth I have been wonderfully favored by fortune. Almost everything I set out to do, five years ago, is done; and I ought to be thankful."
Last January he wrote to me with much feeling about the noble compliment which you paid him by announcing that he was to remain Secretary of State until 1909. "I have no idea, however," he says, "that my term of office will extend to that length. In fact, I have grave doubts whether this tenement of clay which I inhabit will hold together that long. I wish I could look forward to so cheery a prospect as that of visiting Stratford-on-Avon in your company; but that prospect also is dim. "Walking with Henry Adams the other day, I expressed my fear that, by the time I got out of office, I should have lost the faculty of enjoyment. As you know Adams, you can understand the dry malice with which he replied: 'Make your mind easy on that score, sonny! You've lost it now.' "
It is a very serious matter in free countries, full of able men struggling to the front, the great age of successful statesmen. I am satisfied that a good man, with an early chance, is most valuable any time on from five or six and twenty, and seldom good for much after five and sixty. Politics is like war, inasmuch as when a man shrinks from anything great or small, which requires doing, from considerations of health and strength, he is no longer a true campaigner. Our generation in England was curiously affected by the question of age. Mr. Gladstone, in gifts and faculties, was exactly a whole generation better than his time of life; and, while the Liberal party in some respects gained by it, it in some respects was damaged. In his later years he sometimes retained in important offices old colleagues who, though they were actually his juniors, were entirely worn out; and it was noticeable how certain clever men and ambitious outsiders were thrown into very unfortunate political courses by the sense of being overshadowed by him, and not being favorites with him. When John Morley, and Bryce, and I were men of fifty he was old enough, and more, to be our father; and he regarded us with great indulgence—at times even to the verge of spoiling us—as so many promising sons. We certainly were very fond of him. But I cannot help wishing that he had retired from office long before he did, and had allowed the Liberal party to work out its own salvation, make its own mistakes, and learn from its own experience.
When the treaty of peace between Russia and Japan was signed in September, 1905, Roosevelt wrote a long letter to Trevelyan describing the negotiations. In the same letter he wrote: "Your letter about John Hay interested me very much. I think he will be missed more and more instead of less and less as time goes on by all who knew him." Two other passages on his recent reading are worth quoting:
"Last night I was reading the poems of William Morris. Of course they are rather absurd and one gets tired of them very soon; but there are some of them which have a kind of pre-Raphaelite attraction of their own. I also happened to pick up the fifth volume of Lecky. It seems to me that in the opening page he takes rather too sordid a view of the characteristics which we have a right to expect of a modern statesman. It does not seem to me that it is fair to say that passionate earnestness and self-devotion, delicateness of conscience, and lofty aim are likely to prove a hindrance instead of a help to a statesman or a politician. Of course if he has no balance of common-sense, then the man will go to pieces; but it will be because he is a fool, not because he has some of the qualities of a moral hero. Undoubtedly many great statesmen whose names are written in history in imperishable—though personally I think in rather unpleasant—character, have lacked these characteristics, yet there are other great men who certainly have possessed them. But I suppose Lecky was thinking of the creatures analogous to our mugwumps; the people who actually pride themselves on a fantastic and visionary morality, utterly unbalanced by common-sense; the people who attracted the scorn of Macaulay's eminently sane and healthy mind."
What Trevelyan thought of the peace victory, of Washington, Lincoln, and Morris, and incidentally of Lowell, appeared in his next letter:
wallington, September 25, 1905.

Your letter was extraordinarily interesting and acceptable. What a thing you have done! It is unique in history; but it is in the footsteps of the pair whom you like to follow. Washington, so far as I can see (for it is a period in your history which is dim enough to me), prevented a terrible war with England in 1795, at the cost of a great part of his popularity, and at a time of life when his enormous personal position, and the moral dignity by which he was universally and for so long before surrounded wherever his name was known, rendered the brutalities and vulgarities of political detraction, as directed against him, humiliating and almost grotesque. Lincoln, again, under immense temptations and difficulties, prevented another desolating war with us at the time of the Trent. The whole case is wonderfully well put by Lowell in his 'Bridge and Monument'—the cleverest thing, I think, he ever did.
"We recollect how sailors' rights were won: Yard locked in yard, hot gun-lip kissing gun."
That is the way to write!
I agree with you about Morris's poems. Himself, and his wall papers, were the real things of value which he gave to the world. He wrote most excellent letters, and lived a high and inspiring life. That life has been written in two volumes by Mackail, son-in-law to Burne-Jones. I read it with the greatest interest, and, on the chance of your not having it, I have directed a copy to be sent you, which I hope you will accept as my tribute to you as a peace-maker.
In acknowledging the volume of 'Interludes,' containing a paper on 'An Ancient Greek War,' that Trevelyan had sent him, Roosevelt gave his own views on the Greeks, on October 7, 1905:
"I am not quite sure that I agree even with your carefully guarded statement as to your liking to have lived in Greece in the classic age. The proviso you put in includes a great deal! We should have to get rid not only of our present conventions of morality, but of what has come to be our ordinary instincts of humanity, in order to tolerate even the best and simplest of the society of that day; and we should have to lose entirely the beautiful love of husband and wife, with all that it has so incalculably meant for the home. What a strange thing it is that those wonderful Greeks, so brilliant that I suppose Galton is right in placing the average Athenian in point of intellect as far above the average civilized man of our countries as the latter is above the upper class barbarian, yet lacked the self-restraint and political common sense necessary to enable them to hold their own against any strong aggressive power.''
Several letters which passed between the two men at this time contain references to books read and liked by both, with comments on the same:
roosevelt to trevelyan
white house,
November 8, 1905.
Sometimes I get discouraged by the enormous amount of utterly worthless written matter published in America, in all kinds of forms, from Sunday newspapers through magazines to books. It is such a veritable ocean of worthlessness that one tends to lose sight of some really good things that are published. I send you herewith three little volumes that have appeared during the last year, each of which seems to have some real stuff in it. The 'From Epicurus to Christ' seems to me to go pretty well down toward the heart of things in getting at the worth, even in very brief fashion, of those ancient philosophies which stand at the base of our present moral structure. The other two volumes deal more lightly with lighter subjects, for they are only collections of essays; but I have enjoyed them so that I am sure I shall like to reread them now and then. I send them to you on the off chance of your liking them.
I have just finished a fortnight's trip in the Southern States, where I was received with the utmost enthusiasm. As far as I know I did not flinch from one of my principles; but I did do my best to show the Southern people not only that I was earnestly desirous of doing what was best for them, but that I felt a profound sympathy and admiration for them; and they met me half way. This does not mean any political change at all in the South, and it means but a slight permanent change in the attitude of the Southerners; but I think it does mean this slight permanent change, and it marks one more step toward what I believe will some day come about—the complete reunion of the
two sections.
•
tRevelyan to Roosevelt
palace hotel, rome,
December 1, 1905.
I am greatly pleased and honored by your sending me those books which you have proved yourself. I am afraid that the trash, of which you speak in America as flooding the press, is produced not alone in America of English-speaking nations. The best signs in England are the innumerable reprints of good old books, which continue to be issued side by side with much balderdash. The very titles of the volumes which you have been kind enough to send me testify to our tastes in common. For the last five or six years—after caring nothing for philosophy all my life, except in the exquisite literary setting of Plato—I have acquired a deep and intense passion for Cicero's philosophical writings. Perhaps it is that he was an old public man, who had gone through all the most virile and stirring human experiences, and had retained his eagerness for truth and his lofty views of man's destiny. His ethical illustrations are all taken from high political and warlike events, and the diction is divine, and inspiring and suggestive as no other writing. I have brought here the ' Tusculan Disputations,' and the 'De Natura Deorum'; and in truth I now regard this wonderful city, which I know as perhaps none but specialists know it, with a perceptibly increased interest and respect on Cicero's account.
We have a glorious view from a fifth floor window on the Pincian hill, straight across the heart of Borne. On the Janiculan summit opposite—where no Pope or Emperor ever was allowed to be placed—Garibaldi sits on his charger, nobly sculptured in bronze, overlooking all the city from the point where he fought the French in 1849. / saw him once carried by four gens d'armes, within three feet of me; one by each arm, and one with an arm under each knee. It was an arrest, by the Italian authorities, to which he submitted in order to save bloodshed after the battle of Mentana. And now he stands there, the master of all he sees; and he deserves it, too; for though his material did not allow him any certainty of military success, he had the sacred fire which kept everything alive till the work was' done. Last night we ate our Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce with your Ambassador and Ambassadress—very old friends of ours. They lived for many years next door to us in London. How my wife and I would have wished you there! and what I would give to take you, as I took John Morley, to the Forum and the Palatine!! Nine out of ten people at the sights here are Americans; very humble folk, especially the women, but most intelligent and eager, and essentially refined. It is a pleasure to see them poring over their guidebooks and reading them aloud to each other.
welcombe, stratford-on-avon, 
January 8, 1906.

On our return from Italy I found the books you had been good enough to send me; and primarily the "American Hunter," copy No. 3, which in itself is an honor. That honor is greatly enhanced by the inscription which you have written. The portrait is a great acquisition. It could not be improved; and, if for no other reason, the book would be to me a valued possession. But I like it extremely, and have enjoyed every word of it. The hunting books I care for I have always cared for much; but they are very few, and this is among the very best. The whole about the cougars is as good as it possibly can be; and there is a melancholy romance about the Yellowstone Park which produced a great impression on me. I never miss spending five minutes, when I visit our Zoological Gardens, in front of the Bisons. What a sequence of ideas the sight of those animals presents! But I think your bears round the refuse. in the hotels are almost a more significant testimony to the irresistible, unideal, triumph of civilization. However, romance has lasted my time; and the last six weeks have proved to me that Rome at any rate is romantic as ever. To have produced Rome is, and I suppose always will remain, the most remarkable feat accomplished by mankind. It is a place where no one can feel old, and no one unhappy.
Have you got 'Sponge's Sporting Tour'! Many years ago I had a bad Typhoid fever; and, as then was the custom, it was concealed from me what was the matter with me. But I gradually lost all interest in books, and in most other human things; when suddenly there came on me a craving to read 'Sponge,' which I had read a dozen times, and have read several times since; and I even then read it with delight. I never understand how 'Jorrocks' can be placed on a level with it. Macaulay—whose knowledge of a horse was confined to a pretty clear recognition of the difference between its head and its tail—was much interested in 'Sponge.' If you have read the book, I will send you something else which you may like.
Roosevelt to trevelyan
white house, January 22, 1906.
Yes, Mrs. Roosevelt and I are both as fond as you are of the immortal 'Soapy Sponge'; but I shall be very grateful if you will send me that copy, because the only copy we have in the house is one Mrs. Roosevelt inherited from her father. It is a rather cheap American edition, though with the John Leech pictures, and we have read it until it has practically tumbled to pieces. So you see I am greedily closing with your offer.
I find it a great comfort to like all kinds of books, and to be able to get half an hour or an hour's complete rest and complete detachment from the fighting of the moment, by plunging into the genius and misdeeds of Marlborough, or the wicked perversity of James II, or the brilliant battle for human freedom fought by Fox—or in short, anything that Macaulay wrote or that you have written, or any one of the novels of Scott and of some of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens; or to turn to Hawthorne or Poe; or to Longfellow, who I think has been underestimated of late years, by the way.
tRevelyan to Roosevelt
london, March 15, 1906.
I have been an unconscionable time in sending you 'Soapy Sponge'; but it was not my fault. As long as I was in the country I could not get it in the right shape. The new reprints had the engravings reduced in size, and the type—the dear old type—altered. Soon after my arrival in London I picked up the right edition at a book stall, and since then have been getting it bound.