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CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY: 

AND HIS OWN LEADERSHIP: 

that Roosevelt believed the career of the Progressive party had come to an end and that his political leadership was no longer desired by the country, his letters after election in 1912 and during 1913 leave no doubt. Writing to the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Grey, afterwards Viscount Grey, and British Ambassador to the United States in 1919, at London, on November 15, 1913, he said:
"As for the political fight here (1912), I did not believe we would win, and I can say quite honestly that I have little or no personal regret in the outcome. But I do feel sorry from the broader standpoint. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time, and if a country lets the time for wise action pass, it may bitterly repent when a generation later it strives under disheartening difficulties to do what could have been done so easily if attempted at the right moment. We Progressives were fighting for elementary social and industrial justice, and we had with us the great majority of the practical idealists of the country. But we had against us both the old political organizations and ninety-nine per cent at the very least of the corporate wealth of the country, and therefore the great majority of the newspapers. Moreover we were not able to reach the hearts of the materialists, or to stir the imagination of the well-meaning somewhat sodden men who lack vision and prefer to travel in a groove. We were fought by the Socialists as bitterly as by the representatives of the two old parties, and this for the very reason that we stand equally against government by a plutocracy and government by a mob.
   
"There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the 'money touch,' but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers."
To Sir Henry Lucy, London, he wrote on December 18, 1912:
'' As for my own political future, I think the general English estimate is right. I hated to get into this fight at all, but I did-not see how to avoid it; and having gone in, there was nothing to do but to put it through. It was very bitter for me to see the Republican Party, when I had put it back on the Abraham Lincoln basis, in three years turn over to a combination of big financiers and unscrupulous political bosses. "What the future of the Progressive Party will be, nobody can say, but I am very confident that our principles in some shape or other will triumph. At present, however, I do not see how the party can triumph under me; but I have to continue to take a certain interest in it until a new man of sufficient power comes along."
A letter that he wrote to George D. Crocker, of Boston, on November 19, 1912, is interesting as showing a disposition to abandon the issue which he himself had misnamed the recall of judges:
"... Now as to the name which has been given by me to the doctrine. It was given by me in a number of arguments in which I was trying to show that what was needed was not to recall judges who gave wrong constitutional decisions, but to recall the decisions. I have myself regretted the continuous use of the term, but it is difficult to get a short term to explain just what we want to do.
There is another fundamental difficulty for which I am largely responsible. A name to me means very little and I perpetually have to remind myself that such is not the fact with most people. For instance, I found many good people very much concerned over the separation of Panama from Colombia as long as it was called a secession, but not minding it at all as long as it was called a revolution! It took me a long time to realize that they identified secession with the action of the Southern Confederacy, and revolution with our action in 1776! So it is in this matter. I do not in the least care whether the form is that the voters be called upon to decide whether the Supreme Court is right or wrong in its interpretation of the Constitution, or whether they are called on to decide whether they wish some specific act to become a law, notwithstanding the Constitution.
"If you will turn to the llth amendment of the National Constitution, you will find that there, in the administration of the older Adams, and with the sanction of Washington, and of all our statesmen, the people by popular vote in constitutional manner decided that the Constitution should be construed in the reverse way from that in which the Supreme Court had construed it in a given case. In this instance the people acted as a tribunal which decided the interpretation of the Constitution. But I think that the easiest way to put the case and avoid misconception is as you suggest, that is to say, that we propose a reasonably quick and definite method of changing the Constitution ad hoc on a specific case, and thus avoid the very real dangers of changing the general language of the Constitution."
As a matter of fact Roosevelt seems to have taken only slight interest in the recall question after 1914. It is quite possible that a decided change in the attitude of the courts toward cases involving relations between employers and employees had much to do with his abandonment of the subject, for three New York decisions which he had criticized most severely were reversed by the courts of last resort. These reversals could reasonably be traced to an influence upon the courts of a public opinion which his agitation of the subject had produced, leading to a construction of the law more in accordance with new social conditions. That the courts are subject to influences of this sort, and quite justly so, it would be idle to deny.
That Justice Moody of the Supreme Court, who while Attorney General had approved of Roosevelt's utterances, took this view of the matter, appears in a letter that he wrote to Charles Gr. Washburn, on May 11,1916, from which I quote these passages:
"There are some parts of Roosevelt's work as President which I think no one knew better than I did, and there are some results of it which ought to receive thorough study and be brought clearly to light. I have here in mind the effect of his acts and preachings upon economic thought and the development of the constitutional theory of our government. If one contrasts the state of opinion as to the proper relation between capital and labor and the proper attitude of government toward both as that opinion existed say, just before the War with Spain and as it exists to-day, one cannot fail to see that there has been an extraordinary change. In this change I believe he was the one great leader in this country; not that he was preaching things altogether novel or that he was originating a new system of social philosophy; but that at the right time he happened to be in the right place to convert his thoughts into acts and to teach them to a people anxious for constructive leadership, from what he once called the greatest pulpit in the world, the Presidency. . . . Perhaps he would scout the idea that he had been a guide in constitutional interpretation. I remember the state of legal thought and the attitude of the Supreme Court in the nineties toward what we call the new nationalism. I believe no one appreciates more clearly than I the great change that has come to both since then. It is but a revival of the doctrines of Marshall, which at one time seemed to have lost potency. By the legislation which Theodore Roosevelt promoted against great odds, there have been drawn from the Supreme Court decisions which have declared the complete nationalism which is necessary to our future national life." 
Writing on January 28, 1913, to Governor Hiram W. Johnson of California, who had been the Progressive nominee for Vice President, Roosevelt gave this estimate of the future prospects of the Progressive party as affected by the course which Wilson as President might follow:
"Our chance depends upon there being a break in the Democratic party. If they had nominated Judson Harmon last year, I think we should have won anyway; but Wilson was from their standpoint the best man that they could have nominated. I do not regard him as a man of great intensity of principle or conviction, or of much reality of sympathy with our cause. He is an adroit man, a good speaker and writer, with a certain amount of ability of just the kind requisite to his party under present conditions. He showed his adroitness during the campaign, and he may well be able to show similar adroitness during the next four years in the Presidency, and with the same result. In the campaign he talked ardent but diffuse progressiveness. He championed concretely a number of minor things for which we stand, and he trusted to the fact that the Bourbon Democrats, especially the Bourbon Democrats of the South, but also those of the North, would feel that they had to stand by him because their only hope is in the Democratic Party. He may do the same thing successfully as President."
Another estimate of President Wilson, together with Roosevelt's views on a single Presidential term amendment to the Constitution, appears in a letter to me at Panama on February 10, 1913:
"Wilson has a very difficult party situation, but a difficulty is always also an opportunity. If he is big enough to master his party he may make a great record and rivet the attention of the country upon him. At the moment they are trying to pass a constitutional amendment aimed primarily at me, but also at him. In his case they offer him the sop of six years certain instead of a possible eight years, and he may be willing to accept six. For my own sake I very earnestly hope they will pass the amendment, but from the standpoint of the country it is not an amendment they ought to pass. Think what a calamity it would have been if Lincoln had been ineligible for reelection! That one fact might have meant splitting the country absolutely into two."
His views on the Constitution as a "straight-jacket" were set forth in the following letter to a somewhat muddle-headed critic on April 2, 1913:
'' In your letter you say that the newspapers report me as saying that 'the time has gone by when the Constitution should be looked upon as a straight-jacket made by dead men to prevent live men from growing.' Then you add that it seems to you that I must have been incorrectly quoted, for you ' don't think that' I ' regard the Constitution of the United States as a straight-jacket.'
'' Really I don't understand you. I was correctly quoted; and that quotation shows that I do not regard the Constitution of the United States as a straight-jacket. Not only was I correctly quoted, but my statement is absolutely correct, and any one who disagrees with it does regard the Constitution as a straight-jacket; and moreover the man who disagrees with that statement is the man who, in your language, is 'teaching disrespect for our institutions.' You say you are proud of your country, and that you are sure that I am too. You are quite right about the latter fact. I am so proud of it that I positively decline to permit any people to go unrebuked who try to make us ashamed of our country; and this is precisely what those who treat the Constitution as a straight-jacket are engaged in doing."
A hunting trip with his sons which he took in August, 1913, is thus alluded to in a letter September 2, 1913, to Arthur Lee, M.P., afterwards Sir Arthur Lee, of London, who was his valued friend for many years:
"My trip with the boys in Arizona was a great success, although it is rather absurd for me now to be going on such trips, for a stout, rheumatic, elderly gentleman is not particularly in place sleeping curled up in a blanket on the ground, and eating the flesh of a cougar because there is nothing else available. Still we did have a wonderful trip, and this coming winter I shall make my last trip of the kind, coming north through the Brazilian forest. I leave for South America on October 4th to make half a dozen speeches before various universities in Brazil, the Argentine, and Chile. As I speak in English, and nobody will understand it, the trip seems really pointless, but our South American friends seem anxious that I should go."
In October, 1913, Roosevelt went to South America, where he delivered the addresses before universities mentioned in the preceding letter. He came north through Brazil at the head of an exploring party and put on the map a new river which the Brazilian Government subsequently named in his honor "Rio Teodoro." His experiences on this trip were published by him in 1914 under the title of '' Through the Brazilian Wilderness." (Charles Scribner's Sons)
He returned to the United States on May 19, 1914, and soon afterwards went to Madrid to be present at the wedding of his son Kermit, visiting England on the way. When he returned again to the United States on June 25th, he was confronted with an urgent request from his followers to run for Governor of New York as the Progressive candidate, but this he peremptorily declined to do. He took an active part, however, in the discussions about candidates for the governorship and advocated the nomination of a Progressive candidate. His labors were in vain, however, for no candidate of the party was put in the field. All over the country, in fact, the Progressive party showed few signs of vigorous life. Several letters that he wrote after the election in November show the conclusions he drew from the results and his ideas about the political future:
November 7, 1914. To Charles J. Bonaparte, Baltimore, Md.:
"The Progressive Party has come a cropper. Many causes have brought about the result. Our platform of 1912 was rather too advanced for the average man. Our typical leadership was also a little advanced along the lines of morality and loftiness of aim for the average man to follow. Moreover, we inevitably attracted great multitudes of cranks, who would like us to go into a kind of modified I. W. "W. movement, to the emotionalists in this state who represented fundamentally the same type as the Englishmen who in multitudes supported the Tichborne claimant a generation ago. Finally, we have to deal with certain political habits that have become very deep-rooted in our people. The average man is a Democrat or a Republican and he is this as a matter of faith, not as a matter of morals. He no more requires a reason for so being than an adherent of the blue or green factions of the Byzantine Circus required a reason. He has grown to accept as co-relative to this attitude entire willingness to punish his party by voting for the opposite party. Having done this, he returns to his own party.
"After 1896 it did seem as if there would have to be a realignment of the parties; as a matter of fact the gold-Democrats speedily returned to the Democratic party and the silver-Republicans to the Republican party, although of course there were exceptions on each side. Then, there is the perfectly proper feeling that there is only room for two parties, the party in power and the opposition. The immediately effective vote is always for one of these two parties. We were in the position of the Free Soil party, not of the early Republican party. Finally, in this election the fundamental question that interested the average man was the purely economic question of how he could best shape conditions so that he could earn his own living. The workingman was not interested in social or industrial justice."
November 7, 1914.
i
To W. A. White, Emporia, Kansas: "I am in very grave doubt as to what now should be done. Of course, as regards myself, as I have said before, the answer is simple. I shall fight in the ranks as long as I live for the cause and the platform for which we fought in 1912. And at present any attempt at action on my part which could be construed, and which certainly would be construed, into the belief that I was still aspiring to some leadership in the movement would, I am convinced, do real harm. It has been wisely said that while martyrdom is often right for the individual, what society needs is victory. It was eminently proper that Leonidas should die at Thermopylae, but the usefulness of Thermopylae depended upon its being followed by the victory of Themistocles at Salamis. It was evidently proper that Bowie and Travis and Crockett should die at the Alamo, but the usefulness of the Alamo depended upon its being followed by Houston's victory at San Jacinto.
"When it is evident that a leader's day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground clear for the development of a successor. It seems to me that such is the case now as regards myself. 'Heartily know that the half gods go when the gods arise.' There are certain things I can continue to say to small audiences in my writings, and where I think that these will be helpful and not hurtful, I shall continue to say them; but to make speeches on political subjects and to try to take the lead in questions of party politics would be, for the time being, at least, mischievous and not useful."
November 8, 1914.
To Hiram W. Johnson, Sacramento, California: "East of Indiana there is no State in which the Progressive party remains in condition even to affect the balance of power between the two old parties. It would be foolish for me or my friends to blink the fact that as things are now my advocacy of a man or a policy is in all probability a detriment and not an aid. The people as a whole are heartily tired of me and of my views; and while from time to time in my writings, where I think it can do some good, at least for the future, I shall state these views, it would be a great mistake for me to be making speeches on political subjects or taking any part in politics at the moment."
November 11, 1914.
To Kermit Roosevelt: "I cannot expect most people to believe that I have not for years been happier than since election. I have worked very hard and practically without intermission for a long time. Now what I most desire is to be free from engagements and stay out here with Mother and without too much to do, and since election I have been quite busy but it is not exhausting labor and will diminish rather than increase. We have had ten lovely days here. I have ridden once or twice. Two or three times I have taken Mother for a row and we have walked together and sat by the wood fire in the late afternoon and evening. I was going to say that I have been as happy as a king, but as a matter of fact I have been infinitely happier than any of the kings I know, poor devils! Just at the moment it seems to me that King Albert of Belgium, in spite of the awful misfortunes of himself and his country, is of all of them the one who is leading the life I most admire."
Writing again to Kermit on Jan. 27, 1915, he gave this interesting review of his career:
"My immediate and acute trouble is over. The Progressive party cannot in all human probability make another fight as a national party; and, if it does, there will be no expectation that I will have to lead. I am through my hard and disagreeable work. I do not mean that there won't come unpleasant and disagreeable things in connection with the party; but there won't be any such heart-breaking and grinding work as I had last summer. The trouble was that most of my lieutenants, who were good, fine fellows, as disinterested and upright as possible, could not realize that the rank and file had left them; and they felt that I was going back on them if I refused to head the old-style type of fight. I had to make it; and that was all there was to it.
"All my life in politics, I have striven to do just what you and Ted are striving to do in business and in your life generally, that is, to make the necessary working compromise between the ideal and the practical. If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful. If, on the other hand, he does not work practically, with the knowledge that he is in the world of actual men and must get results, he becomes a worthless head-in-the-air creature, a nuisance to himself and to everybody else.
"My chief knowledge of the working out of this theory is in politics. From the time I was elected to the Legislature in 1881 until 1911, when it became evident that I would have to part company with the Republican organization, I steadily strove to be loyal to my ideals and yet to strive to realize them in practical fashion. I always tried to administer each office well. I never did one thing personally that was not as straight as a string; and, where I had to work with other men, I tried my best to get the common results of as high a quality as possible, without insisting upon so much that it would mean a break-up with my associates. On a big scale I handle things just as I tried to handle them on a smaller scale as regards Father Zahm and Sigg and Fiala and our Brazilian friends on our trip.
"I was on the whole successful. When, after the Spanish War, I got to a position of such importance that a good deal of consideration had to be paid me, I was very successful ; and, as President, I was able to do a great deal that I wished to do. This was done merely because I utilized the reformers without letting them grow perfectly wild-eyed; and I yet kept in some kind of relations with the machine men, so as to be on a living basis with them, although I had to thwart them at every turn. But, when I got back from Africa, I found that everything had split. Taft had thrown in his lot with the sordid machine crowd, as had most of my former efficient political supporters. On the other
hand, the reformers of the type of BLANK 	had begun to
run wild and to associate with a set of so-called reformers, who came dangerously near the mark of lunacy. I spent eighteen months in the vain effort to get them together on some kind of a basis that would permit of efficient joint action. It proved impossible; and, when the break had to come, I had to stand by the reformers as against the sordid apostles of self-interest. (But the reformers showed enough that was mean and base in addition to enough that was foolish themselves! What happened afterwards you know.)
"It may be that after I left the Presidency I ought not to have tried to take any part in politics at all. But all the men of the highest type made the strongest kind of appeal to me not to desert them. There was no use of my talking about virtue in the abstract, unless I applied it to concrete cases; and I either had to do just as I did or else completely abandon all effort to say anything on any public question whatsoever. Perhaps I ought to have done this; but, if I had done so, it is quite possible that I should now be feeling that I had a little shirked my duty.
"Well, as things are now, I am entirely out of touch with the American people. I abhor Wilson and Bryan; their attitude in foreign affairs is the worst we have seen since the days of Buchanan; and there is always the chance that they will bring the country to real disaster and disgrace.
"There is just one element of relief to me in the smash that came to the Progressive party. We did not have many practical men with us. Under such circumstances the reformers tended to go into sheer lunacy. I now can preach the doctrines of labor and capital just as I did when I was President, without being hampered by the well-meant extravagances of so many among my Progressive friends."
A conspicuous example of his habitual strong common sense on questions of mistaken religious zeal is furnished in a letter to Michael Schaap, on Feb. 22, 1915:
"I see you appeared against the bill making compulsory the reading of the Bible in the Public Schools. If I were in the Legislature or Governor, I should vote against or veto that bill, because I believe in absolutely non-sectarian public schools. It is not our business to have the Protestant Bible or the Catholic Vulgate or the Talmud read in those schools. There is no objection whatever, where the local sentiment favors it, for the teacher to read a few verses of the ethical or moral parts of the Bible, so long as this causes no offense to any one. But it is entirely wrong for the law to make this reading compulsory; and the Protestant fanatics who attempt to force this through are playing into the hands of the Catholic fanatics who want to break down the Public School system and introduce a system of sectarian schools. I shall ask you to treat this letter as private, because I have so many fights on my hands that there is no use my going into another; and just at present our people do not wish me to embark on a general course of lectures to them as to what they should do in the public schools."
A letter that he wrote a few years later, Aug. 28, 1917, to Major Joel E. Spingarn, U. S. E., well-known American scholar and author, gives an entertaining account of his taste in reading:
"I wish to thank you for that volume of capital essays. The two last were especially enjoyed by me because they were more within my very moderate powers of critical appreciation. I know nothing of the drama except that I am ashamed to say I don't care to go to the theater; and nevertheless I do very greatly care to read certain plays in my library. But your two final chapters dealt with matter I can fairly well understand, and I agree with every word. Personally, I don't care a rap whether we call the Flight of a Tartar Tribe, or certain passages in the Confessions of an Opium Eater, prose or vers libres. I think that it might help the eye to have parts of them arranged as the Spoon River Anthology is arranged, in irregular lines. But in any event I enjoy what seems to me to be the rhythm, and the beauty and majesty of the diction. I enjoy Wordsworth's sonnets and I enjoy Shakespeare's sonnets; and I don't care in the least if some one proves to me that Shakespeare did not write sonnets but something else. On the other hand, I loathe Wordsworth's Excursion, and not Matthew Arnold himself would persuade me to read it. I delight in the saga of King Olaf and Othere and Belisarius, and Simon Danz, and the Mystery of the Sea; and I don't care for Evangeline or any of Longfellow's plays; and I cannot give any reasoned-out explanations in either case!"
Roosevelt's cordial and appreciative relations with his publishers are shown in these letters to the chief of them:
October 5, 1901. My dear Mr. Scribner:
I want to thank you for the way you have managed the articles. I have appreciated it, and any hunting trips I do in the future will be written for you. You may be amused to know that in two different publications during the next year articles that I wrote, in one case this year, in one case five years ago, will appear, and I have instructed the people that they must behave exactly as you have behaved. Of course, these articles do not appear in magazines, but in
books.	-m •,! p I,
Faithfully yours,
theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Charles Scribner.
January 24, 1915.
Seriously, I want to say that I have never appreciated anything more than your willingness to go into the publication of the African Game Animals. It was characteristic of you and your firm and was a really disinterested bit of scientific service. I knew I would never get any payment for the labor I had put into the thing, but I was not at all sure that you would be willing to invest capital in something that represented non-remunerative labor—-which is very desirable from the standpoint of the community as a whole but which does not amount to very much from the standpoint of the individual laboring. I am very glad to be connected with your firm; and proud.
Faithfully yours,
theodoee Roosevelt.
Charles Scribner, Esq.
A few passages may also, not inappropriately, be cited from those letters that he sent to his publishers revealing his own methods as an author. He was a model of promptness and efficiency. When he promised a manuscript for a certain date, the promise was kept absolutely, no matter what intervened. Before he left the African wilderness in 1909 he had written in his own hand in triplicate and forwarded to the publishers of Scribner's Magazine the entire book known as "African Game Trails," including the Preface. One of the men who were with him said that, no matter how arduous the day in the hunting-field, night after night he would see him seated on a camp-stool, with a feeble light on the table, often with his head and face covered with mosquito netting, and gauntlet gloves on his hands, to protect him from insects, writing the narrative of his adventures. Chapter by chapter this narrative was sent by runners from the heart of Africa. Two copies were despatched at different times. When he got to the headwaters of the Nile one of the chapters was sent from Nairobi and the duplicate was sent down the Nile to Cairo. The blue-canvas envelopes often arrived much battered and stained, but never did a single chapter miss.
The same method was pursued in 1914 in regard to the chapters in his "Brazilian Wilderness." How clearly he was able to map out far in advance the entire plan of a book is shown in two letters to Robert Bridges, the editor of the magazine, one from the African and the other from the Brazilian wilderness, from which the following passages are taken:
October 15, 1909.
B. E. A.
"I forward herewith chapters 9 and 10. Chapter nine is too long, but is of course one of the most important yet. Chapter 10 is more like say chapters 4 or 5. It is too long; but I don't know where to cut it off. Both chapters are all right for the book. I mean 'too long' as being over 10,000 words. If, as I suppose, you have combined chapters 2 and 3 (in the Magazine,—of course they will be kept separate in the book), and if, as I anticipate, I write three more chapters, and further if—what is improbable—you find all the chapters worth using in the Magazine, this will make just twelve articles. I doubt if chapter 11 will be very thrilling; it will be like 4 or 5 or 10 and I trust shorter. But chapter 12 ought to be good. It will deal with utterly new conditions; however, the country I there traverse is very unhealthy, and of course there is always the remote chance that I will be laid up; or that the conditions will prevent our getting our game. If all goes well, I suppose you will publish the book a year from this fall? I agree with you that the best title is 'African Wanderings of a Hunter Naturalist.' As for the pictures, it is always hard to get in both the hunter and the game. The elephant that charged me was within a few feet; I killed a charging bull rhino when it was a dozen yards off; either of these ought to make drawings; a very good one would be the big maned lion in the foreground charging the dismounted horseman in the distance. It could be called 'Coming in.'
 "I am immensely pleased that you continue to like what I write. In chapter 10 the paragraph at the top of page 8 is perhaps too 'wrought up,' for the Magazine; if so, strike it out; but keep it for the book, for I really wish to try to preserve the impression these tremendous tropic storms made on me.
"It may well be that you will wish to end the series in your June or July number. The white rhino, or Uganda and upper Nile chapter, which, if all goes right, will be of interest, I could send you from Gondokoro about Feb. 15th, so that you could use it in either number. If you closed the series, say in the July number, I suppose you would wish the book to appear the end of June; in such case I would send you the foreword, title pages, appendices, etc., from Khartoum in March. Perhaps you will write me fully on these matters to Khartoum! Of course I a little prefer the book to appear in the fall; but I should accept your judgment.
"Could you have some one look up for me the statement in one of the 'Anglo Saxon Chronicles,' that either William the Conqueror or William Rufus 'loved the great game as if he were their father.' In one of the copies it appears as 'deer'; but in another I think it appears as 'great game.' "
bonofacio, February 25, 1914.
"Here is chapter seven. I have already sent you some of the photos, from the Juruena. I enclose others; and lists of both sets. The constant humidity, and the generally less favorable surroundings, have made it more difficult than in Africa to do the mechanical part of writing and photographing and sending you the results. I hope that the chapters have reached you in decent form. I am as unable as ever to tell whether they are of interest; but the trip itself is certainly of interest. No men except these pioneers who now accompany us have been over the ground before. No civilized man has ever been down the Diivida, the descent of which we shall begin in a couple of days. Anything may then happen. If it proves to be a short river, running into the Gy-Parana, we shall return here, and in that case I shall send you another chapter. Otherwise this will be the last chapter until I appear in New York, and hand you in person whatever I have. If we return here, we intend to go down the Ananas, another unexplored river, probably, but not certainly, entering the Tapajos. From the geographical standpoint the work we are now about to attempt will be worth while. We are all in good health—but sickness will, doubtless be one of the incidents of our trip into the unknown. We have weeded out every one unfit for exploration. The insects are at times a torment; but the trip has been both pleasant and interesting, with no real hardship.
"I enclose preliminary rough drafts of the title page, dedication, and necessarily incomplete preface. I enclose an Appendix. There will probably be another. Will you in Chapter 6, where I speak of the dog and the mantis, insert after the sentence in which I said that the dog was a jovial near-puppy the following: 'He had been christened the jolly-cum-pup, from a character in one of Frank Stockton's stories, which I suppose are now remembered only by elderly people, and by them only if they are natives of the United States.'"