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CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

ROOSEVELT AND TREVELYAN—CONCLUDED: 

in November, 1906, President Roosevelt made a visit to the Isthmus of Panama, to inspect the work of building the canal, making the journey on the battleship Louisiana. While on the return trip he wrote a letter, November 23, to Trevelyan, in which, after describing what he had seen on the Isthmus, he said:
"In a very amusing and very kindly, and on the whole not unjust book in which Captain Younghusband describes the Philippines, he spoke of our army out there as looking not like an army in the European sense but like the inhabitants of a Rocky Mountain mining town. I know just what he meant, and the comparison was not unjust, and in some ways was more exact than he realized. Our army in service now wears a flannel shirt, light or heavy khaki trousers, leggins and a soft slouch hat, and each man on the average believes in his work and has much power of initiative. Well, in dress and traits the five thousand men on the Isthmus keep making me think of our army as I have actually seen it busily at work at some half war-like, half administrative problem. Of course there are many exceptions, but on the average the white man on the Isthmus feels that he is doing a big job which will reflect credit on the country, and is working with hearty good will. He is well housed and well fed. He often has his wife and children with him, in which case he lives in a really delightful cottage, the home life being just such as one reads about in Octave Thanet's stories of the West and of American labor people.
"I do not like a sea voyage myself, though of course I am interested very much in this great battleship and in her officers and crew. The other day we dined at the chief petty officers' mess, and the men are of the type, which make the strength of our navy and of yours.
"I have had a good deal of time for reading, naturally, and among other things have gone over Milton's prose works. What a radical Republican, and what a staunch partisan, and what an intense Protestant the fine old fellow was; subject to the inevitable limitations of his time and place, he was curiously modern too. He advocated liberty of conscience to a degree that few were then able to advocate, or at least few of those who were not only philosophers like Milton, but also like Milton in active public life, and his plea for liberty of the press is good reading now. His essay on divorce is curious rather than convincing, and while it is extremely modern in some ways it is not modern at all in the contemptuous arrogance of its attitude toward women. Personally I like his 'Eikonoklastes,' but then I am a radical about punishing people like Charles the First or Jefferson Davis. It may be very unwise to kill either, but it is eminently righteous to do so—so far, that is, as anything is righteous which is not in its deepest and truest sense also expedient.
"I have also been reading Dill's account of Roman society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. You, my dear Sir, who are so blessed as to read all the best of the Greeks or Latins in the original must not look down too scornfully upon us who have to make believe that we are contented with Emerson's view of translations. I am now trying to get some really good English editions of Tacitus. I want to see if it is possible to pick up some old edition with good print and good binding.
"After I read Milton and Tacitus until I feel that I can stand them no longer I devour short stories or novels. In the novels I am sorry to say I usually have to go back to those I have read already."
To this letter Trevelyan replied:
wallington,
 December 12, 1906.
I was unusually glad to get your letter, for I seemed to detect in it the note of out-doors zest and freshness which betokened that you had what to you, at any rate, was something of a holiday. It interested me extremely to read your impressions of the Isthmus; and one felt proud of what man can do to make this world more habitable when one compared your account of the health of the employees, and their families, with the story of Darien which Macaulay tells with such extraordinary picturesqueness in the twenty fifth chapter of his History. Spain is not so formidable to you as she was to those poor souls of Scotch settlers in 1699: and you have had a hand in. bringing that result about. Captain Younghusband's description of your army in the Philippines is curious. I fancy that must have been very much the appearance of the legionary in remote quarters under the Roman Empire. But it pleased me most to know that you had dined at the petty officers' mess on the Louisiana. I should like to have seen the faces around the Board of Admiralty if, as a junior Lord, in the year 1869, I had accepted the hospitality of the Warrant officers! They must be a fine set with you, as with us; and I am glad to think that they live exceedingly well.
I am leading a very tranquil life, finishing my next part of the American Revolution. It is most fascinating work describing the French element in the great affair. The statesmen at Versailles are in interesting contrast to Nathanael Greene and Jonathan Trumbull. Those ancient heroes do not lose by the comparison.
Almost our last visitors here were Charles Francis and Mrs. Adams. He went on to inspect Flodden, as he is very fond of battle-fields. He has seen some warm work in his time, or omitted to see it; for he slept all through Pickett's charge with his tired cavalry in the rear of the line. I am glad to say he is older than I am. Very few of my contemporaries are still going; except Bryce, and John Morley, and the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman (fine fellow that he is!), and one or two of the tougher Judges. All who held any humbler rank have been mustered out of employment on account of their advanced years. Even a friend of mine has been superannuated from being President of the Society of Antiquaries, which seems the ne plus ultra of superannuation. There is great comfort in being old. A man feels responsible for his own contemporaries, and critical of those among them who get more than their deserts; but he has no feeling beyond a mild amusement as connected with personal matters in a younger generation—except a genuine pleasure in seeing young merit rewarded. One troubles oneself little about the actors, but retains one's interest in the cause. I look up to you as a reader of Milton's prose. I never have taken to sixteenth or seventeenth century prose; but I may some day; for I never read Chaucer till three years ago, and I have since read him twice through aloud, and he had spoiled me for any other poetry. As for classical history, have you ever tried beginning Grate's Greece at the 35th chapter, the Ionic revolt; leaving out all that precedes it, much of which is hopelessly unreadable? The interest of what then follows, through volume after volume, is unequaled in all the world.
Hints of the wide range of Roosevelt's reading are conveyed in these two letters:
white house, April 10, 1907.
Do you know Negris' 'History of Julian the Apostate'? Julian's career has always been interesting to me, and I was particularly interested in seeing it treated by an Italian of Negris' type. By the way, while I knew that one of your diplomatists, Rennell Rodd, was a poet, I did not realize that he was a historian until the other day Mrs. Roosevelt presented me with a couple of volumes of his on those curious Frankish principalities which existed in Greece for a couple of centuries as the sequence of the Fourth Crusade. It has always been to me an interesting episode in history, although it led absolutely nowhere, and as far as I can see had almost no practical effect whatever— beyond fixing in the minds of Chaucer and his contemporaries the idea that feudal titles sat naturally on the heroes of old Greece.
oyster bay, June 20, 1907.
Some little time ago I received your son's volume on Garibaldi which you so kindly sent me. I have been delighted with it, especially because I was able to read it in connection with De la Gorce's 'History of the French Republic,' which in a couple of chapters gives the French-clerical view of the transaction. By the way, I suppose you are familiar with De la Gorce's 'History of the Second Republic and Second Empire.' To me it is a most interesting and attractive work, and the man ranks high among historians in spite of his pronounced clerical sympathies and his distrust of democracy.
In October, 1907, Roosevelt received an additional volume of Trevelyan's 'American Revolution,' which in acknowledging, he said: "I look forward to reading it as eagerly as any girl ever looked forward to reading the last volume of a favorite novel." A few weeks later, November 11, 1907, he wrote a letter to Trevelyan which contains interesting views of his own on some of the personages of the Revolution:
"I have now read through your last volume. It is a little difficult to say just what I feel about your history without subjecting you to the discomfort always felt by a fastidious -man when he suspects he is over praised. Yet I can not refrain from expressing my sincere opinion that you have not only written the final history of our Revolution, but that you have done what is given to so very, very few men to do—that you have written one of the few histories which can deservedly be called great. I do not want to be misled by national feeling; and yet I can not help believing that the American Revolution was one of the great historic events which will always stand forth in the story of mankind; and now we have been fortunate enough to see that rare combination of a great historic event treated by a great writer, a great student, a great historian. How fortunate we should be if Napier had written not merely the Peninsula War, but all of Napoleon's campaigns! How fortunate we should be if there had been a Thucydides to write of Alexander as he actually wrote of the Peloponnesian War! How I wish that some man could arise to do for the great English civil war of the 17th century, or for the American civil war of the 19th century, what Macaulay did for the English revolution and its hero! Well, it seems to me that you have done just this for the American Revolution.
"By the way, I am especially pleased at the justice you did to Lord Grey, he who cut up Wayne's troops with the bayonet, and thereby taught Wayne a lesson which Stony Point and the Fallen Timbers afterwards showed he had learned in good fashion. Was this Grey the ancestor of either your present Foreign Secretary or present Governor General in Canada? I have always felt a keen sympathy with the men who receive no credit for their great and brilliant deeds simply because an inexorable fate has compelled' them to fight on the losing side. The very greatest captains in history, the Hannibals and Napoleons, leave a fame un-dimmed by the fact of final failure, for their colossal might forces the unwilling attention of mankind, and the recognition of the fact that no human greatness can in the end prevail against the stars in their courses. But the lesser men are generally judged merely by success. In the Revolutionary War, for instance, I have never felt that Cornwallis received justice, or that minor men like Tarleton and Grey received justice. (I am putting them together from a military standpoint and without any intention at the moment of alluding to any possible difference of character among them.) It was not possible that Cornwallis should win, as events actually were; yet he defeated army after army, battling always against superior numbers, conquered the Southern States—though no man with his resources could have held them down—and succumbed only when neither he nor any one else could have altered the final outcome by further resistance. Tarleton was a most dashing leader of dragoons in partisan warfare; and if he was often ruthlessly unsparing, so were many among his opponents. "I also thank you for the very interesting 'Marginal Notes by Lord Macaulay.' It is the kind of book that I rejoice in, especially when I have many things to worry me, and do not feel like reading books that are too long or too serious unless they are also very interesting!"
tRevelyan's Reply
palace hotel, rome,
 November 27, 1907.

Yesterday I had the immense double pleasure of a letter from you, which was as gratifying personally as I ever received; and of arriving for a six weeks' holiday—from happy labours—in this wonderful and most attractive of cities. What a delight it would be to show you about it! for I know it as well as Horace knew it—as well as you know Washington. And yet, in my inmost heart, I wish that that opportunity might not come until I am a lustrum older—too old to be your cicerone. Now that you have expressed your approbation of my last volume I may say that, while writing it, I was conscious of having a firmer and larger grasp of the subject than in the previous volumes. I have noted what you say about Cornwallis for quotation in the next volume, which, if I can violate all literary precedent by writing a book of any value after seventy years of age, will be the last volume.
I am reminded, by this place, of the circumstances that there is, at last, a good history of the great days of Rome. It is by Professor Ferrero of Bologna, 'La Grandeur et Decadence de Rome.' It is well translated into French, in which I am reading it; and the first two volumes are translated into English. I read them aloud, every word; and a book of greater interest, more vigorously and credibly written, it is difficult to imagine. I should strongly recommend it for your periods of comparative leisure—of those you may from time to time have. I hope I may say with how much sympathy I watch the great difficulties that are upon you, tempered by the certainty that you are the same in all fortunes and circumstances. The financial tornado into which my book fluttered from the publishers will, I suppose, be to its disadvantage; but that matters less in the case of a long, continuous work.
In December, 1907, the President united with Secretary Root and Senator Lodge in the present of a silver loving-cup to Trevelyan, with the inscription: "To the Historian of the American Revolution from his friends—Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root." The first mention of it occurs in the letter which the President wrote to Trevelyan, on December 9, 1907, in which he informs him that he had read Ferrero's book on Rome a year earlier:

"I read Ferrero's work last year and I entirely agree with you that it would be impossible to imagine a book of greater interest, more vigorous, or conveying more clearly the conviction of its essential truth. I quoted it in one of my public speeches, in Keokuk, the other day. While I like it in translation, I think it is so big a book that I want it in the original, and accordingly I some little time ago ordered it in the Italian. It is the first history of that period of Rome which I have thought really satisfactory.
"Root and Lodge and I are sending you a trifling token of our affection and esteem which I hope you will receive about Christmas.
"Within the last fortnight I have again reread your last volume from beginning to end, and I am more pleased with it than ever."
The loving-cup was acknowledged in two letters by Trevelyan:
rome,
December 22, 1907.
I have received your letter, which was as great, and as agreeable, a surprise as ever befell me. I can think nothing a greater honor than being remembered in this kindly and courteous fashion, by three such men; and it is a real reward for the trouble and thought I have so long given to this work of mine that it should have pleased such judges. We are starting for England about the 5th of January, and your Christmas present will reach me at our beautiful home at Stratford on Avon, where we earnestly hope some day to receive each and all the donors.
london,
January 9, 1908.
On our return yesterday from the Continent we found the box. The pleasure and pride which its contents gave us surpasses, I think, anything of the sort that I remember. The cup is a noble piece; and the simplicity and singular beauty of proportion struck us much while fresh from Italian Museums, and impressed us with the notion that there must be much artistic feeling among silver-workers in America. I look forward to your seeing it on our dinner table. We always have silver for our ornaments there; and none more valued than this. Such an expression from three such men will make it a real heirloom to a coming generation which is well able to appreciate it.
Roosevelt's reading of the third volume of the 'American Revolution' was the inspiring cause of two letters which come very near to being the most interesting of the series:
Roosevelt to trevelyan
white house, 
January 1, 1908.
I look forward eagerly to your next volume. With one of the smaller fights with which you will have to deal, that of King's Mountain, I am fairly well acquainted. I made rather a study of it, as well as of the western campaigns of George Rogers Clark during the Revolution, in a book I wrote called 'The Winning of the West.' I look forward to seeing what you say of Tarleton. My admiration for that dashing, even though somewhat ruthless, cavalryman has steadily grown. In my library his volume stands side by side with the memoirs of Lighthorse Harry Lee—where it belongs. As you so well say, men are very apt to consider as cruel any form of killing to which they are unaccustomed. The British thought the sharpshooters who picked off their officers were nothing short of murderers; and the Americans stigmatized as a massacre any fight that was won by unsparing use of saber or bayonet, whether under Tarleton or Grey. It seems to me you have been eminently just to Burgoyne, Howe and Clinton. It is nonsense to attack them as so many British historians, and with still less excuse so many American historians, have done. They were not military men of the first rank; but very few such are produced in any war; and many far less deserving men to whom the fates were kind, now hold respectable positions as victors in the histories of commonplace campaigns against mediocrities. I shall be interested in seeing what you say of Rawdon. His name always possesses for me an attraction which I suppose is due to subconscious feeling that he must be connected in some way with his namesake, that fundamentally good fellow, Captain Crawley.
I look forward especially to your account of Cornwallis. Greene and Cornwallis were the two commanders who stood next to Washington. Wayne got his growth after the Revolutionary War had ended. It seems to me that there has never been a more satisfactory summing up of Washington as a soldier than is contained in your pages 284 to 286. How well you have done Benedict Arnold! How will you deal with his fall; with the money-paid treason of the rider of the war storm! What a base web was shot through the woof of his wild daring! He was at heart a Lucifer, that child of thunder and lover of the battle's hottest heat; and dreadful it is to think that when he fell his fall should have been, not that of the lightning-blasted Son of the Morning, but that of a mere Mammon or Belial. Your etching of Morgan's riflemen is fine. The Victors of King's Mountain were just such men, but without a Morgan to train them.

Now, for a bit of brag. My Bough Eiders, hunters of the mountains and horsemen of the plains, could not, taken as a whole, have walked quite as well as Morgan's men, nor yet have starved as well, though they were good enough at both. But they rode without thought horses that Morgan's men would not have ventured so much as to try to get on,-and I firmly believe that they were fully as formidable in battle. Mine was a volunteer regiment, and at least half of the officers at the outset were very bad, so that in a long campaign I should have had to make a complete change among them—a change that was already well begun when the regiment was disbanded. But as compared with any volunteer regiment of the Revolution, of the Civil War during a like short period of service—four months—I think its record stood well. It was raised, drilled—so far as it was drilled—armed and equipped, kept two weeks on transports, and put through two victorious aggressive (not defensive) fights, in which it lost over a third of its officers and nearly a fourth of its men, and this within sixty days. The men already knew how to ride, shoot, and live in the open; and they had the fighting edge.

You speak of the Indians just as they should be spoken of; although I am not sure that from your account men will realize what formidable and terrible foes they usually were on their own ground.

I was especially delighted with your account of Franklin abroad, and of the unfortunate diplomats whom Congress first sent to Europe. You have, it seems to me, done justice as regards the civilian agents of the Revolution.

Now, poor Andre! His tragedy was like that of Nathan Hale; and the tragedy was the same in the case of the brilliant young patrician, brilliant, fearless, devoted, and the plain, straightforward yeoman who just as bravely gave up his life in performing the same kind of duty. It was not a pleasant kind of duty; and the penalty was rightly the same in each case; and the countrymen of each man are also right to hold him in honor and to commemorate his memory by a monument. Among our monstrosities in the statue line in New York we have one really by a master; it is Nathan Hale's. By the way, it is one of the sad ironies of history that a difference in the outcome of a war should necessarily in so many cases utterly change the way the descendants of the two sides look at one another's heroes. In Canada, for instance, Wolfe and Montcalm are equally national heroes now, because the English conquered the French and yet live in the country on terms of absolute equality with them, so that of necessity, if they are to have a common national tie, they must have as common heroes for both peoples the heroes of each people.
So in a very striking fashion it is with us and the memories of the Civil War. My father's people were all Union men. My mother's brothers fought in the Confederate navy, one being an admiral therein, and the other firing the last gun fired by the Alabama before she sank. When I recently visited Vicksburg in Mississippi, the State of Jefferson Davis, I was greeted with just as much enthusiasm as if it had been Massachusetts or Ohio. I went out to the national park which commemorates the battle and siege and was shown around it by Stephen Lee, the present head of the Confederate veterans' organization, and had as guard of honor both ex-Confederate and ex-Union soldiers. After for many years talking about the fact that the deeds of valor shown by the men in gray and the men in blue are now the common heritage of all our people, those who talked and those who listened have now gradually grown first to believe with their minds, and then to feel with their hearts, the truth of what they have 'spoken. But where such results flow from battles as flowed from Bannockbum and Yorktown, centuries must pass before the wound not only scars over but becomes completely forgotten, and the memory becomes a bond of union and not a cause of division. It is our business to shorten the time as much as possible; and no one has done better work toward this end than you yourself.
This Christmas I was given an original proclamation issued in 1776 by my great-great-grandfather, the first governor (or, as he was called, President) of the Revolutionary State of Georgia, Two among my forbears were soldiers who fought under Marion and Sumter, one was in the Continental army of the North, and one a member of the Continental Congress. They were plain people, farmers or merchants, for the most part, though I suppose one or two would have been ranked among the gentry. In 1698 one of these was "Landgrave" of South Carolina under Locke's absurd constitution.
trevelyan's reply
welcombE, stratford-on-avon,
 January 18, 1908.
I am extraordinarily complimented by the minute and detailed interest which you express as to the manner in which I shall treat of the heroes of that part of the War of Independence which still remains to be told. I shall like to go over ground, some of which you. have trodden—if that expression can be applied to your rate of movement when writing about military affairs; and I shall like very much to read what you said about the Southern battles. But you must not expect too much. Remember that I shall be seventy on the 20th of next July; and no good history— and, so far as I know, only one good book of any sort— was ever produced in our language by an author who had passed that age. But I shall work in a leisurely, unanxious, and enjoyable manner—encouraged to it by the kindness and favor which has been shown me by Americans, and most of all by you. Of one thing I am quite resolved, that the next volume shall, and ought to, end the work; and I have prepared the ground carefully to obtain that result, if time is given me to bring it about.
Your account of the Rough Riders is very enlightening to one who has never seen fighting. What a rough business the whole thing must be, and how unlike most of the books! But the more I read, the more I am impressed with the belief that the actual conduct of a fight with firearms is, and has always been, essentially the same in all ages and countries. It is now beginning to be understood that the colossal successes of the early French Republic, and of Napoleon, were mainly won by the straighter shooting, in line of skirmish, of soldiers who individually were more intelligent than Austrians and Russians, and than Prussians of the old regime. As to Andre, I have a central idea about Washington's action in the matter which I am anxious to put on paper. I was much struck by your comparison between the mutual feelings left by struggles which ended in union, like those in Canada and the War of Secession, and those which end in a separation, like yours and ours. I am glad that you think I have done something towards that work of conciliation in which you have borne so signal a part.
While on a hunting tour in Africa in 1910 Roosevelt wrote to Trevelyan a letter which may quite accurately, I am sure, be called the supreme gem of this correspondence. In sending it to me for publication, Sir George says of it: "It is faultlessly written and perfectly legible. I received it at Rome, where my wife and I enjoyed the privilege of seeing not a little of Mrs. and Miss Roosevelt. When I opened the penciled envelope I expected a story of great game shooting, written by the light of a camp fire; instead of a story about an hippopotamus or lion, it was a wonderfully wise and eloquent comparison of Carlyle 's and Macaulay 's views of Frederick the Great; and marvelous in sagacity as being written years before the German war. Though surprised by the contents of the letter, I was very far from being disappointed. It must be remembered that this scathing judgment upon the Silesian and Polish policy of Frederick the Great, and the approval of that policy by Carlyle, and the condemnation of it by Macaulay, was put on record by Mr. Roosevelt nearly five years before the cult and tradition of the Hohenzollern family, and the deification and worship of Frederick the Great, culminated in the invasion, the spoliation and the torture of Belgium."
north of kenia, B. E. A.,
September 10, 1909. My dear Trevelyan:
No ex-President, and no ex-Prime Minister, for that matter, ever enjoyed six months as I have enjoyed the six months now ending. We have had great sport with the noblest game in all the world; the country is fascinating; and it is most interesting to see, and admire, your government officials at work—while your settlers, especially those from South Africa or Australia, are in all essentials just like my own beloved westerners.
I always take in my saddle pocket some volume (I am too old now to be satisfied merely with a hunter's life), and among the most worn are the volumes of Macaulay. Upon my word, the more often I read him, whether the History or the Essays, the greater my admiration becomes. I read him primarily for pleasure, as I do all books; but I get any amount of profit from him, incidentally. Of all the authors I know I believe I should first choose him as the man whose writings will most help a man of action who desires to be both efficient and decent, to keep straight and yet be of some account in the world. I have also been reading Car-lyle; and the more I read him the more hearty grows my contempt for his profound untruthfulness and for his shrieking deification of shams. What a contrast he offers to that real and great historian, your uncle! If only Car-lyle were alive how I would like to review his Frederick the Great with the same freedom of epithet which he practised! and with all the sincerity and truthfulness to which he paid such lip worship, and in the practice of which he so wholly failed. Some of his writing is really fine; his battles for instance; but a far more truthful idea of the real Frederick can be gained from Macaulay's concise and brilliant essay, than from Carlyle's five long, brilliant and utterly disingenuous volumes. What I can't stand is his hypocrisy; his everlasting praise of veracity, accompanying the constant practise of every species of mendacity in order to give a false color to history and a false twist to ethics. He actually reprobates, with sanctimonious piety, the French for doing wrong much less than that which he imputes to Frederick for righteousness. When he speaks of his hero—indeed of any of his heroes—he always uses morality as a synonym for ruthless efficiency, and sincerity as a synonym for shameless lack of scruple; but in dealing with people who he does not like, the words at once revert to their ordinary uses, and he himself appears as the sternest rebuker of evil and treachery; whereas your uncle was a great teacher of uprightness and sound principle joined with that common sense the lack of which makes morality a mere balloon on the winds of chance.
The porters are just bringing in to camp the skin and tusks of a bull elephant I killed three days ago, and Kermit got another yesterday. We have killed 17 lions between us.
Sir George, to whom I am indebted beyond measure in the preparation of this correspondence for publication, not only for contributions of inestimable value, but for suggestions scarcely less valuable, prompted by his affection and admiration for Roosevelt, sends to me also this memorable tribute to Roosevelt by King George of England, uttered at an extemporized luncheon at Lord Rosebery's:
"On the 26th of April, 1910, I was in a small company with a gentleman who ten days afterwards became the first Personage in the country, and who himself was a famous master of the gun. Some question arose about Mr. Roosevelt as a rifle-shot; and the principal guest at table said, very quietly, 'I know on good authority that he always shoots straight when there is danger.' I well remember the pleasure with which I heard these generous and manly words."
On October 14,1912, Roosevelt, while on a speaking tour in the West as the Progressive candidate for the Presidency, was shot and slightly wounded by a half-crazed fanatic in Milwaukee. Four days later, when it was known that the injury was not dangerous, Trevelyan wrote:
wallington,
 October 18, 1912.

I have been unable to forbear sending you a few lines; although perhaps I ought to have waited. This matter has given me the full measure of the personal affection which I bear towards you. It had been already proved to me, in part, by the deep, constant, and overpowering interest, and earnest hopes, with which for the last six months I have followed all that I could learn of your public action. But this dreadful event, and your bearing after it, have made me as proud of your friendship as I am sadly interested in your health and comfort. I say no more;, because quiet words, if they are true, are best under the greatest, as under the daily and slightest, conditions of life. My privilege in knowing Mrs. Roosevelt, and your daughter and son, intensify, if possible, my feeling; and in this, as in all else, my wife is one with me.
On the Saturday before the news came I was passing through London, and lunched at Brooks's with Edward Grey. I was greatly pleased, but not surprised, to find that his personal feeling about you is the same as mine.
In replying to this letter Roosevelt gave expression to views about the assassination of public men which his intimate friends had often heard him utter. It was a frequent saying of his: '' There are worse deaths than for a man to be killed in the service of his country":
oyster bay, October 29, 1912.
Your letter touched and pleased me very much. I shall always keep it. I have not yet reached the point where it is wise for me to write with my own hand, so I shall only send you these few typewritten lines of greeting.
It is just as you say; prominence in public life inevitably means that creatures of morbid and semi-criminal type are incited thereby to murderous assault. But, my dear Sir George, I must say I have never understood public men who get nervous about assassination. For the last eleven years I have of course thoroughly understood that I might at any time be shot, and probably would be shot some time. I think I have come off uncommonly well. But what I cannot understand is any serious minded public man not being so absorbed in the great and vital questions with which he has to deal as to exclude thoughts of assassination. I do not think this is a question of courage at all. I think it is a question of the major interest driving out the minor interest. It is exactly as it is in the army. I can readily understand any enlisted man having qualms about his own safety, but the minute that a man gets command of others and has responsibilities for more than his own personal safety, especially when he becomes a Colonel or a General, I don't see how, in the middle of his wearing anxieties, he has a chance to wonder whether he personally will be shot. As I say, it is not a question of courage: it is a question of perspective, of proper proportion. If tomorrow I were to go fox-hunting I would probably feel a little more need of hardening my heart when I approached an uncommonly stiff jump than I would have felt thirty years ago; just because there would be no responsibility in the matter, no duties to be first considered, nothing whatever to appeal to me except the chance of a smash-up as balanced against the fun of the hunting and the galloping. But if I had a division of cavalry and were in battle with it, so far as I thought selfishly at all, it would be as to whether I were handling the cavalry creditably. It would not be as to whether I was in danger of being shot. So that I never have felt that public men who were shot whether they were killed or not, were entitled to any especial sympathy; and I do most emphatically feel that when in danger it is their business to act in the manner which we accept as commonplace when the actor is an enlisted man of the Army or Navy, or a policeman, or a fireman, or a railroad man, or a miner, or a deep-sea fisherman.
I am really pleased at what you tell me about Edward Grey. I have felt toward him almost as I feel toward you— and that is as strongly as I feel toward any man not in my immediate family.
In acknowledging the receipt of a portrait of Macaulay, Roosevelt wrote on March 19, 1913:
"Your letter and the really delightful picture of Macau-lay have both come. I shall put your letter in an envelope pasted to the back of it. You say well that it brings out his homely, shrewd, and above all his kindly look; but it brings out something more; it brings out the great power of the man. As you know, I am rather a fanatic about Macaulay. Of course in a man with such an active life, and a man who wrote so much, there will be occasional expressions or convictions with which I do not agree; but in most cases I think these were matters as to which it was impossible that he and I should have the same understanding. In all the essentials he seems to me more and more as I grow older a very great political philosopher and statesman, no less than one of the two or three very greatest historians. Of course I am undoubtedly partly influenced by the fact that he typifies common sense mixed with high idealism, but also the sane and tempered radicalism which seem to me to make for true progress. I am always having to fight the silly reactionaries and the inert, fatuous creatures who will not think seriously; and on the other hand to try to exercise some control over the lunatic fringe among the reformers."
A glimpse of Roosevelt's growing popularity among his countrymen as a molder and leader of opinion on questions arising from the European war is afforded in the following citations from a notable letter from Trevelyan 
wallington,
 September 1, 1914.

All through our long correspondence, on the existence and character of which I set as high a value as on any possession of my life, I have never ventured to put forward anything in the shape of counsel or suggestion. And this for three reasons. I never find occasion to take exception to your views about public expediency and public morality; I have not detailed knowledge which would justify me in giving an opinion; and (to speak quite plainly) I was as unwilling to obtrude my advice on the chief ruler of the American Republic as upon the Czar of Russia, if he had thought fit to write me a private letter.
But I have something special to tell you. In the course of the last nine or ten months I have been brought into singularly intimate relations with a new class of American friends belonging to the Democratic party; and I have entertained here, or have received long and spontaneous letters from, old friends and acquaintances of the Republican party who did not support you at the last election. Three distinguished Democrats,--two of them public men, and the other of exceptional literary and educational note,—held to me exactly the same language. They all talked with me of your immense administrative power and success, as evinced in such questions as the Panama Canal, the Russian and Japanese war, the Labor troubles, and other like matters; and they all spoke of, and seemed to sympathize with, the wide-spread affection which your countrymen feel for you. The Republicans, men of the highest eminence, held the same language on both heads; and in their case the personal feeling for you was based upon a far more intimate knowledge. They seemed in this respect to share the sentiment of their party. I hope you will take it from me that all those of whom I write are practical and able men, of high and deserved reputation.
The deduction I draw from these letters and conversations is a conviction that it is of untold importance that you should have a leading part at this conjuncture. What course you would take in any given matter I cannot foresee; but I am sure that it would be a righteous and wise one. The accounts with which you have honored me about your diplomatic and international action in the past inspire me with an assurance on that point. The need of you is not for the present only, inasmuch as a vast number of intricate problems will arise during the war, and after the war, on the bold and just solution of which the welfare of countless millions must depend. Multitudes of people are at this moment bound to serve their respective countries in the field; but perhaps you are, of all other living men, the one who is most bound to serve the world, let alone his own people, by his guidance. The most vital interests at stake are, and for years to come will be, the existence and independence of the most industrious and virtuous of the smaller communities of the civilized world,—Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and (and may I not say?) Italy, and the poor French people themselves. Your mode of thought on international policy, and your deep and wide interest in the history of the past, would be of immeasurable service now and hereafter.
I may be biased in this matter by my own regard for you, and my earnest desire to see you at the center of the world's affairs; but, after all, that is on my part no ignoble motive.
In a published interview in May, 1915, Roosevelt said of the proposal to forbid the shipment of munitions of war to the Allies: "The manufacture and shipment of arms and ammunition to any belligerents is moral or immoral according to the use to which the arms are to be put. If they are to be used to prevent the redress of hideous wrongs inflicted on Belgium, then it is immoral to ship them. If they are to be used for the redress of those wrongs and the restoration of Belgium to her deeply-wronged and unoffending people, then it is eminently moral to send them." Commenting on this utterance, Trevelyan wrote:
welcomes, stratford on-avon,
May 13, 1915.
This morning I read the sentence in which you set forth the moral side of the Munitions of War question—whether they were to be employed for the rescue of Belgium, or for her continued enslavement. The reading of it kindled into a flame the smoldering consciousness which always underlies my feelings—the consciousness that there is a man in the world who is never wanting in chivalry, humanity, and the dictates of high national duty. You know that you are my hero, and always will be; and there is no need to enlarge on that topic. When Senator Lodge was with me at Wallington in the summer we had some comfortable talk about the sentiments towards you which we possess in common. I would pray "God bless you" in your great objects; but that word is of ill omen to me. We had a noble battalion of regular infantry quartered at Stratford on Avon, to be "acclimatized" from India. In the course of six or seven weeks I became entirely at home with them, officers and men alike; and then they all marched off to the war past our front gate, along the Warwick road, with their baggage and Maxim guns, bidding me good-by with jolly cries and assurances all down the long column. I bade the Colonel— a grand soldier—"God bless you" at the head of his regiment. Then the news came. At the landing in the Dardanelles the Colonel, the senior Major, and the Brigadier General were killed at once; and almost every marked young fellow in that mess has gone to join them. I now know what the feelings of a stay at home citizen of seventy-six years of age must have been when your young men went to battle in 1861-1865.
The correspondence had now entered the period of the European war and the letters took on a new interest. Replying to Trevelyan's letter of May 13, Roosevelt wrote on May 29, 1915:
"Your letter was very welcome. I do not in the least deserve what you say of me; but I am glad that you should think as you do, all the more so because I am out of sympathy with the great majority of my countrymen, and especially with those who claim the foremost place in light and leading. I am not in the least a hero, my dear fellow. I am a perfectly commonplace man and I know it; I am just a decent American citizen who tries to stand for what is decent in his own country and in other countries and who owes very much to you and to certain men like you who are not fellow-countrymen of his.
"That's a dreadful tragedy of which you speak in connection with that noble battalion of regular infantry and the fate they encountered at the Dardanelles.
"Booth was at my house just at the time of the outbreak of the war last year. To think of the horror that has befallen his partner!
"Your son lunched here the Sunday before he sailed. As you know, he is one of the young men whom I especially admire.''
In 1918 Roosevelt had four sons and a son-in-law in the war, and Trevelyan's youngest son, George Macaulay Trevelyan, had been in it since 1915. This common interest and anxiety naturally drew them more closely than ever together and the letters reveal an added tone of tender affection. When in the spring of 1918 the news came of the wounding of two of the Roosevelt boys, Trevelyan sent to Roosevelt a letter of sympathy, to which the latter replied on April 9:
"Yes; you know exactly how I feel about Archie's wounds. In this great and terrible war we are indeed proud that events here so shaped themselves that our four sons are at the front, and Ethel's husband also; we would not for anything have them anywhere else; but I fear we would welcome their return home, each with an arm or leg off, so that they could feel that they had played their parts manfully, and yet we could have them back! Archie's arm was badly fractured, and a shell splinter went into his knee; he continued in command for some time, until the loss of blood overcame him; it was fourteen hours before he reached a hospital; a French general gave him the croix de guerre while he was on the operating table. The rest in the hospital will do him good. Ted was knocked down by a shell, but was merely bruised. He and Quentin are now in the battle to beat back this huge German drive.
"I have heard again and again of George's high and gallant valor; indeed you must feel equal pride and anxiety over him."
Writing to me on June 6, 1919, and referring to the above letter, Sir George gives this graphic picture of a most interesting incident of the war:
'' This letter was in my mind on last Friday, the 30th of May. We were traveling to this place from Stratford on Avon, and we spent an hour or two in Birmingham, and went to the Cathedral, where the Lord Mayor and Corporation had come to do honor to Commemoration day. Some hundred and fifty young Americans, without side-arms, marched past us in single file up the center of the nave, the last twenty or thirty of them carrying immense armfuls and handfuls of most beautiful flowers. They took their seats in long rows beneath the mural tablet bearing the fine inscription to the famous Loyalist exile, 'Peter Oliver, formerly His Majesty's Chief Justice of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England.' There they sat, unconscious of the historical contrast; and, as I watched their calm grave young faces, lighted by the glorious and inimitable windows of Burne-Jones, I thought how Theodore Roosevelt would have loved to see them, and they him.''