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IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT  
By Lawrence F. Abbot

CHAPTER FIVE

 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

    In his autobiography Colonel Roosevelt says: "By far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was President related to the Panama Canal."

With the qualification: "during the time I was President" this is doubtless true, although there are three things that he did—one while he was President, and two after his retirement from that office—which had a moral influence or reaction upon foreign affairs that entitled them to be ranked very close to the Panama achievement. It is probable that if Roosevelt could read this statement he would question it. At any rate, he did not consider as important enough to mention in his autobiography the actions which I have in mind. He performed them in the ordinary course of the day's work. Nevertheless, I have always thought they made a permanent—an almost incalculable—impression upon our foreign relations.

The first of these achievements was the remission
of the Chinese indemnity; the second was the speech he made at the Guildhall in London in 1910; and the third was his stimulating address to the French people at the Sorbonne in Paris in the same year.
THE CHINESE INDEMNITY.—As a result of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the United States received from China an indemnity of about twenty-five million dollars for the damage and dangers to American lives and property. The payments were being regularly made by China, she having accepted the indemnity as a just execution of international law.

In 1906, Dr. Arthur H. Smith—long an American missionary, resident in China—made a visit to this country. He knew and liked the Chinese, and few Europeans or Americans have become more familiar with their life, literature, customs, and manners. He is the author of two admirable books on modern China:" Chinese Characteristics" and "Village Life in China." As an old-time reader of the Outlook he came to our office to enlist our interest in a plan, regarding the Chinese indemnity, which he wished to bring to President Roosevelt's attention.

His plan, which he had carefully worked out in detail, was that one half of the Boxer indemnity, say about twelve million dollars, should be given back to China on the understanding that she use the money, or its income, for sending Chinese young men to American collegiate institutions, and for educating certain other young Chinese in American institutions in China.

His point of view was not that of the conventional missionary. It was really that of the statesman. He said that when he first went to China the American flag was seen on vessels in every harbour, but that now it was rarely visible; that America ought to do something to renew her intimate economic, industrial, and commercial relations and so cement the political friendship which had been fostered by Secretary Hay. He believed that with a body of young Chinese being graduated annually from American institutions, we should finally have a great company of influential men in China who understood American ways and sympathized with the American spirit; that no other way could China and the United States be brought together so effectively in their economic and political relationship.

The plan made a strong impression upon my father and myself, and my father wrote to the President asking whether he would see Dr. Smith. Mr. Roosevelt replied appointing a day for the meeting. It was early in March, 1906—I think the sixth. My father was unable to go to Washington, so, at Roosevelt's suggestion, I accompanied Dr. Smith and was present at the interview which took place in the Red Room. My recollection is that we first lunched with the President and afterward returned for a longer conference in the evening. At all events, Roosevelt showed his interest by giving Dr. Smith and myself a personal interview of much more than ordinary length, and the plan, in complete detail, was laid before the President by Dr. Smith. The result of that conference was that, the following year, the remission of the unpaid portion of the indemnity was authorized and the money that would have gone to the United States was devoted by China to educational purposes. (The complete record may be found in House Document No. 1275 of the second session of the Sixtieth Congress.)

Ten years after this visit of Dr. Smith to the White House I happened to be seated at a Princeton Faculty Club luncheon beside Dr. Robert McNutt McElroy, who had just been selected as the first American exchange professor to China, and he and I fell into conversation about Dr. Smith's part in the indemnity remission. Dr. McElroy was so much interested that he expressed a desire to relate the story in his lectures in China. I asked him not to do so until I had verified my recollection of the incident that had occurred ten years before. I accordingly wrote to Mr. Roosevelt at Oyster Bay recalling the White House interview which I have just described and Mr. Roosevelt replied under date of January 24,1916, as follows:
My memory agrees with yours about Dr. Arthur H. Smith. I had forgotten his name; but I know that it was through your father that I first became interested in using that indemnity for educational purposes. The idea was suggested to me as you describe it; and then I asked Root to take it up and put it in operation.
Of course the remission of the Boxer indemnity established Chinese friendship for the American people on the firmest kind of basis. But this was not the only effect of this action on foreign affairs. There is another aspect of the achievement which seems worth bearing in mind.

It is said by many publicists that governments cannot have altruistic qualities and motives. In two cases, at least, the history of the United States shows that governments can, in practice, be altruistic. We were empowered to take $25,-000,000 from China in accordance with the best standards of international action and we voluntarily gave up half that sum in order to promote a moral idea. We took Cuba, a rich possession, in the course of a war which, at the very least, was a war carried on in accordance with common international procedure. Europe, especially Germany, said it was cant to assert that we made war for the benefit of the Cubans, and that our chief motive was to gain the splendid prize of Cuba. But we gave Cuba back to the Cubans, only asking that they keep it in order.

If there are in history any other two similar instances of national altruism, I do not know of them. These two historical facts, it seems to me, should be kept before the coming generations in their studies of the structure of government, not in order that we may plume ourselves upon our virtue, but in order to show that the moral law may be made to work in international practice just as it works in the individual practice of the citizens of a community.

These two acts of national morals are in a very real sense the acts of President Roosevelt and a product of his philosophy of statesmanship. He did not merely preach about national morals but somehow or other he got national things done on a distinctly moral basis; and he was not a mollycoddle, either!

His satisfaction in practical altruism appears in the following exchange of notes which I find among my papers.   On February 10, 1917, 1 wrote Roosevelt as follows:
Everett P. Wheeler, who, as you know, is an old-line Democrat—and therefore, I suppose, naturally one of your critics— has just published a book called "Sixty Years of American Life." In looking it over, at the head of Chapter 12, which deals with New York City politics, I find the following quotation ascribed to you: "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world knows." Do you remember where and when you said it ? It is delightful to think of doing good as a high-class sport.
To this query Roosevelt replied:
I remember perfectly using that sentence, but I cannot tell you the exact date. It was when I was Police Commissioner and, I think, in connection with an address to some college boys.
THE GUILDHALL SPEECH.— Roosevelt took a sporting chance in making his Guildhall speech, which had a more far-reaching, if less direct, effect on foreign affairs than the remission of the Chinese indemnity.

Of all the public addresses that Roosevelt ^made during his tour through Egypt and Europe in the summer of 1910—a trip which I shall describe more fully in the next chapter—the Guildhall speech was, in my judgment, the most striking and notable. The occasion was the ceremony in the ancient and noble Guildhall, one of the most perfect Gothic interiors in England, which has historical associations of more than five centuries, when he was presented by the Corporation of the City of London (the oldest corporation in the world) with the freedom of the city. In this speech he praised the colonial administration of Great Britain in Africa and frankly criticized the course of the British Government then in power in its conduct of the protectorate of Egypt. In order to appreciate the furore that this speech aroused, his criticism must be read in its entirety:
Now as to Egypt. It would not be worth my while to speak to you at all, nor would it be worth your while to listen, unless on condition that I say what I deeply feel ought to be said. I speak as an outsider, but in one way this is an advantage, for I speak without national prejudice. I would not talk to you about your own internal affairs here at home, but you are so very busy at home that I am not sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least, abroad. At any rate, it can do you no harm to hear the view of one who has actually been on the ground, and has information at first hand; of one, moreover, who, it is true, is a sincere well-wisher of the British Empire, but who is not English by blood, and who is impelled to speak mainly because of his deep concern in the welfare of mankind and in the future of civilization. Remember also that I who address you am not only an American, but a Radical, a real—not a mock—democrat, and that what I have to say is spoken chiefly because I am a democrat, a man who feels that his first thought is bound to be the welfare of the masses of mankind, and his first duty to war against violence and injustice and wrong-doing, wherever found; and I advise you only in accordance with the principles on which I have myself acted as American President in dealing with the Philippines.

In Egypt you are not only the guardians of your own interests; you are also the guardians of the interests of civilization; and the present condition of affairs in Egypt is a grave menace to both your empire and the entire civilized world. You have given Egypt the best government it has had for at least two thousand years—probably a better government than it has ever had before; for never in history has the poor man in Egypt—the tiller of the soil, the ordinary labourer— been treated with as much justice and mercy, under a rule, as free from corruption and brutality, as during the last twenty-eight years. Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have erred; and it is for you to make good your error. It has been an error proceeding from the effort to do too much and not too little in the interests of the Egyptians themselves; but unfortunately it is necessary for all of us who have to do with uncivilized peoples, and especially with fanatical peoples, to remember that in such a situation as yours in Egypt weakness, timidity, and sentimentality may cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds, sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.

In Egypt you have been treating all religions with studied fairness and impartiality; and instead of gratefully acknowledging this, a noisy section of the native population takes advantage of what your good treatment has done to bring about an anti-foreign movement, a movement in which, as events have shown, murder on a large or a small scale is expected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha was the best and most competent Egyptian official, a steadfast upholder of English rule, and an earnest worker for the welfare of his countrymen; and he was murdered simply and solely because of these facts, and because he did his duty wisely, fearlessly, and uprightly. The attitude of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist party in connection with this murder has shown that they were neither desirous nor capable of guaranteeing even that primary justice, the failure to supply which makes self-government not merely an empty but a noxious farce. Such are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to help the Egyptians toward self-government is taken advantage of by them, not to make things better, not to help their country, but to try to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.

It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not; either it is or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name agree and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the responsibility which is yours. It is the thing, not the form, which is vital; if the present forms of government in Egypt, established by you in the hope that they would help the Egyptians upward, merely serve to provoke and permit disorder, then it is for you to alter the forms; for if you stay in Egypt it is your first duty to keep order, and, above all things, also to punish murder and to bring to justice all who directly or indirectly incite others to commit murder or condone the crime when it is committed. When a people treat assassination as the corner-stone of self-government, it forfeits all right to be treated as worthy of self-government. You are in Egypt for several purposes, and among them one of the greatest is the benefit of the Egyptian people. You saved them from ruin by coming in, and at the present moment, if they are not governed from outside, they will again sink into a welter of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I hope and believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation.
These frank words aroused more opposition in the United States than they did in England. His political antagonists at home attacked him severely. In effect they said: "This is just like the impetuous, impulsive Roosevelt. On an occasion when the British have arranged to do him honour he 'butts in' and presumes to tell them how to run their own government!"

Whatever else the speech may have been, it was not impetuous and impulsive. It was the premeditated result of careful, considerate, and painstaking preparation. The story is an interesting one and throws as much light as any incident in his career that I know of upon his methods of thought and action, and I shall therefore relate it in some detail.

Just before Roosevelt arrived at Khartum in March, 1910, Boutros Pasha, the Prime Minister— a Copt, that is an Egyptian Christian, and the best native officials that Egypt has ever produced—was openly and foully assassinated by an agent of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist party. That party consisted of extreme Radicals, mostly young, who professed to wish to free Egypt from British rule and to establish an independent republic. They were the "Sinn Feiners" of the Near East. Perhaps "Bolshevists" of the Near East would be a better term to apply to them, although the word "Bolshevik" had not yet been invented. They were both dangerous and foolish; dangerous, because they proposed to establish liberty on violence and assassination, and foolish, because they did not seem to realize that if the British were driven out of Egypt that unhappy country would immediately fall back into the hands of the Turk who did not care a fig about the vague and grandiloquent aspirations of the half-baked young Nationalists.
The assassination of Boutros Pasha caused almost a panic among the civil and military representatives of Great Britain in Egypt, a panic which was augmented by the fact that the Liberal Government in London appeared to be shillyshallying about the matter as the Gladstonian Government in the eighties shillyshallied over the Gordon Relief Expedition which resulted in the death of that heroic soldier and the plunging of the Sudan into twelve years of savagery. Lord Cromer, one of the greatest colonial administrators in British history, had only recently retired from the position of British diplomatic agent in Egypt and had been succeeded by Sir Eldon Gorst who proved to be wholly incapable of dealing with the crisis.

By a curious coincidence I arrived at Khartum on the very day, March fourteenth, when Roosevelt came into that remarkable tropical city from the upper reaches of the Nile. Khartum is a veritable British capital, a beautifully appointed modern city in the midst of the desert. That evening, or possibly the following evening, a dinner was given in Roosevelt's honour at the palace of the Governor-General, Sir Reginald Wingate. Sir Reginald was absent in Cairo, owing to a temporary illness, and his place, both as Governor-General and as host, was filled by Slatin Pasha, the famous author of " Fire and Sword in the Sudan," who knew as well as any man living the horrors of the period when Gordon was assassinated and Khartum fell.
The subject of general discussion at the dinner, for it was uppermost in everyone's mind, was the murder of Boutros Pasha. Roosevelt was asked what he would do. He said: "It is very simple. 
 I would try the murderer at drumhead court martial. As there is no question about the facts, for his own faction do not deny the assassination, he would be found guilty. I would sentence him to be taken out and shot; and then if the home government cabled me, in one of their moments of vacillation, to wait a little while, I would cable in reply: 'Can't wait; the assassin has been tried and shot.' The home government might recall me or impeach me if they wanted to, but that assassin would have received his just deserts."

I happened to be sitting next to Colonel Asser, a British officer who held a very high and important post under the Governor-General. He was a tall, blond, red-cheeked Englishman, a type of those splendid men who in the awful first weeks of the Great War made the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders—the immortal "Contemptibles"—the most heroic force that the world has known since the days of Thermopylae. When Colonel Roosevelt finished speaking Colonel Asser turned to me, and, bringing his fist down on the palm of his hand, said, with very deep feeling: "By heaven! I wish that man were my boss!" Similar sentiments were expressed by others at the table and Roosevelt was actually implored to state his views of the necessity of strong action in Egypt to the people at home; home, being, of course, London. All the way down the Nile civil and military officers urged him to support their cause when he reached London. At Cairo he was asked to make a public address before the University of Cairo. 

By this time Egypt was literally aflame with the threatening controversy excited by the murder of Boutros Pasha. A few of the more timid felt that the affair should be allowed to "blow over" if possible. Their feelings were like those of a man who has an ulcerated tooth and who is about equally reluctant either to let the tooth stay in or to go to the dentist and have it out. Some of these reluctant ones urged Roosevelt to omit all reference to the murder of Boutros Pasha in his speech at the University. He replied: "Gentlemen, I am perfectly willing not to speak at all, if you so prefer, but if I do speak I assure you I shall speak frankly and openly about this assassination which seems to me to strike at the very roots of law, order, and justice in Egypt."

He spoke; and in the course of his address he said'
All good men, all the men of every nation whose respect is worth having, have been inexpressibly shocked by the recent assassination of Boutros Pasha. It was an even greater calamity for Egypt than it was a wrong to the in dividual himself. The type of man which turns out an assassin is a type possessing all the qualities most alien to good citizenship—the type which produces poor soldiers in time of war and worse citizens in time of peace. Such a man stands on a pinnacle of evil infamy; and those who apologize for or condone his act; those who, by word or deed, directly or indirectly, encourage such an act in advance, or defend it afterward, occupy the same bad eminence.
The result was electrical. He was cheered to the echo by his audience. His fearlessness strengthened the hands of those officials who wanted to be backed up in maintaining law and order, and he was again urged by influential and important men to carry this message of upholding the moral law, by force if necessary, to the home government in London. Thanked on every hand for the help he had given to the force of strong and good government in Egypt and implored on every hand to present the needs of the British representatives in Egypt to the English people, he consented to do so. He wrote his Guildhall speech during his journey of six or eight weeks through Europe. He literally brooded over it. He consulted personal friends and British statesmen about it, and before it was delivered, men like Lord Cromer, Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Asquith, and, I think, Lord Kitchener, knew what he was going to say. He sought and accepted suggestions as to form and phraseology. This I know, because at Roosevelt's request I read the speech two weeks before it was delivered and ventured some minor suggestions of my own.
 
The stage setting of the Guildhall speech was a brilliant one. On the dais at one end of the hall sat the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress. The special guests of the occasion were conducted by ushers, in robes and carrying maces, down a long aisle, flanked with spectators on either side, and up the steps of the dais where they were presented. Their names were called out at the beginning of the aisle and the audience applauded little or much, as the ushers or guests moved along, according to the popularity of the newcomer. Thus John Burns and A. J. Balfour were greeted with enthusiastic hand-clapping and cheers, although they belonged of course to opposite parties. The Bishop of London; Lord Cromer, who deserved to be called the maker of modern Egypt; Sargent, the painter; and Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, were among those greeted in this way. In the front row on one side of the dais were seated the Aldermen of the City, in their red robes; and various officials, in wigs and gowns, lent to the scene an aspect curiously antique to the American eye.

My seat was on the dais, from which I could easily observe the great audience. At the outset of Mr. Roosevelt's address it was obvious that the frankness of his utterance, his characteristic attitude and gestures, and the pungent quality of his oratory startled his audience, accustomed to the more conventional methods of public speaking, but he soon captured and carried his hearers with him, as was indicated by the marks of approval printed in the verbatim report of the speech in the London Times. It is no exaggeration to say that the speech for a week or more was the talk of England—in clubs, in homes, and in the newspapers. There was some criticism, especially irx the papers supporting the Liberal party then in power. But the best and most influential public opinion, while recognizing the unconven-tionality of Roosevelt's course, heartily approved of both the matter and the manner of the speech.
The London Times said:
Mr. Roosevelt has reminded us in the most friendly way of what we are at least in danger of forgetting, and no impatience of outside criticism ought to be allowed to divert us from considering the substantial truth of his words.
The Daily Telegraph (after referring to Mr. Roosevelt as "a practical statesman who combines with all his serious force a famous sense of humour") expressed the opinion that:
His candour is a tonic which not only makes plain our immediate duty but helps us to do it. In Egypt as in India there is no doubt as to the alternative he has stated so effectively: we must govern or go; and we have no intention of going.
The Pall Mall Gazette's view was that:
Mr. Roosevelt delivered a great and memorable speech— a speech that will be read and pondered over throughout the world.
The London Spectator, calling the speech the chief event of the week, remarked:
Timid, fussy, and pedantic people have charged Mr. Roosevelt with all sorts of crimes because he had the courage to speak out, and had even accused him of unfriendliness to this country because of his criticism. Happily the British people as a whole are not so foolish. Instinctively they have recognized and thoroughly appreciated the good feeling of Mr. Roosevelt's speech. . . . His speech is one of the greatest compliments ever paid to a people by a statesman of another country. . . . He has told us something useful and practical and has not lost himself in abstraction and platitude. . . . We thank Mr. Roosevelt once again for giving us so useful a reminder of our duty.
These sentiments of approval were repeated in a great number of letters which Mr. Roosevelt received from men and women in all walks of life. As I was in charge of his affairs at the time this correspondence came under my eye. There were some abusive letters, chiefly anonymous, but the predominating tone of the correspondence is fairly illustrated by the following:
Allow me, an old colonist in his eighty-fourth year, to thank you most heartily for your manly address at the Guildhall and for your life work in the cause of humanity. If I ever come to the great republic I shall do myself the honour of seeking an audience of your excellency. I may do so on my 100th birthday! With best wishes and profound respect.
The envelope of this letter was addressed: "His Excellency Govern-or-Go Roosevelt." That the Daily Telegraph and "the man in the street" should independently seize upon this salient point of the address—the "govern-or-go "theory—is significant.
The effect of the Guildhall speech upon the Government was quite as marked as upon the people at large. The Asquith Government then in power was inclined to be anti-imperialistic, but in 1911, as a direct result of the public sentiment aroused by Roosevelt's Guildhall speech, the Government sent Lord Kitchener to Egypt as Consul-General, and with his well-known vigour of action he suppressed the bolshevist tendencies of the young Nationalist party and reestablished Great Britain's authority and prestige. If some such man as Kitchener had not accomplished this during the years 1911-14 it is highly probable that, taking advantage of Egypt's disorganization, the Turks and Germans might have captured the Suez Canal thus cutting off one of the main arteries of British military existence in the war. It may, therefore, be said that Roosevelt, by his Guildhall speech, made a great contribution to the final success of the Allies.
THE SORBONNE SPEECH—On his way to London, from Egypt, Mr. Roosevelt passed through Paris, where on April 23, 1910, he gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, by invitation of the officials of the University of Paris. It was an appeal for the highest type of citizenship based upon the simple but eternal and universally recognized laws of individual and social morality. Said Mr. Roosevelt:
The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. ... I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university; which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when 1 add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
With his characteristic frankness, Mr. Roosevelt attacked race suicide, in speaking to a nation whose birth-rate was decreasing:
Even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
In this address he also stated succinctly his position with regard to the relations of labour and capital:
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded. Ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.
A passage which elicited enthusiastic applause was the following in which he paid his tribute to the man who strenuously struggles on against all obstacles:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again—because there is no effort without error and shortcoming—but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
But the most significant passage of the address, the truth of which has been more than substantiated by the chaos of Russian bolshevism, was what he had to say about the danger of extreme socialism based on class war:
I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance' and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should, in our turn, strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity; to turn the tool user more and more into the tool owner; to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
The effect of this address on French public opinion was remarkable. Not long after its delivery I received from a friend, an American military officer stationed in Paris, a letter from which I quote the following passage:
I find that Paris is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt. It was a thing almost without precedent that this blase city kept up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris history. The Temps, one of the foremost daily newspapers of Paris, has had fifty-seven thousand copies of his Sorbonne address printed and distributed free to every school-teacher in France and to many other persons. The socialist or revolutionary groups and press had made preparations for a monster demonstration on May first. Walls were placarded with incendiary appeals and their press was full of calls to arms. M. Briand [the Prime Minister] flatly refused to allow the demonstration, and gave orders accordingly to M. Lepine [the Chief of Police]. For the first time since present influences have governed France—certainly the first time in fifteen years— the police and the troops were authorized to use their arms in self-defence.

The result of this firmness was that the leaders countermanded the demonstration, and there can be no doubt that many lives were saved and a new point gained in the possibility of governing Paris as a free city, yet one where order must be preserved—votes or no votes.

Now this stiff attitude of M. Briand and the Conseil is Freely attributed, in intelligent quarters, to Mr. Roosevelt. French people say it is a repercussion of his visit—of his Sorbonne lecture—and that, going away, he left in the minds of these people some of that intangible spirit of his; in other words, they felt what, in a similar emergency, he would have felt, and, for the first time in their lives, showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon mischief. It is rather an extraordinary verdict, but it has seized the Parisian imagination, and I, for one, believe it is correct.
If the international socialists had got control of Paris in 1910 they might have wielded the influence which they sought to exert in the early days of the war in behalf of a "Brest-Litovsk" peace between France and Germany. Such a peace would have meant the extinction of France, and so it has always seemed to me that Roosevelt contributed personally something to the vigour of the French people.

While Roosevelt was lying ill in the Roosevelt Hospital in the city of New York in November, 1918, with what at the time was supposed to be a severe attack of sciatica—an illness which was followed by his death in the following January— I wrote him this letter:
Please accept this word of sympathy and best wishes. Some years ago I had a severe attack of sciatica which kept me in bed a good many days; in fact, it 'kept me in an armchair night and day some of the time because I could not lie down, so I know what the discomfort and pain are.

I want to take this opportunity also of sending you my congratulations. For I think your leadership has had very much to do with the unconditional surrender of Germany. Last Friday night I was asked to speak at the Men's Club of the Church of the Messiah in this city and they requested me to make you the subject of my talk. I told them something about your experience in Egypt and Europe in 1910 and said what I most strongly believe, that your address at the Sor-bonne—in strengthening the supporters of law and order against red Bolshevism—and your address in Guildhall— urging the British to govern or go—contributed directly to the success of those two governments in this war. If Great Britain had allowed Egypt to get out of hand instead of, as an actual result of your Guildhall speech, sending Kitchener to strengthen the feebleness of Sir Eldon Gorst, the Turks and Germans might have succeeded in their invasion and have cut off the Suez Canal. So you laid the ground for preparedness not only in this country but in France and England.

I know it was a disappointment to you not to have an actual share in the fighting but I think you did a greater piece of work in preparing the battleground and the battle spirit.

168   IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT In reply he sent me this note:
That's a dear letter of yours, Lawrence.   I thank you for it and I appreciate it to the full.
This was the last exchange of letters I had with him.