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A Cartoon History
of
Roosevelt's Career
Illustrated by Six Hundred and Thirty Contemporary Cartoons and Many Other Pictures
By Albert Shaw
New York:
The Review of Reviews Company
1910

PREFACE
IT has long been my custom to make note of political cartoons and caricatures in the press of various countries.    It requires, perhaps, some understanding of political questions and personages, and some acquaintance with the types and symbols used in caricature, to appreciate altogether the meaning and value of that kind of work.    But when one has acquired  a  certain  amount  of knowledge  and familiarity in this field, he is sure to find the  current  cartoons very enlightening as well as amusing.    The cartoonists, indeed, reflect more faithfully the changing phases of the public mind than do the writers of editorial articles. 

The political writer must exercise a certain dignity and restraint. But the cartoonist is a privileged character, who may tell the plain, homely truth as people see it and feel it, very much as the court jester in olden times was expected to take liberties with those in high places and—under the guise of quip and fling and witticism—tell the king a bit of direct and wholesome truth. Thus I have not hesitated to make constant use, in reproduced form, of American and foreign cartoons from month to month in the Review of Reviews, not merely because they are diverting, but chiefly because they frequently express so much of fact and sentiment and point of view, in such telling and convincing ways.

For a long time there were mechanical difficulties in the way of the large use of illustration in daily newspapers. Pictorial matter of all kinds was chiefly confined to the weekly and monthly illustrated publications. The large and influential use of cartoons was, therefore, confined to a set of weekly periodicals, not very numerous, that made a specialty of political subjects. Of all these, it is needless to say the most famous has been Punch, of London. In this country Harper's and Leslie's weeklies, followed by Puck and Judge, have been the most famous and influential of the weekly papers making use of cartoons in such a manner as to express and influence political opinion throughout the country.

In all the European countries, political cartoons have for many years been used with great effect. In Germany the publishers of papers using cartoons have at times been subjected to a rather severe censorship; but in the main throughout Europe there is permitted an extreme freedom of expression to cartoonists that would not be tolerated in political writers. And there is a fierceness of satire, and a malignancy of attack, in many of these European cartoons that would not accord with the kindlier and more humorous tone of American cartoon work.

The very rapid growth, during recent years, of the use of cartoons in the daily newspapers of the United, States has been due to the improvement of photo-engraving methods which permit the very rapid making of a zinc-etched block in reproduction of a pen drawing. Thus the cartoon as drawn this afternoon in illustration of the latest political incident, may be as readily printed in to-morrow morning's paper as the letter-press itself that reports the news. There are few people who realize the extent to which inventions of this kind are changing the methods and character of the press.
It is hardly less remarkable, however, that the use of photo-engraving in newspaper offices should have been followed so quickly by the development of a great number of clever American cartoonists. It had seemed at one time that John Tenniel, afterwards knighted in recognition of the importance of his cartoon work in Punch, could have no successor worthy of the name. But Punch keeps its hold, and England has several very clever political cartoonists at this moment. And it had seemed at one time that the political cartoon could have no future in America, after Nast and his two or three contemporaries. But then came the school of Keppler and Gillam, whose marvelous work, printed in colors by lithography, made Puck a power in the land, interpreting—perhaps better than any other newspaper or periodical—the aims and achievements of President Cleveland. It was cartoonists of this same school and method who, with similar ability, represented the Republican point of view in the weekly paper called Judge.

Then came the rise to influence and power of the cartoonists of the daily press, the foremost of these being the late Charles G. Bush, for several years on the New York Herald and then for many years on the New York World. One is tempted to run over the list of remarkable men who within the past fifteen or twenty years have been drawing cartoons for the American newspapers and periodicals. But this volume—which is chiefly theirs rather than mine—shows well enough my estimate of their wit, their humor, their kindliness, and, above all, their remarkable instinct for politics.

Their drawing has had to be done under great pressure; and some of the most influential and effective of them all are quite defective when judged from the standpoint of draughtsman ship. But where their drawing is often greatly at fault when compared, for example, with such a piece of work as that of Bernard Partridge of Punch on page 75 of this volume, their cartoons have been redeemed by the skill with which they expressed their ideas. The artists of Punch, drawing perhaps only one finished cartoon a week, have a much better opportunity to do good technical work than the newspaper cartoonists who often draw an effective cartoon each day for weeks together.
 Of all the political personages who have become familiar in cartoons, no one in recent years has figured as frequently as Mr. Roosevelt. And we have no other public man whose career has been illustrated in contemporary cartoons so continuously, or for such a long time. Mr. Nast's cartoons were drawn on the blocks which were laboriously tooled by the wood-engravers. He did not waste much effort 011 minor personages. And Mr. Nast's tributes to Roosevelt give fine testimony to the impression the young reformer in the New York Legislature was making upon public opinion in State and nation.

As our readers will discover, we have been able to find striking cartoons that bear witness, in each successive phase of Roosevelt's career, to the recognition accorded him at the moment as a man of energy and leadership who was taking hold of essential problems rather than giving his energy to lesser things. I believe, therefore, that these cartoons, brought together in such a way as to bear upon successive episodes or periods in Mr. Roosevelt's public life, will be found useful as a contribution to the political history of our own time.
 
Very much of the material assembled here is of a nature so ephemeral that its assembling has not been a very easy task. For example, although the Verdict ran its brief but brilliant career of two or three years as recently as 1899-1900, my own office file had disappeared, and it was not easy to obtain access to the copies in which Roosevelt as Governor and Vice-Presidential nominee was so strikingly presented, until Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis, who had been its editor, generously lent his own personal file. Thus thanks are also due to the Columbia College Library, the Astor Library, and to the editors and proprietors of Puck, of Judge, of Harper's Weekly, of Leslie's, of Collier's, and of several other periodicals. I am much indebted also to several members of my own office staff for toilsome search in the files of newspapers.
 
Recognition is due in this place to Mr. William Menkel, of the editorial office of the Review of Reviews, more than to any one else, for co-operation without which the assembling and arrangement of so much pictorial matter would have been very laborious and difficult. There is such a thing as making one cartoon add to the effectiveness of another by the manner of their grouping on the same page. This is also true of the contrasts or the cumulative impressions produced in arrangement of facing pages. To Mr. Menkel I am much indebted for help in all this,— which, if it may seem easy in the result, was more difficult than anything else in the actual doing.
 
I have tried to make the simple text of this volume a clear and honest interpretation of what Mr. Roosevelt has tried to do as a public man, and the spirit he has shown throughout his career. I have had some advantages of intimate knowledge of most of the period I present in these cursory pages; and this has included acquaintance not only with the hero of the play but with most of the other people who have been prominently associated with him upon our political stage. I hope, therefore, that the collection of cartoons and other pictures, with the thread of text that binds them together, may find some modest place with the materials that a historian like Air. James Ford Rhodes, for example, would some day like to vise-as helping him to throw into true historical perspective the political period in which Mr. Roosevelt has been so notable and dominant a figure.
ALBERT   SHAW. NEW YORK, August 22, 1910.

A Cartoon   History of Roosevelt's Career

CHAPTER I
His First Political Experiences

IT so happened that Theodore Roosevelt became a national figure at the very beginning of his public career. His name was printed in newspapers from one ocean to the other, his portrait duly appeared in the illustrated press, and he was conspicuous enough to be caricatured by political cartoonists in the days when it was not customary for the wood engravers to carve the lineaments of any except those who, for good or for ill, were among the eminent personages of the hour.

There might be some difference of opinion about the quality of Mr. Roosevelt's mental endowments; but there could never be any difference about his courage, his single-heartedness, his concentration upon the thing in hand, and the clear, strong, stubborn will power to do his best under any given circumstances, and to see in any piece of work, whether public or private, quite sufficient opportunity to justify his best endeavor.

Doubtless some conditions, not of his own choosing or making, have aided Mr. Roosevelt in the successive onward steps of his public career. But when one studies the case thoroughly, one must admit that Mr. Roosevelt has made his own way by his own efforts, just as truly as did Mr. Lincoln, or any other man of distinction in our history. The city boy, brought up in affluent circumstances, who scorns ease, deliberately chooses a life of work and of usefulness, and never for a moment doubts the value of his ideals, deserves just as much credit as the country boy who pores over his few treasured books by the dim evening light in his log cabin.

Thus far in our history it has not made very much difference. Most American boys have had a fairly good chance to improve their own positions, and to be of use to their fellow men, if only they were endowed with will, energy, some gift of moral power, and some little kindling touch of imagination.

As a boy, Theodore Roosevelt was rather sickly than strong, and he gave few signs pointing to a very exceptional future. But he was plucky and persevering. He became strong by degrees through physical exercise, and through a gradual acquirement of the art of living in such a way as to be hardy and well. He graduated at Harvard in 1880, and was twenty-two years old October 27 of that year, having been born in 1858.

His father, also named Theodore Roosevelt, was a man of business and affairs in New York City. He was prominent in all that made for the best interests of New York, noted for philanthropic works, sound in his principles, wise and devoted as a father. He died a
year or two before his son and namesake finished the  Harvard course.    The family ha lived in and about New York  City for  more than two hundred and fifty years.

During the college period, Theodore Roosevelt was a diligent student, devoting himself especially to out-door science, American history, and literary studies. He was active almost every form of exercise and sport, and took creditable rank in everything, although he was never a champion athlete. He learned to ride well, and played polo. He learn to shoot, and made the most of his vacations. He was fond of animal life and nature and cultivated that habit of close observation which has made him a naturalist and h; added so much to his happiness in life. He took to the water, with Long Island Sound offering ready access; and his appetite for the study of American naval history w whetted by some practical knowledge of boats and seamanship.

Thus, soon after leaving college, he wrote and published his first book, on the " Na\ War of 1812 "; and the greatness of the American navy to-day is largely due to such « periences and studies as produced that excellent volume. After leaving college, A Roosevelt spent about a year in further study and foreign travel. It was characteristic him that in that year he did some difficult mountain climbing and qualified himself : membership in the famous Alpine Club of London, his sponsors being Mr. Bryce and L Buxton, whose careers have been so distinguished and useful, and who have been I Roosevelt's life-long friends. ,

His year of travel and study ended, Mr. Roosevelt settled down in his native ci determined to be a good citizen and to do with his might whatsoever his hand found do. In his private capacity, he was reading law, with a view to taking up a profession that he has never yet found opportunity to practice. He was a studying American history and began to write his books.

On the public side of his life, he ' trying to  find out how  we  were really governed in the city and  State of New York.    He  proposed  to  take  a citizen’s part in the governing business, and he out to acquaint himself with the practical as well as the theoretical mechanism politics and government.   He soon discovered that he must join a political organization, attend the primaries, and do part at the local political headquarter 

He studied his own voting precinct municipal ward, and his assembly dist He found himself a Republican by heritance and tradition, and by his own study of the course of the country's political history.    He attached himself, therefore the  Republican organization  of his district, and insisted upon taking his { as an active worker.

He was not taken seriously at first by the workers and heelers in the old
Hess district; but it was not many weeks before his positive and serious qualities were apparent to everybody. There was dissatisfaction with the district's leadership, and with its member of the legislature. Young Roosevelt was ready for the fight, secured the nomination, and was elected a member of the law-making body of the State.

This was in the fall of 1881; and he served in the legislature during the sessions of 1882, 1883, and 1884.
There were in the United States several thousand members of State legislatures at that time, many of whom must have had ability, and not a few of whom were laying foundations for future eminence. But among all those thousands, young Roosevelt at that time took positions which gave him an immediate recognition throughout the country. He had a way of finding what were the great issues and driving straight at them, with no thought of waiting for more experience, or of deferring to older men. It was not vanity or egotism that impelled him, but earnestness and his great, life-long talent for decision and action.

He was, of course, fortunate in the stage that was set for the part he had to play. New York State was the foremost of our commonwealths, and New York City was our chief metropolis. Reforms in the administration of his State and city were sure to be noted throughout the land.

He saw dawning upon the horizon of practical politics two essential reforms. One was the movement to substitute for the old spoils system in nation, State and city, a business-like civil service, based upon merit and efficiency regardless of party. The other was the improvement of the methods and character of our municipal government, in view of the rapid growth of town life. He studied the civil-service question, and identified himself with the national and State civil-service reform associations.

The Hon. Carl Schurz, serving as Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881, was promoting the movement at Washington ; George William Curtis was at its head in New York; leading Massachusetts men were identified with it, and Theodore Roosevelt at once took his place with these men. He wrote the civil-service law for the State of New York, and secured its passage. This was a great achievement, because the spoils system was firmly intrenched.

He secured a legislative investigation of New York City government, and headed the committee of inquiry. He secured the passage of a law increasing the authority of the mayor, and in various other ways improved the city charter, while reforming abuses in many offices.

Grover Cleveland, who had been a reform mayor of the city of Buffalo, was elected governor in 1882, and although he was
a Democrat, while Roosevelt was a Republican, there was co-operation between the two men in the work of purifying politics and administration in the State and its cities and counties. The position that young Roosevelt then occupied in the public eye is admirably shown in a cartoon drawn by Nast in the spring of 1884, in which Governor Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt are represented as working out reforms for New York that would prevent such disorder and bloodshed as had at that time occurred in the city of Cincinnati. It is a felicitous thing that this first important cartoon in which the face of Roosevelt appears should associate him with Mr. Cleveland. Each man was destined to become President of the United States. They were friends to the day of Mr. Cleveland's death.

So vigorous was Mr. Roosevelt's work in the legislatures of 1882 and 1883, that he was prominently mentioned for the Speaker ship of the Assembly that convened in January,1884. His work in that session was so noteworthy that it made him famous throughout the country, and he would have remained a prominent and respected leader in public affairs even if he had never held another office.

Young men of like views and aspirations in other States all the way to the Pacific took note of this courageous young leader in New York, and felt that they might some day bring him forward as their candidate for the Presidency. His Dakota ranch and his studies of Western history and pioneer life were already becoming a factor in his larger reputation. What proved to be the turning point in his political career lay just ahead of him, although it could not be clearly foreseen.

CHAPTER  II
The Crisis of   1884
 
MR. ROOSEVELT was made one of the four delegates-at-large from New York to the national Republican convention of 1884, and was chosen as chairman of the State delegation. This was a very unusual honor for so young a man, and is an evidence of the influential rank he had already attained. James A. Garfield had been elected President in 1880, but his assassination had placed the Vice-President, Mr. Arthur, of New York, in the White House. The idol of the Republican masses of the Middle West was the Speaker of the House, Mr. James G. Blaine, of Maine. President Arthur was a candidate for renomination, and many of the anti-Blaine men rallied about him. He belonged to the " Stalwart" faction of the party in New York, of which Senator Conkling was the mentor, while Mr. Blaine was the inspiration of the so-called " Half-breeds " of the Empire State.

Roosevelt was not in alliance with either faction; and he strongly hoped, with many of the reformers and conservative men of the day, that it might be possible to secure the nomination as a compromise candidate of Senator Edmunds, of Vermont, then the strongest and most respected figure in the United States Senate.

Popular sentiment triumphed, and Mr. Blaine was nominated. The reformers admitted Mr. Blaine's brilliancy as a party leader, but distrusted his judgment and his character. Until that time, Carl Schurz, George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and many other prominent reformers had been acknowledged leaders of the Republican party. Curtis and Schurz had been great figures in Republican conventions. They were deeply disaffected by the nomination of Blaine and went home in silence, waiting to see what the Democrats would do. Mr. Roosevelt, meanwhile, went out to his Dakota ranch, primarily to attend to his cattle business, but also to think over the political situation.

The Democrats had the wisdom to nominate Governor Cleveland, of New York, and the disaffected Republicans, led by Schurz and Curtis, organized the so-called "Independent" or "Mugwump" movement, and decided to  support Cleveland against Blane.

It was believed by the Independents and the Democrats that Roosevelt would also support Cleveland; and even the Blaine Republicans had little hope of holding him within party lines. But after a brief interval, Mr. Roosevelt came out with a public statement so characteristic of him that it ought to be quoted in this record. It was as follows:

" I intend to vote the Republican Presidential ticket. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both. Each course has its advantages, and each has its disadvantages, and one cannot take the advantages or the disadvantages separately. I went in with my eyes open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten, and I propose to stand by the result. It is impossible to combine the functions of a guerrilla chief with those of a colonel in the regular army; one has greater independence of action, the other is able to make what action he does take vastly more effective. In certain contingencies, the one can do the most good; in certain contingencies, the other; but there is no use in accepting a commission and then trying to play the game out on a lone hand. During the entire canvass for the nomination Mr. Blaine received but two checks. I had a hand in both, and I could have had a hand in neither had not those Republicans who elected me the head of the New York State delegation supposed that I would in good faith support the man who was fairly made the Republican nominee. I am, by inheritance and by education, a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future."

The cartoons relating to this period that are reproduced herewith indicate how general was the belief that Mr. Roosevelt would abandon his party. Grover Cleveland was his personal friend; and his views were regarded as more nearly like Roosevelt's than were those of the successful Republican candidate. But Roosevelt believed that his place was with the Republican party, and that in the long run he could be far more useful to the country as a member of his own political organization than as a critical outsider.

Bereavements in his family just at this time lessened his public activity; but he made some speeches before the campaign was over, and indulged in no bitterness toward those who reproached him for abandoning the leadership of Curtis and Schurz. He had predicted,—while the fight was on in the convention and there was some chance to nominate Edmunds,—that Blaine could not be elected. The issue in November was very close; but the Democrats won and Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as President in March, 1885.

Mr. Roosevelt had maintained the party regularity that was a valuable asset in his subsequent political career, while by his position in the convention of 1884 and during the campaign he had firmly established his position as a man of independence and self-direction within the party councils. He followed no political boss in the New York organization, and he worshipped at the shrine of no popular idol. He was never wholly forgiven by Mr. Schurz and the leaders of the revolt; nor, on the other hand, was he ever in full favor with Mr. Blaine and those closest to the ambitions of the so-called " Plumed Knight."

But he had worked out a consistent line of action for himself, and on more than one occasion in subsequent years, when there might have seemed some good reason of the moment for acting in opposition, he preferred to stay in the Republican camp, while freely criticising the party's mistakes.

CHAPTER III
 
The Mayoralty Fight of  1886

MR. ROOSEVELT had bought his ranch in the " Bad Lands " of Northwest Dakota near the Montana line on the Little Missouri River in the summer of 1883, and had invested a good deal of his patrimony in the cattle business. He had returned to his ranch after the convention of 1884, and was much absorbed in all the phases of frontier life, remaining almost continuously for the following two years. He had published a book on various hunting experiences in 1883. He founded the Boone and Crockett Club, and sought to know by experience as well as by study all those phases of pioneer life that had made the American people what they are.

Yet he had by no means severed the ties that bound him to New York. Like the Roosevelts before him, he had grown up at once a townsman of Manhattan and a countryman of Long Island. It would not have been like him to transplant himself altogether. He could identify himself with the Dakota pioneer experiences, but it would not have been in keeping with his nature to break the continuity of the Roosevelt life in and about the great town that had grown up where the original Roosevelts had settled.

Even while he was writing his books on ranch life and the pursuit of large game in the Rockies, and while at work on his chief historical production, " The Winning of the West," he also produced a history of the City of New York which was published in 1890. He had spent some part of each winter in New York City; and when the municipal reformers brought him out as their candidate for mayor in 1886 he could not refuse.

   The Republican party promptly made him its candidate. His father had been mayor before him, and he himself while in the legislature had only recently secured charter changes for the metropolis and given great attention to its affairs.    Mr. Henry George, who was then at the height of his fame, had come from San Francisco to live in New York; and the labor party, together with the believers in Mr. George's single-tax theory, made him a candidate for the chief city office. Tammany Hall and the Democratic party nominated an able business man and member of Congress, Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, son-in-law of Peter Cooper.

It was a stirring campaign. As election day approached, certain conservative business interests were alarmed lest Henry George should win, and to make sure of his defeat they decided to vote with the Democrats for Mr. Hewitt. The alarm about Mr. George is well expressed in a cartoon from Harper's Weekly that we reproduce. Mr. Roosevelt received more than 60,000 votes; Mr. George more than 68,000, and Mr. Hewitt more
than 90,000.    New York at that time was a strong Democratic city, and Mr. Roosevelt's vote, under all the circumstances, was highly creditable.

His defeat was not a disappointment. He had sprung unexpectedly into the forefront of political life within a year or two after leaving college, and he heeded an interval of private life for further reading and study, the building up of his mental and physical constitution, and the ordering of his -personal and private affairs.

CHAPTER IV
A Brief Period of Private Life

THE Western life that Mr. Roosevelt led in the eighties is not likely to be overestimated by any biographer as a formative influence in shaping his mature character, and as relating itself in many ways to his later career as leader of the nation. Its human contacts were direct, unconventional, and sincere. Mr. Roosevelt became hardy by long days in the saddle and the pursuit of game in the fastnesses of the mountains. His graduating theme at Harvard had been in the field of natural history; and the Western life made him a high authority upon the animals of the North American continent.

He found time in this period to read standard literature and become saturated with it; and he became firmly grounded in the habit of giving literary expression to his own observations and experiences. The years 1887 and 1888 were devoted to this Western life, to .historical study and writing, and to domestic life and the founding of a home and family.

The Roosevelt kith and kin had long been identified with the Oyster Bay neighborhood of Long Island, and it was natural and easy for Theodore Roosevelt to settle there and to build on the top of his Sagamore Hill the modest but ample and comfortable home that has since become so famous, and that is pictured (as it then looked) at the end of this chapter. 

Some years ago, at the request  of  the  writer  of  the present volume, the late Julian Ralph prepared an  admirable  character  sketch   of  Theodore Roosevelt.   Much of it is in the form of direct statement by Mr. Roosevelt himself. One of the paragraphs sums up, in his own words, Roosevelt's period of life in Dakota. " A man with a horse and a gun is a picture or idea that has always appealed to me," he says. " Mayne Reid's heroes and the life out West also always appealed to me. I wanted to see the rude, rough, formative life in the Far West before it vanished. I went there just in time. I was in at the killing of the buffalo, in the last big hunt, in 1883, near Pretty Buttes, when the whites and the Sioux from Standing Rock and Pine Ridge were doing the killing. I went West while I was in the Assembly, in the long vacations—went hunting—went to the Bad Lands and shot elk, sheep, deer, buffalo, and antelope. I made two hunting trips, and in 1884 I started my cattle ranch. After my terms in the Legislature, and until I was appointed Civil Service Commissioner, I lived most of the time out West in the summers and spent only the winters in New York. I never was happier in my life. My house out there is a long low house of hewn logs, which I helped to build myself. It has a broad veranda and rocking chairs and a big fireplace and elk skins and wolf skins scattered about,-—on the brink of the Little Missouri, right in a clump of cotton woods; and less than three years ago I shot a deer from the veranda. I kept my books there,—such as I wanted, —and did a deal of writing, being the rest of the time out all day in every kind of weather."

These sentences, taken together with the pictures with which this brief chapter of our volume is embellished, enable one to understand quite clearly how it came about that the ranching period of his life entered into the very structure of Roosevelt's character and mind. And they also explain why in after years his frequent hunting trips were indispensable. The later quest of great game in Africa was in response to that persistent call of outdoor life, and love of wilderness adventure, that has always belonged to Mr. Roosevelt's essential nature.

CHAPTER V
Battling with the  Spoils  System

IN the campaign of 1888, the Republicans were victorious.    Mr. Cleveland had been re-nominated, but was defeated by the Hon.  Benjamin   Harrison.     Mr.  Roosevelt had cordially supported the Republican ticket, and his friends thought him highly fitted to be Assistant Secretary of State.    In his interval of private life, Mr. Roosevelt had again traveled abroad; he was intelligently interested in foreign affairs, and he would have been a valuable man in the Secretary of State's office at a time when a number of foreign questions 'of some moment were pending. But Mr. Blaine, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the nomination, was made Secretary of State, and he had not forgotten Roosevelt's attitude in the convention of 1884.

Mr. Harrison, therefore, found something else for the energetic young man from New York and Dakota. The new civil-service act was unpopular with the politicians of both parties. Yet every one realized that the spoils system had run its course, and that the great business of public administration had to be put upon some basis of merit, efficiency, and permanence. The enforcement of the act was not popular. No man of great political ambition, or high party standing, desired to be made a civil-service commissioner
Mr. Harrison, however, offered this seemingly thankless post of difficult service to Theodore Roosevelt, who promptly accepted it.

It should be remembered that from the time of James Buchanan to the time of Grover-' Cleveland, the Democrats had been* out of office. Thus for the twenty-five years from 1861 to 1885 the Republicans had been filling the offices from top to bottom with their own men. The Democrats were hungry for their turn, and although President Cleveland was not in sympathy with the spoils system, he could not resist the pressure which put scores of thousands of Republican office-holders, great and small, into private life, in order to meet the clamoring of the Democrats for at least half of the salaried positions of the government. Furthermore, in the latter half of his term, Mr. Cleveland was a candidate for re-nomination ; and he allowed himself to be guided by his political friends and supporters, and by the Democratic National Committee, in much that had to do with appointments to office.

When, therefore, Mr. Harrison was elected in November, 1888, and entered upon his administration in March, 1889, it was natural enough that there should have been a furious onrush of Republican office-seekers. A large part of these were the indignant people who had been from time to time displaced during the brief four years of Democratic rule.

There were three Civil Service Commissioners, and Theodore Roosevelt was chairman of the board. The law did not prevent the dismissal of government employees, but it provided a system under which appointments were to be made upon merit, ascertained in chief part by examinations; and this system was under the control of the Civil Service Commissioners. The system was ridiculed and assailed. At each session of Congress there was a formidable attempt to starve out the system by refusing to appropriate the money  necessary  for the  expenditures  of the Civil Service Board.

Mr. Harrison was a good President, and instinctively in favor of a business-like public service; but he belonged to his own period and he was a candidate for a second term. The cabinet officers and the heads of bureaus, in large part, wanted to appoint their subordinates in their own way. They regarded the civil-service restrictions as irksome. Mr. Roosevelt at times stood practically alone, with the politicians and the more partisan newspapers against him. But public opinion would not permit the repeal of the civil-service law, and Roosevelt not only enforced it but secured its gradual extension, so that it applied to an ever-increasing number of public offices.

Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Harrison were again the opposing candidates in 1892, and the Democrats carried the day. Mr. Cleveland showed his appreciation of the chairman of the Civil Service Board by asking him to remain at his post, and Mr. Roosevelt consented. Again there was the pandemonium of office-seekers at Washington. The Democrats insisted that the}' were entitled to the spoils of their victory. Mr. Cleveland was in a position to stand more firmly than in his first term for the merit system, and he and Roosevelt found themselves working together for efficient and economical administration and against the evils of the spoils system,—just as they had been working together ten years before in the State of New York..

Mr. Roosevelt held this office for six continuous years, from 1889 to 1895. It was a period of patriotic service, with little promise of glory or reward. A man of different physical and nervous organization would have been worn out with the nagging and worry of a place that was involved in sharp, unceasing controversy. But the fights for the law, and against the politicians, did not worry Mr. Roosevelt in the least. He was able to keep it all within office hours, and it was a kind of work that gave him exceptional familiarity with every phase of the administrative system of the United States Government.

It gave him, also, a vast acquaintance with the personalities of Congress, and the active men in all branches of the government. Within a little more than six years it was his destiny to become President of the United States; and few experiences could have fitted him so well for the Presidency as the six years of firm, incessant battling at Washington for the systematizing of the government's work in all departments.

CHAPTER VI
Reforming New York's Police Work

THERE   had   been   fruitless   endeavors   for many years, to elect a reform mayor and bring new methods and ideas into the municipal administration of New York City.    Mr. Roosevelt had always believed, and said, that New York afforded a boundless field of  
usefulness for any man who chose to put his energies into its social or political service.    At length, in the fall of 1894, all the anti-Tammany forces of the city had united upon a candidate and had elected as mayor Mr. William L. Strong, a merchant of public  spirit and repute.    Under the charter then existing, the principal function of the mayor was to select the heads of working departments.

The most difficult department on many accounts was that of the police. This department was charged with duties far more extensive than the control of some thousands of policemen in their work of maintaining law and order, and of aiding in the prevention and punishment of crime. The Police Department was charged with the enforcement of important laws of the State of New York that had to do with the manners and morals
of the people. The Police Department, further, had control over the tenement house conditions, and at that time was even more important than the Health Department in its relations with the sanitary and social welfare of the people.

The charter called for a board of four police commissioners, one of whom should be the president of the board. Mayor Strong asked Mr. Roosevelt to return from Washington to become chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners of his native city. To have enforced the civil-service laws at Washington was, in the estimation of all politicians, to perform a work so unpopular as to destroy a man's chances of future preferment and
public honor. Now he was asked to take upon himself the work of Police Commissioner in New York City, with the intention of enforcing unpopular laws of the State, and of breaking up the blackmailing and grafting practices which had for so long a time prevailed in the Police Department—in partnership with the criminal elements on the one hand, and the mercenary politicians and large corporation interests on the other hand. To attack these evils was to attempt a task of Augean stable-cleaning that was more unwelcome and far more contentious and difficult than to be embroiled with the national politicians in attempts to enforce the civil-service law.

 Mr. Roosevelt did not hesitate to accept this difficult office. The eyes of the country were upon him in his work, just as they had been when at Albany he was dealing with similar questions and problems. All the growing cities of America were wrestling with the difficulties of municipal reform. The police department in most cities seemed to be at the very center of civic misrule and corruption. Mr. Roosevelt's sympathies were with every policeman who tried to do his duty, and he recognized the fact that the corruption of the police force was due much more to the conditions outside than to those inside of the body of policemen. His discipline was severe, but he became popular with the rank and file of the city's uniformed guardians.

He had always been an optimist about our city populations. He explored the tenement houses, and in his brief two years as Police Commissioner he accomplished a great work in the destruction of unsanitary tenements and the improvement of housing conditions. He knew that most of the plain people were industrious and honest, and that the hordes of immigrants speaking many languages would rapidly become Americanized and make good citizens. He was striving in every way possible to improve their environment, in order that these people might contribute the more effectively toward the welfare and progress of the community.

A source of great evil and  much blackmail had been the old laws of the State requiring the closing of business places, and particularly of licensed liquor saloons, on Sunday. The Sunday closing law was violated almost universally, but its existence gave opportunity for blackmail that at once corrupted the police force and intensified many other evils. Mr. Roosevelt took the ground that laws must be enforced or changed. He pressed his point so aggressively that Mayor Strong was alarmed and many good people opposed him. He worked under the further difficulty of a divided police board. But he made a great record that will live in the municipal life of New York.

His work, and that of Colonel Waring as Street Cleaning Commissioner, have resulted in a stupendous advancement in the comfort, health, and safety of the great population on Manhattan Island that lives more densely than any other city population in the world.

Fortunate progress in many directions has been made in the metropolis since Mayor Strong's administration. But in several of the departments,—notably those having to do with the daily life and comfort of the people,—the advance movement seems to have derived its great impulse from efforts made at that time with such ardor and intensity by department heads of whom Roosevelt and Waring were conspicuous types. All day at his desk Mr. Roosevelt was the decisive, untiring Commissioner of Police. It is the sort of office that no hesitant, indecisive man should ever try to fill. He was transferring good policemen to difficult precincts, disciplining bad ones, and sequestering indifferent ones to suburban beats. At night, Mr. Roosevelt was shaking up sleeping or loitering patrolmen; unexpectedly appearing in police stations; but more especially he was examining the conditions of the over-crowded tenement houses, in companionship with newspaper-men and reformers like Jacob A. Riis,—in consequence of which reforms of a sweeping nature have followed.

CHAPTER VII
 
Preparing the Navy for War
 
MR. ROOSEVELT'S duties as Police Commissioner did not prevent his taking an active part in the Presidential campaign of 1896 between Mr. McKinley and Mr. Bryan. The great issue was that of the monetary standards, and Mr. Roosevelt opposed the Bryan doctrine of the free coinage of silver with an energy that came near leading him -to a misunderstanding of the honest motives of many Western people whose virtues in a general way he understood so well. Though not a technical political economist, or an authority in matters of monetary science and finance, Mr. Roosevelt's clear and well-trained mind led him to the firm grasp of sound principles.

There was still work for him to do in  the   fight   for  municipal   reform   in New York; but the national conditions drew him again to Washington. Even before Mr. Cleveland went out of office in March, 1897, there was a high and ever-rising tide of American public opinion that demanded our intervention in Cuba for the sake of ending an intolerable situation. Our commercial relations with Cuba were intimate and important. Spanish administration had been selfish, corrupt, and detrimental to Cuba's welfare.

From the time when most of Spanish America had established its independence early in the Nineteenth Century, Cuban revolutions had occurred one
after  another, only to  be  	But  in  1895  a  Cuban  revolt  occurred that was managed with skill and was prepared for a long struggle. With 'Cuba lying so near our coasts, and with a good many American adventurers helping the insurgents, while arms and ammunition were constantly smuggled into Cuba from this country as a base of supplies, the situation between our government and that of Spain had grown very critical, when Mr. McKinley was inaugurated in March, 1897.

The Hon. John D. Long, of Massachusetts, was made Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Roosevelt, who had felt strongly the necessity of Spanish withdrawal from Cuba, and the importance of naval preparation on our part, was willing enough to take the post of assistant secretary. The New York political machine stood in the way at first, but Senator Platt's reluctant consent was given at length, and on April 6 Mr. Roosevelt was duly appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It was understood that in that post he was to be the active executive officer of the department. 

It must not be forgotten that our navy at that time was low in rank and that European naval authorities considered the Spanish navy stronger in ships, equipment and men than ours. There was real fear lest, if trouble came, Spain's European fleet might attack the Atlantic seaboard, while her Asiatic fleet, with headquarters at Manila, might occupy Honolulu as a re-coaling base and attack San Francisco.

Mr. Roosevelt's early studies were of use to him in his new post. His preparation of the volume on our naval war of 1812 had led him into a broad reading of naval history. He had been recognized in Europe as a naval writer, and had been associated with Captain Mahan in certain contributions to a history of naval warfare. His remarkable energy had found precisely the work that was most congenial at the moment. He cultivated the society of the ablest naval officers in Washington, and found out what was most necessary to be done. He had to fight against apathy and red-tape everywhere.

It has been characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt at all times that he has known whom to consult, and where and how to find out what things should be done. And, having found out, he has had the force and energy to do those things without hesitation and with surprising promptness.

We have on record a little statement of his own which pictures the things he found to do while Assistant Secretary of the Navy:

" Commodore Dewey, Captain Evans, Captain Brownson, Captain Davis,—with these and the various other naval officers on duty at Washington, I used to hold long consultations, during which we went over and over not only every question of naval administration but specifically everything necessary to do in order to put the navy in trim to strike quick and hard if, as we believed to be the case, we went to war with Spain. Sending an ample quantity of ammunition to the Asiatic squadron and providing it with coal; getting the battleships and the armored cruisers on the Atlantic into one squadron, both to train them in maneuvering together, and to have them ready to sail against either the Cuban or the Spanish coasts; gathering the torpedo boats into a flotilla for practice; securing ample target exercise, so conducted as to raise the standard of our marksmanship; gathering in the small ships from European and South American waters; settling on the number and kind of craft needed as auxiliary cruisers,—every one of these points was threshed over in conversations with officers who were present in Washington, or in correspondence with officers who, like Captain Mahan, were absent."

If, at the moment, in some of this work Mr. Roosevelt's energy was not appreciated by his superiors in the McKinley administration, or by older naval officers who had fallen into easy-going habits, it was approved by the country as a whole; and its wisdom was destined to be admitted by everybody before the mid-summer of 1898. The late Senator Cushman K. Davis, who was at that time chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, declared that " If it had not been for Roosevelt, Dewey would not have been able to strike the blow that he dealt at Manila. Roosevelt's sagacity, energy, and promptness saved us."

CHAPTER VIII
The Rough Rider of 1898

IN the opening sentences of his volume, " The Rough Riders," Mr. Roosevelt says that, while his party was still out of power, he had preached with all the fervor and zeal he possessed " our duty to intervene in Cuba and to take this opportunity of driving the Spaniard from the Western world."    And he goes on as follows:

" Now that my party had come to power, I felt it incumbent on me, by word and deed, to do all I could to secure the carrying out of the policy in which I so heartily belieyed; and from the beginning I had determined that, if a war came, somehow or other, I was going to the front. Meanwhile, there was any amount of work at hand in getting ready the navy, and to this 1 devoted myself."

War was declared in April, 1898. The navy was as nearly ready as it could be made. Armies can be somehow improvised, but navies require planning in advance. When wan> break out, naval direction must pass over practically to the strategists and to the high naval officers. Thus Mr. Roosevelt felt that his period of especial usefulness at the naval office would have an end.

The army of the United States consisted of scattered companies and fragments of regiments, located at posts and garrisons extending across a continent and comprising altogether only about 25,000 men. It is within bounds to say that for a great many years previous to the Spanish war, no officer had commanded,—even for the drills, maneuvers and marching of peaceful days,—as many United States troops as would be comprised in three full regiments. The Spaniards in their struggle against the Cuban insurrection had massed in that island about 100,000 troops, transported from Spain. It was evident that
we should have to do something more than gather together the scattered fragments of our regular army. It was necessary to issue a call for volunteer troops, and this President McKinley did very promptly.

At first, Mr. Roosevelt thought of going to the front as a member of the staff of one of the generals; but some obstacle intervened, and when it was proposed to form a volunteer cavalry regiment or two from the cowboys and horsemen of the Western plains, Mr. Roosevelt had an opportunity to form such an organization and to become its colonel. He had, however, been much in company with an army surgeon, Dr. Leonard Wood, then residing in Washington, and he and Dr. Wood had found themselves in entire harmony regarding the Cuban question and the military situation. Dr. Wood had served in campaigns against the Apache Indians, where he had won credit and honor. It was arranged that Dr. Wood should be colonel and Mr. Roosevelt lieutenant-colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, Dr. Wood was slated for early promotion to a brigadier-generalship, and the regiment from the beginning was known as " Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders."

It was a very picturesque organization, and remarkable in the individual efficiency of its members. It was made up of cowboys from Montana to New Mexico and Arizona, Texas rangers, young Southern horsemen and young college men of the East who were accustomed to riding and shooting and fond of adventure. The regiment arrived in Cuba in time to participate in the brief but very real campaign near Sanitago, and Mr. Roosevelt acquitted himself in/ a soldierly way that was quite in keeping with qualities that had been developed by the accumulated experiences of his life. In his earlier New York experience he had been a member of a militia company, and he had been accustomed to horses and firearms from school boy days.

The expansion of the  army was sudden, and we were quite unprepared at Washington to manage it well on the business side. Many volunteers died in unsanitary camps who had no chance to go near the seat of war. Commissary supplies were mismanaged, our soldiers in Cuba were badly fed and supplied, and we were obliged to face serious scandals. Mr. Roosevelt's experience in Cuba gave him intimate knowledge of these conditions, and his protests helped to bring about some drastic reforms.

Soon after the war was over Mr. Elihu Root became Secretary of War, and there followed a thoroughgoing reform in army administration. Meanwhile it was a remarkable coincidence that a man who was destined so soon to become President of the United States, and therefore commander-in-chief of the army and navy, should have served at a critical time in the Navy Department and should have taken part conspicuously as a soldier at the front in the work of the army. 1 he story of the Rough Riders is a fascinating book, and Roosevelt's name, more than that of any other participant, will remain associated with the war for the liberation of Cuba.

CHAPTER IX
As Candidate for Governor

IT was in the month of August, 1898, that the troops came back from Cuba in bad condition from improper food and supplies, and were encamped for restoration  in the  bracing  air  of  Montauk Point at the eastern end of Long Island. There the Rough  Riders remained until they  were  mustered   out  and   disbanded on September 15.

The people of New York were about to enter upon a gubernatorial campaign. The Republicans were charged with having made dishonest use of money appropriated for the enlargement of the State canals. The so-called " Raines Law" had provided for turning the saloons of New York into sham hotels to evade the Sunday closing law, and great abuse and scandal had resulted. There was just criticism of the management of the State insurance department, as well as that of public works. Mr. Platt was at the height of his sway as Republican boss, and his followers had in so far abused their privileges of office and power that they were facing an almost inevitable defeat at the polls.

 It looked like an opportunity for the Democratic machine; and the Independents, together with many Republicans and Democrats of high personal standing, were thinking it necessary to nominate a third candidate against the machine tickets of the two parties. Mr. Roosevelt had every qualification by his previous experiences to lead such a movement; besides which his fresh popularity as colonel of the Rough Riders, and the hero of San Juan, was sure to add to his strength as a vote getter.

Colonel Roosevelt, however, could not forget the political crisis of 1884, and he was reluctant to take any position   that   could   put him outside the ranks of the Republican party.   He agreed under  certain circumstances   to   accept   an independent    nomination, but he proposed not to be a candidate until after he had had a fair chance to see  what  his  own   party was   going   to   do.     Mr. Platt  and  his   chief  lieutenants   were   thoroughly opposed to Roosevelt, but they  were  facing  certain defeat if they put any man known   to   be   identified with   themselves   at   the head of the ticket.     The alternative was bitter for them, but  they  accepted Roosevelt. 

He ran as a straight Republican and gave his cordial support to the other names on the Republican ticket. The cartoonists were much concerned through the campaign with his relations to Senator Platt as the acknowledged leader of the party in the State. Mr. Roosevelt's own point of view was clear on all such points. He would accept no man's dictation in anything that concerned his freedom of opinion or utterance, or his responsible actions as governor in case of his election. But in all things where custom and propriety allowed him to act as a member of his party he was prepared to consult cordially and fully with those who were the official heads and leaders of the party organization. He was willing to listen to suggestions from such leaders as to appointments to office, but would appoint no man to any position unless he was convinced of the man's honesty and faithfulness, and of his entire fitness to perform the duties of the place in question.

In his campaign Mr. Roosevelt was entirely frank as respects administrative scandals. He promised to unearth the canal frauds if any were to be found, and to deal as unsparingly with wrong-doers of the Republican party as if they were members of the opposing organization. Up to this time he had not had much experience as a public speaker, and the leaders were strongly opposed to his taking the stump in his own behalf. But the campaign began apathetically, and Mr. Roosevelt, with his unfailing instinct for the dramatic, took a few of his cowboys with him, allowed them to tell the public what they thought of their Colonel, and the Rough Riders drew the crowds, to whom the Colonel appealed with his direct promises to introduce reform wherever reform  wherever needed.  He was elected by a plurality of  about 17,000 in a year when a less striking candidate must have been defeated by a large Democratic plurality.

CHAPTER X
In  the  Gubernatorial   Chair
 
MR. ROOSEVELT began his term as governor with a message to the legislature that was ringing and statesmanlike. The people had elected a Republican governor charged with the duty of reforming conditions that the Republicans themselves had brought about. Governor Roosevelt appointed Democratic lawyers, together with engineering and financial experts, to examine into the expenditures of the canal millions. The Department of Public Works was reorganized on a practical business basis with proper men in charge.

In the other departments of the State government, the process of shifting things from a political to a business basis was quietly but firmly carried out. Great improvements were made in managing charitable and penal institutions. The insurance department and the bank department, under control of the governor of New York, have to supervise the insurance companies, and the banks and trust companies, that are the most essential and important of any in the nation.   The work of these departments was reorganized by Governor Roosevelt," though the task cost him a stubborn fight.

A board of revision was appointed to give New York an improved charter in view of the recent consolidation of New York and Brooklyn. The educational work of the State was improved, and in many ways the social welfare of the people of the Empire State was advanced under Mr. Roosevelt's administration.

The subject that proved in the end to have been the most influential in its bearing upon Mr. Roosevelt's future career was that of State taxation. During his early months as governor, a State senator, the Hon. John Ford, introduced a bill designed to secure for the State a proper revenue from public-service corporations, such as street railway companies and gas and electric lighting companies, which were in the enjoyment of unlimited and perpetual franchises. The street railway lines, particularly those of New York City, had been formed into a vast monopoly, capitalized at hundreds of millions of dollars by the issuing of inflated securities.

Most of the issues of stocks and bonds were based upon the commercial value of these franchises, rather than upon tangible property. Senator Ford held that such franchises ought to be assessed at their market value, just as real estate is assessed for purposes of taxation.

Public   opinion   and   the   best  newspapers  supported  him,   and   Governor  Roosevelt gave Senator Ford the backing of his support in so far as the principles involved in the Ford bill were concerned. Senator Platt's Republican machine and Mr. Croker's Tammany machine were alike opposed to the Ford scheme of taxing corporation franchises. Both political organizations derived a great part of their pecuniary support from the contributions they were accustomed to exact from the very set of corporations which it was proposed to tax under the Ford scheme.

Mr. Roosevelt was urged in high and influential quarters not to support any form of franchise tax. But he stood by the plan, called an extra session of the legislature, and with the masses of the people behind him, put the bill through the Senate and Assembly, gave it his signature, and made it a law. This action was typical of his brilliant administration as governor.

When the legislature assembly in January, 1900, Governor Roosevelt presented to it an annual message of great scope and statesmanlike ability, in which he discussed the problem of commercial monopolies and so-called trusts, and dealt broadly with the policies in which it seemed to him the State of New York should point the way for other commonwealths. He was looking forward to renomination as governor in the autumn of that year, in order that in a second term of two years he might complete the program he had laid out for himself as chief of the government of the State of New York.

CHAPTER XI
Named for the Vice-Presidency

FOR American politicians, the issues of a Presidential year overshadow all other affairs of a public nature.    The year 1900 was one of much political excitement.    We had acquired the Philippines as one result of the war with Spain.    Mr. Bryan and the Democrats were attacking the McKinley administration on the new issue of imperialism. Many people besides the Democrats were criticizing the administration because of Secretary Alger's unpopular management of the War Department.    Governor  Roosevelt was stoutly defending the expansion policy, and our acquisitions in the Atlantic and Pacific, but he was well known to be critical of the War  Department.    The   State   Department  had blundered frightfully with the original Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and Roosevelt had openly denounced it and helped to prevent its ratification.

The administration in turn was not devotedly attached to  Governor  Roosevelt,  and Secretary Alger had failed to show appreciation of the war record of the gallant colonel
of the Rough Riders. It was supposed that the Secretary was endeavoring to keep Mr. Roosevelt's name off the list of those to whom Congress was voting medals of honor.

No President ever approaches the time of his renomination without discovering that there are numerous people who would prefer to try a new candidate. Many critics of the administration were proposing to deprive McKinley of a second term, and to nominate Roosevelt at Philadelphia in 1900. The more practical party managers, however, saw that the logic of the situation called for a second McKinley term.

The friends and admirers of Mr.  Roosevelt were planning to elect him in the fall of 1900 to a second term as governor, and to bring him forward as their Presidential candidate in 1904. Mr. Roosevelt's enemies, however, had a different program. The Vice-Presidency had always been regarded as a somewhat empty honor and as a place for disposing of men who were not wanted in active politics. The corporations that had opposed the franchise tax, and that were very close to the Republican boss, Senator Platt, were determined to have some other man for governor. Roosevelt was too strong to be defeated in a direct fight. The only plan they could devise was to have him run for Vice-President on the ticket with Mr. McKinley

As early as February, Governor Roosevelt had issued a frank statement saying that under no circumstances would he accept a nomination to the Vice-Presidency, and declaring his desire to serve the people of New York in a second term as governor. He went to the Philadelphia convention as chairman of the delegates from New York. The street railroad magnates had arranged, through Senator Quay, to have Pennsylvania lead in the movement to make Roosevelt the Vice-Presidential candidate. Mr. McKinley and his manager, Senator Hanna, had other plans, but there was an insistent demand for Roosevelt from the Western States where Bryan was very strong. Many of these Western delegates asserted openly that they were prepared to abandon McKinley and make Roosevelt the head of the ticket. The pressure became irresistible and Mr. Roosevelt finally abandoned his preference.

Messrs. Platt, Quay, and the corporations had undoubtedly started the movement. They would not have prevailed, however, but for the genuine Roosevelt sentiment in the West. Roosevelt accepted the nomination for the Vice-Presidency not at the hands of his enemies, but at the hands of his friends. He felt that he was giving up his best chance for usefulness, as well as his probable future preferment. But it seemed to be his duty, and it was always Mr. Roosevelt's way to try to face the immediate emergency in honorable fashion and let the future take care of itself.

At almost every stage in his career he had illustrated the principle that the best way to save one's life is to seem to lose it at the call of duty. The New York political machine chuckled and sneered, and the enemies that Roosevelt had made through his honest and vigorous administration as governor thought that Samson was shorn of his locks. If Mr. Roosevelt's friends were a little disheartened, the governor himself was cheerful and buoyant. He had done his best, he was still young, and very much interested in the passing show, and he had never allowed himself to be the victim of ambition.

CHAPTER XII

His First National Stumping Tour

SENATOR MARK HANNA, of Ohio, who was President McKinley's close friend and political manager, was at this time chairman of the National Republican Committee. Mr. Bryan,  (who had also volunteered in the Spanish war, and had been made a colonel of volunteers, though he had not reached the front)   was again the Democratic nominee for the Presidency.    He was the most skilful and assiduous campaign speaker in the country.    His chances for election were not regarded as by any means hopeless.

Many of the best minds of the country, Republicans as well as Democrats, were profoundly opposed to the policy of acquiring the Philippines, with its attendant reorganization of the army and navy on a permanent scale of great costliness, and its inevitable sequel of new and untried adventures as a world power. Some one had to defend these policies on the stump, in a telling way, on behalf of the Republican ticket. Mr. Roosevelt, by common consent and demand, was the man to speak for his party.

He had, while serving his first year as governor, made a notable address before the Hamilton Club at Chicago, not a stump harangue, but a carefully written oration, in championship of the doctrine that the United States had grown into a maturity of influence and power which required the assumption of a full share of responsibility for the affairs of the world at large. In his earlier years, Mr. Roosevelt, as we 'have said, had not been an accomplished public speaker. He had been forcible and direct as a debater in the New York legislature, but he was not an orator, and had none of those easy gifts and tricks of speech so common among American politicians and so highly developed by the professional platform orators of Mr. Bryan's type.

Mr. Roosevelt had improved, however, in this regard, not so much through practice or through taking thought as to his platform manner or diction, as through the maturing of his convictions and knowledge and the corresponding increase in the value and range of the things he had to say. It is usually the case that the man who is on the one hand a student and on the other hand a man of action, will succeed well enough in public debate or on the stump when real occasions present themselves.

Thus Governor Roosevelt in his capacity as " running mate " with President McKinley made a great speaking campaign throughout the United States in the summer and autumn of 1900. He was aided by his splendid physical vitality; and his speaking grew more effective day after day. He was never lacking in that mysterious attribute of magnetic per
sonality that brings audiences together, and keeps them attentive to the speaker's words.

And his honesty and sincerity, together with the strength of his convictions, were bound to impress his audiences. There are some men who can never carry with them a campaign audience, because of their own lack of party spirit and because certain qualities of mind compel them to see both sides at once, so that they cannot lose the impartial and judicial spirit of history. They are hampered by philosophic doubts. Mr. Roosevelt, though a profound historical student, was even more the born fighter and the man of action.

His mind was always decisive. The issue before him took on ethical aspects, and he saw his own side clearly right and the other side essentially wrong.

To the group of anti-imperialists, Mr. Roosevelt's doctrines were abhorrent. Their timid, narrow, negative point of view was equally abhorrent to his bold and positive mind.

Mr. Roosevelt made a tour in that campaign of 22,000 miles, made five or six hundred speeches of considerable length, was the notable figure of the season,—as he had been of the Philadelphia convention,—directly addressed from 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 people, and in the course of four months had placed himself in the rank of the half-dozen most effective platform and campaign speakers in the entire political history of the country.

CHAPTER XIII
A Half-Year as Vice-President

AFTER the election early in November, Mr. Roosevelt had still to serve nearly two months as governor at Albany. He had then an interval of two months in which to prepare for changing his residence to Washington and assuming the dignities of the Vice-Presidency after the 4th of March. He quietly resumed his literary work (he had already written in 1898 his famous book, " The Rough Riders," and in 1899, while governor, had written a . characteristic life of " Oliver Cromwell"), spent a much-needed winter vacation hunting the cougar, or mountain lion, in the Rocky Mountains, with pen as well as with gun, and reconciled himself to the prospects of four years of self-repressed, observant, and studious life in the functionless office of Vice-President. 

The Senate was convened for a brief session in March to confirm the President's appointments. And thus Mr. Roosevelt had his opportunity to sit as its presiding officer for a few days. The regular session was not to begin until the first week in December, and it so happened that this brief experience in March completed his service as presiding officer of the Senate.

Already the politicians were looking forward to the year 1904. They supposed that Mr. Odell, or possibly ex-Speaker Reed (who had retired from Congress and had come to New York to practice law), might secure the support of the New York delegation and carry off the Presidential honors. Mr. Roosevelt, however, with no machine behind him, had won hosts of ardent friends throughout the country in typical groups, like the Hamilton Club, of Chicago, and other Western organizations. Many of those who had professed to be his close political friends in fair weather, had sought other political society. Among the time-serving politicians, Roosevelt's stock had declined to a low figure. Few men are so little able to discern the real signs of the times in American politics as the machine leaders. They know the rules of the game as they play it themselves, but the larger forces of public opinion are quantities that they can never estimate.

At the very time in July and August, 1901, when they were most certain that Mr. Roosevelt had been excluded from influence and power in the politics of his own State, and sidetracked from a career that would have led to the Presidency or to the Senate, the Roosevelt movement was, in fact, taking on strength and form throughout the whole country. Hosts of influential men were joining in it, though mainly without the cognizance of the old-fashioned professional politicians. 

The men of the earlier political type could not understand that a new era had dawned in American affairs. With the rising men of a new generation, Roosevelt was stronger than any one else. These men had made it plain to Mr. Roosevelt that they were determined to control the national convention in his interest in 1904; and while he was taking no active steps himself, he could not refuse to listen and to observe.

Meanwhile Mr. Roosevelt was determined to be ready for whatever might happen. He resumed the reading of law that had been interrupted by his election to the legislature exactly twenty years before. His repute was such that he could not have failed at the end of four years in the Vice-Presidency to form connections that would enable him to earn an easy competence at the bar.

He laid out projects, moreover, for literary work; and proposed to use his sojourn in Washington and his seat in the presiding chair of the Senate to add every day to his already extraordinary knowledge of the men and the subjects about which a President ought to be well informed.

For a good while previous to the convention of 1900, the Vice-Presidency had as a rule been regarded with disfavor by men of ambition, and had usually been conferred upon men either of advanced years or comparative obscurity. Roosevelt's fame and position were already national, he had youth in his favor, and he could afford to take his chances in a great country where opportunities, whether in public or in private life, seemed well-nigh boundless.

CHAPTER XIV
Assuming the Presidency

In September, 1901, Mr. Roosevelt was spending a few days in the wilderness of the Adirondacks. President McKinley had gone to Buffalo, New York, to visit the Pan-American Exposition and make an address. It was on September 6 that the country and the world were shocked by the news of the shooting of Mr. McKinley at the hands of an anarchist. Mr. Roosevelt was found and hurried to Buffalo, where the cabinet was gathered, awaiting the inevitable end.

Mr. McKinley died on the I4th, and Mr. Roosevelt at once took the oath of office at Buffalo. In Mr. McKinley's first term, Mr. Hobart, of New Jersey, had been Vice-Presi-dent, and it had been Mr. McKinley's method to treat Mr. Hobart as a close personal and official adviser, rather than to hold him aloof. If Mr. Hobart had lived, he would have been renominated in 1900, and Mr. Roosevelt's career, however distinguished, must have been different in its external facts. When Mr. Roosevelt was selected at Philadelphia, Mr. McKinley promptly assured him that if the ticket should be elected, he would expect to treat Mr. Roosevelt exactly as he had treated Mr. Hobart.    Mr. McKinley had been true to this promise in so far as he had found opportunity.

Mr. Roosevelt, furthermore, was on terms of personal friendship with several members of Mr. McKinley's cabinet. In an article prepared at the request of the present writer, for the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, in 1896, Mr. Roosevelt had discussed the office of Vice-President, and had held that its incumbent should have close and harmonious relations with the President and the cabinet in order to preserve continuity of policy and of administrative work in case of his being called to the executive chair through the President's death.

Mr. Roosevelt, therefore, did not have to hesitate or take counsel in September, in order to decide precisely what his general course of action should be. Because he knew his own mind, he was able to give the country instant and welcome reassurance. The fact that he was devotedly loyal to Mr. McKinley and a supporter of the administration's
policies, made it the easier for him to  assume his new responsibilities.

He immediately declared that it would be his intention to carry out unbroken the pending plans and policies of the administration in accordance with Mr. McKinley's well-known views. He further invited every member of Mr. McKinley's cabinet to retain his portfolio, with an earnestness that not one of them could withstand.

Almost at once in his administration he had to face the problem of enforcing the Sherman anti-trust law against railroad and industrial combinations. He took the safe position that it was his business to enforce the laws, and to follow the advice of the Attorney-General on the application of the law to any given case. This explains the action against the Northern Securities Company brought early in his administration by Attorney-General Knox.

In every subsequent case under that law, Mr. Roosevelt was not the crusader against modern business methods or aggregations of capital, but he was the firm executive, sworn to enforce the law, and acting always on the advice of his constitutional counselors, like Attorney-General Knox, and Secretary Root who was then at the head of the War Department.

Obviously, there were new policies to be shaped and executed relating to our
occupation of Cuba and our acquisition of the Philippines and other insular possessions. But Secretary Root was in direct charge of all these insular matters, as well as of army reorganization; and Mr. Roosevelt, besides having profound respect for Mr. Root's legal and executive talents, had always been able to work with him in perfect harmony and co-operation.

Mr. Roosevelt's personality impressed itself at once upon European statesmen and the foreign press. His face became familiar in the illustrated papers and cartoons of Europe. He was frequently likened, in his energetic and versatile qualities, to the German Emperor.

That distinguished monarch almost immediately, through diplomatic and less formal channels came into friendly touch with the American President. He sent his brother, Prince Henry, to visit this country and to give his greetings to President Roosevelt. The Emperor ordered an American yacht, and the President's daughter christened it at the launching in the presence of Prince Henry and Mr. Roosevelt.

The English press was cordial and appreciative, and felt that Roosevelt was a man of broad views of international affairs, while finding also some reassurance in his retention of Mr. John Hay as Secretary of State.

Even more sensational, at the time of it, than the prosecution of the Northern Securities Company, was the President's intervention in the great anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania in 1902. The former case had involved a combination of three great Western railroad systems. The coal situation was the result of a stubborn contest between the organized miners who desired better pay, better conditions of labor, and the recognition of their union, and the five or six railroad corporations that had monopolized the anthracite coal production and were managing it for their own associated welfare.
The strike was so stubborn and complete that there was danger lest the great cities of New York and Philadelphia should be without their supply of fuel during the season of 1902-3, and general business interests were also suffering. The workmen desired to arbitrate, but the so-called coal barons refused, and stood upon their rights to manage their own affairs in their own way.

Mr. Roosevelt found that the law permitted him, through the Bureau of Labor, to make inquiry into all the facts and to seek to bring about conciliation. In the end he was able to secure a satisfactory arbitration, as a result of which the men were gainers; and the anthracite industry has been carried on in a peaceful way ever since.

The President's leadership in these matters had the approval of the country, and resulted in the election of a Republican Congress in the fall of 1902.

Furthermore, several State conventions, as for example those of the Pacific Coast, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and others,—looking ahead two years,—made formal declaration of their intention to support Mr. Roosevelt for President in 1904.

CHAPTER XV
Asserting the Monroe Doctrine

EARLY in 1903 several situations gave opportunity for the fresh declaration by Mr. Roosevelt of our interest in the affairs of the Latin-American republics, in accordance with the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. The subjects of several European powers were in despair of being able to obtain compensation for claims due them from the government of Venezuela. A number of American citizens were in the same plight. A joint naval expedition was undertaken by Germany, France, and Holland to blockade Venezuelan coasts, seize ports and custom houses, and collect by force the sums considered by them to be due to their subjects.

Our government did not wish to see even a temporary occupation of South American soil by European governments on the pretext of collecting private debts. We. were able to persuade President Castro on the one hand and the European powers on the other, to send representatives to Washington in order to ascertain what sums were fairly due under the claims. We then undertook to see that such claims as were allowed should in due time be paid. The position of our government made some sensation in Europe and a profound impression in South America.

Our general attitude toward Latin America was the more sharply observed, because at that time we were in the thick of negotiations preliminary to constructing the Trans-Isthmian Canal. The war with Spain had brought that long-dreamed-of project into the domain of actual possibilities. We had sent the battleship Oregon on a memorable voyage from the Pacific Coast around the continent of South America, to join our fleet in Cuban waters and strengthen it for the attack upon the Spanish squadron. We had realized the need of a canal for the sake of better protection of both coasts.

Furthermore, our new insular possessions in both oceans called for the Panama Canal as a logical sequel. A French company had obtained from the Republic of Colombia the necessary concession to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Many millions had been unwisely spent, great corruption and scandal had attended the history of the company in France, the enterprise had failed, and private capital was not available to resume it. Our American engineers for many years had preferred the Nicaragua route, and a private company had been formed which had made some beginnings. But the inevitable conclusion had been reached that no canal in the near future could be constructed, by either route, unless the United States Government should make a public enterprise of it and provide the necessary millions.

The country was almost unanimously prepared to proceed with the Nicaragua work when, by the efforts of the friends of the Panama scheme, a board of engineers was authorized to report upon the engineering and financial feasibility of both routes. It had been decided finally that Panama should be preferred if the assets of the French company could be bought for not more than $40,000,000. The next step was the drafting of a treaty with Colombia through Minister Herran and President Maroquin. Congress was called in special session to ratify this treaty, and also to pass upon the new constitution for the Republic of Cuba.

This constitution, with the significant part of which Secretary Root was identified, was one of the most important acts of statesmanship of all our recent history. It brought Cuba perpetually under our guaranty of internal order and financial responsibility.

The special session ended, Mr. Roosevelt was off for a Western trip, where in the Rocky Mountains he hunted the grizzly bear. He returned to a summer at Oyster Bay, where many questions of interest came before him, one of them being the endeavor to present to the Russian government the American view of the treatment of Jews in the Czar's dominions.

Another question of exceptional interest, relating also to our position on the North American continent, was the dispute with Canada regarding the Alaska boundary. This was settled by a tribunal, of an arbitral nature, composed of Americans on one side and Canadians and Englishmen on the other. It was a great triumph to have settled the Alaska boundary by amicable methods, and to have retained our unbroken coast-line as we had bought it from Russia.

CHAPTER XVI
Panama,—A New Sister Republic

'THE   Congress   of   Colombia,   sitting   at Bogota,   refused   to   ratify   the   treaty that   its   diplomatists   had   signed.     It was in every way to the advantage of Colombia to have the United  States  dig the canal that the French company had abandoned.  The
treaty proposed that we should give Colombia ten -million dollars for the privilege of conferring upon her a benefit of incalculable value. To have had us revert to the Nicaragua route would have been disadvantageous to Colombia for many centuries.

Furthermore, our return to the Nicaragua plan would have been ruinous to the people of the Isthmus of Panama, who were under no obligations whatsoever to the mercenary politicians at Bogota. Again, our choosing Nicaragua as the alternative would have made it impossible for the French company to have obtained its expected forty million dollars. Under these circumstances, the Isthmus of Panama declared itself an independent
republic, all in the twinkling of an eye, with the substantial encouragement of the representatives of the French canal company, and with no unfriendliness or discouragement on the part of our government at Washington.

The few Colombian troops on the isthmus  made no  resistance.    American  warships were prepared to keep order.   The ten million dollars that Bogota had  refused was gladly accepted by the new Republic of Panama. The treaty was promptly signed that established our rights in the canal zone, and put the new republic virtually under our protection. The President of the United States was authorized by Congress to appoint a board of canal commissioners and to proceed with the work of construction. And all this constituted a notable episode in our history.

CHAPTER XVII

MR. ROOSEVELT had been having the sort of strenuous experiences as President that were in every way congenial to him, and the American public had undoubtedly approved of his policies and actions in most essential respects.   It was not to be expected, however, that his renomination could come without opposition.

Senator Hanna, of Ohio, chairman of the National Republican Committee, and close friend of the late President McKinley, had become the most masterful personage in the Senate, not excepting Mr. Aldrich. Senator Hanna had broadened his interests. He espoused the cause of organized labor. He accounted himself responsible more than any one else for the practical steps that were making the Panama Canal a realized fact. In short, he was a candidate for the Presidency, and  was  effecting  a  powerful organization of politicians throughout the country in his own behalf.

A good many States as early as 1902 had endorsed Roosevelt. The question arose whether the Ohio convention of 1903 would speak favorably of his administration. Mr. Roosevelt, who was hunting in the West, sent a famous message that resulted in Ohio's recognition of him in its platform. There was tariff agitation in the air, with Senator Hanna as the champion of the high-tariff " stand-pat " policy,—to use his ownleaders like Governor Cummins, of Iowa, were demanding revision.    A great financial discussion was pending, moreover, having to do with the need of a different banking and currency system

Mr. Roosevelt's tone was progressive, but his attitude was expectant rather than positive touching such questions. Those were matters for Congress rather than for the executive. But when serious scandals were current regarding the administration of the business of the postal system, Mr. Roosevelt was in no doubt as to his responsibility.

He took hold of the work of postal investigation with such vigor that he left no opportunity for the Democrats to make capital in the approaching campaign out of abuses which otherwise might have led to Republican defeat.

As the time for the choosing of delegates for the 1904 convention approached, the movement for Mr. Hanna's nomination disintegrated, partly because of the great strength of President Roosevelt with the people, and also partly because of the serious breakdown of Mr. Hanna's health. One after another of the great States, in their local conventions, instructed their delegates to support President Roosevelt. Ohio itself fell in with the general movement and sent a delegation instructed for the President.

The convention at Chicago turned out to be a great spontaneous demonstration in favor of the man who had acceptably served out three and a half years of Mr. McKinley's unexpired second term. If President McKinley had lived Vice-President Roosevelt would have been a candidate for the nomination in 1904. But he would not have been personally identified with the many stirring matters, both foreign and domestic, that had been crowded into the busy period from 1901 to 1904; and no one can make even a sagacious guess as to what would have happened. Senator Fairbanks, of Indiana, was nominated for Vice-President. Under other circumstances, Mr. Fairbanks would have been a formidable candidate for the Presidency. His friends had declared that he was the natural successor of Mr. McKinley, and that it had been Mr. McKinley's hope and wish, if he had lived, that Mr. Fairbanks should succeed him. But the bluff, powerful Hanna had intervened, and with the disintegration of the Roosevelt opposition which had centered around the chairman of the National Committee, it was quite impossible to rally around any other man's standard the various leaders and groups who did not like Roosevelt.

Mr. Root, Mr. Beveridge, ex-Governor Black, of New York, and others, made eloquent Roosevelt speeches in the convention, and there was incomparably more enthusiasm over Roosevelt's nomination in 1904 than there had been at Philadelphia over Mr. McKinley's re-nomination, or the placing of Roosevelt on the ticket as candidate for Vice-President. For years Roosevelt's friends had hoped to nominate him for the Presidency in the year 1904, and now they had actually accomplished their purpose.

CHAPTER XVIII

THERE was no well-defined issue in the campaign of  1904, as in the two previous ones.    In 1896 the question of sound money was  threshed out  and permanently settled.    In 1900 the people ratified the expansion policy, and the momentous national and international developments that followed our war with Spain.    In 1904 the real question was whether the people were well enough pleased with the man who had succeeded McKinley by a fateful accident to give him another four years' lease of power.

Wall Street interests were bitterly opposed to Mr. Roosevelt, because his investigation and prosecution of various trusts and corporations, and his attacks upon railroad rebates and like abuses had for the time being not only checked the prosperous schemes of many promoters, but had also confused and disturbed legitimate business,—the whole fabric of corporation finance and control being so closely interwoven. Thus Wall Street, largely under Democratic leadership, had undertaken a more positive part in politics than ever before. If only the Republicans could be prevented from nominating: a man as bold
and aloof as Roosevelt, and the Democrats could be persuaded to nominate a representative of their conservative wing rather than a radical like Bryan, Wall Street would have nothing to fear from the result of the election. So the " magnates " reasoned.

Thus in 1903 and early in 1904 Wall Street had done its best to aid in the movement to secure the nomination of Senator Hanna in place of Mr. Roosevelt; and as early as 1903 certain eminent legal advisers of Wall Street had selected Judge Alton B. Parker (then chief justice of the highest court of the State of New York) as an excellent representative of the so-called " safe and sane " type of Democratic candidates. All this was in no way to Judge Parker's discredit; for he was an upright judge and a public man of sound views and a well-poised mind. Mr. Bryan had been twice defeated; and Judge Parker, though of a different school of political thought and training, had maintained his party regularity at all times, just as Roosevelt on his side had been a Republican under all conditions.

Judge Parker was not widely known to the country, and his candidacy could not be otherwise than the merely negative one of opposition to Roosevelt. It was not possible for the Democrats to frame any successful issues. They could not ask boldly for tariff reform, because the South had become protectionist. They talked of scandals in administration, but. the country knew that Roosevelt had cleaned out the Post Office frauds with as much vigor as any Democratic President could have shown. They could not denounce Roosevelt as a foe of trusts and corporations, because the major part of the Democratic party had always professed to be far more deeply opposed to monopoly and corporate aggrandizement than the Republicans.

In short, the logic of the situation was with Roosevelt. The people of the country, regardless of party, liked both the man and his policies. As the campaign progressed the Democratic managers denounced the Republicans as collecting large campaign funds from the very trusts and corporations that Mr. Roosevelt was supposed to be righting. Moreover, Wall Street quickly lost confidence in itself as a political Warwick, and was inclined to disavow Judge Parker's candidacy as of its choosing. Doubtless various corporation interests contributed to both campaign funds; and it is unquestionably true that the greater part of the responsible business men of the country thought it better to keep Roosevelt and the Republicans in power than to bring in the Democrats on a dubious platform, with no knowledge of the make-up of a prospective Democratic cabinet.

Associated with Mr. Roosevelt was Secretary Hay, in charge of our foreign affairs; Mr. Root (who had just been succeeded by Mr. Taft), in charge of the War Department and our island dependencies ; Mr. Knox, brilliantly heading the judiciary department ; and that remarkable campaigner, the Hon. Leslie M. Shaw, who had succeeded Mr. Gage as Secretary of the Treasury.

The President's Secretary, Mr. Cortelyou, had been secretary to President Cleveland, then to President McKinley ; and three successive Presidents testified to his ability and faithfulness. He had political tact, administrative skill, and absolute honesty. He it was whom Mr. Roosevelt selected to conduct the campaign, and to serve as chairman of the National Republican Committee. One of the notable achievements of Mr. Roosevelt's first administration had been the creation of the new Department of Commerce and Labor, and Mr. Cortelyou had been promoted to the cabinet as Secretary of this new department.    Mr. Roosevelt had advanced his assistant secretary, Mr. William Loeb, Jr., to succeed Mr. Cortelyou as Secretary to the President.

Of the bureaus grouped together under the  Secretary of Commerce  and  Labor,  the
most important was a new one called the Bureau of Corporations. Mr. Roosevelt placed at the head of this bureau the Hon. James R. Garfield, transferring him from the post of Civil Service Commissioner. These are the names of a very few of the strong and able men with whom Mr. Roosevelt was surrounded. Mr. Hitchcock, of St. Louis, Secretary of the Interior, was exposing and prosecuting land frauds in the West, while the new Bureau of Corporations was investigating the Beef Trust, the Standard Oil Trust, and other corporations accused of violating the Sherman anti-trust law.

 Under the circumstances, Mr. Roosevelt's overwhelming triumph at the polls was to have been expected. All sections of the country seemed to be contented with the outcome, and Judge Parker, though badly defeated, was regarded as having lost no important States which Roosevelt might not have carried against any possible Democratic nominee.

Mr. Roosevelt felt that his victory was not of a strictly partisan nature, and that the country was entitled to know in just what spirit he accepted it. On the night of his election, therefore, he issued a statement declaring that under no circumstances would he be a candidate or accept a nomination in 1908.

There was already much political talk to the effect that Mr. Roosevelt had merely been serving out Mr. McKinley's term, and that his acceptance of another nomination in 1908 would not be in violation of the tradition that limits an American President to two consecutive terms. His friends and his opponents alike had been thus looking forward to the next contest. Mr. Roosevelt won the approval and renewed confidence of the country in the decisive announcement he made. It was believed that with no ambition to secure another nomination, he could give the more devoted and patriotic attention to the service of the whole people in his high office.

There was nothing more remarkable than the contented acquiescence of the Democratic press in the result. The people of the South showed their approval in many ways that could not be mistaken, and flooded Mr. Roosevelt with invitations to visit their respective States and cities. It had been the good fortune of Mr. McKinley, in a period of declining partisanship, to be regarded as the President of the whole country without regard to section or party; and this general good-will was transferred to Roosevelt even as the mantle of Elijah had in ancient time fallen upon the shoulders of his successor.

CHAPTER XIX
As Peace-Maker and World Figure

IT was in the summer of 1904,—his renomination secured and his election certain,— that Mr. Roosevelt began clearly to emerge in the mature sense as one of the great world figures of his day. The completion of the second McKinley (Roosevelt) term had secured the full establishment of the policy of expansion. Our navy had become strong and efficient under Mr. Roosevelt's guidance. The army had been thoroughly reorganized through Mr. Root's constructive statesmanship and his ability to win the approval of Congress for his policies. We were gaining renown through extirpation of yellow fever in Cuba and our success in sanitary measures at Panama.

The international prestige of the United States was enormously increased, and in the eyes of the world President Roosevelt was the man who typified the Twentieth Century America. He had, of course, followed in McKinley's footsteps in so far as he saw the path of duty leading in that direction. But it had been easy to work with Mr. McKinley's appointees, and Mr. Roosevelt had found no difficulty in holding to his pledge of September, 1901, that he would do his best to carry out Mr. McKinley's plans.

Now, however, the country had deliberately chosen him for its helmsman, and there could be no doubt of its mandate to go forward according to his own judgment. It was not necessary to wait for inauguration day in March. The new mandate took effect on
election day in November, and his message to Congress in December came with a strength and force that had perhaps been equalled in none of his previous state papers. It was then that he laid down that guiding principle of the " square deal,"—the determination to secure justice to all men to the best of his ability, to capitalist as well as to workman; to humble immigrant or Asiatic coolie as well as to the descendants of the Pilgrims or the Patroons. And recognizing the commanding prestige that the United States had secured abroad as a result of its new policies and recent growth, the Roosevelt administration gladly accepted the responsibilities and the opportunities that go with prestige and power 

(pages 117 & 118 missing rjk)

for the Pacific Ocean and the Farther East, we had also a duty to perform in that region. It was our business to maintain friendly relations with Japan and to help support the integrity of China. With Alaska, the Sandwich Islands, and the Philippines in our possession, besides our great States of the Pacific seaboard, and with the Panama Canal in process of construction, it was evident that our interests in the Pacific had become larger than those of any other single power.

Mr.   Roosevelt's   attitude was not belligerent, to use their own influence and power to help keep the world in order. Mr. Roosevelt saw this duty clearly, and had no shrinking from its performance. He did not in the least object to being pictured as the " World's Constable." He believed that it was quite clearly the business of the United States to maintain peace and order throughout the whole of North America and the regions around the Caribbean Sea, including the West Indies, Central America, and the countries on the northern coast of South America.
 
He regarded it as our duty, furthermore, through friendliness and good will, to serve the cause of peace for the remainder of South America. As
but, on the contrary, was most tactful, and friendly toward all the powers of America, Europe, and Asia. But it was an attitude of firmness and of conscious recognition of power. Instead of arousing the hostility of an ambitious monarch and empire like those of Germany, this American attitude helped to establish us in the good-will of the people and the government of that great nation. Further, we were more free from differences of opinion with the people and government of the British Empire than at any previous time in all our history.
 
A certain masterfulness that the administration had assumed in its international relations was also felt in its policies of law enforcement at home. The question had been boldly asked whether the great aggregations of capital had not become so powerful as to be able to control politics, the press, and the organs of government. Mr. Roosevelt stood firmly on the ground that law and government must be supreme over the corporations created under the law. It was to be a long and difficult struggle,—that of finding the best way to regulate and control the forces of modern business without hampering them in their proper development and progress. It is by no means to be asserted that Mr. Roosevelt possessed any rare or peculiar wisdom in his dealing with such subjects.

He had no desire to destroy the forces of modern business. He had none of the antagonism toward corporations that Mr. Bryan had always shown. But he perceived that if some great capitalistic enterprises were beneficent in their methods and results, others were guilty of oppression, and were prospering through disregard both of the laws of the land and of the natural rights of a host of citizens. Mr. Roosevelt tried, therefore, to find some workable applications of justice, with government and law supreme.

About some questions he was an opportunist ally have been glad to see a revision of the tariff undertaken somewhat early during his second administration. He did what he could to bring the question before Congress and the country. But he found that Congress was not ready for tariff revision., and that there was no compelling sentiment in favor of it anywhere in the country. His convictions on the tariff question were not of a sort that made him regard it as his duty to go forth upon a crusade against the Dingley tariff. As a party question and as a sectional question, the tariff was no longer in the thick of bitter controversy. It had become a business man's question and one of industrial evolution.

It was not only the prestige and the power of the United States in world matters, but it was also the confidence felt in President Roosevelt himself, and in the fairness and good will of our government and people, that made it possible for Mr. Roosevelt, in the summer of 1905, to bring about a conclusion of the war between Russia and Japan and a settlement of the issues involved by the adoption of a treaty of peace.

This  was  perhaps  the  crowning  act   of .Mr.   Roosevelt's   career.     Russia's   misfor-
tunes in the war made it highly desirable for her that hostilities should end. Japan's financial resources were becoming strained, and it was better for her future power and prestige to end the war promptly than to continue it. Both countries were on terms of especial friendship with the United States. And thus Mr. Roosevelt was able to bring them into negotiation for settlement, and through his influence and earnest intercession and efforts, the Treaty of Portsmouth was drafted and signed, and one of the great wars of history brought to an end.

This achievement was indeed appreciated in the United States as constituting a bright page in the country's history. But it was even more widely recognized in Europe and Asia, where the magnitude of the war and the profound consequences of an unforeseen kind that follow in the wake of so colossal a struggle were more vividly felt and better understood.

Thus, Mr. Roosevelt's international reputation as a peacemaker suddenly flamed up and filled the eyes of an astonished world. Congratulations came from all lands. The Emperor William of Germany is reported to have cabled: " The whole of mankind must unite in thanking you for the great boon you have given it." The cartoonists began with increasing frequency to picture Roosevelt and the German Kaiser together as "kindred spirits of the strenuous life "; and a cartoon in the London Punch to that effect was confiscated by the Berlin police as lacking in the reverence due to two men so noble and majestic, whereupon the irreverent cartoonist, Mr. E. T. Reed, drew a caricature of his original cartoon. Both pictures are reproduced on page 122; and another amusing drawing by the same artist, which we have reproduced on page 127, records the deeds of the peace-making Theodore under the guise of an old Assyrian tablet and chronicle.

And thus the press of all Europe made much of the Treaty of Portsmouth; while the Norwegian parliament, at the first opportunity, awarded to Mr. Roosevelt the Nobel Prize as the man who had done the most within the year to promote the world's peace

CHAPTER XX
The "Big Stick" at Home and Abroad

SOME casual remark of Mr. Roosevelt's, quoting the old proverb that it is well to speak softly but carry a big stick, had caught the visualizing imagination of the cartoonists; and on many occasions they have found it convenient to depict him as armed with a heavy club. He was not, however, making belligerent use of that or of other offensive implements in the year that followed his inauguration. There were many other matters of international concern in the spring and summer of 1905 besides the Russo-Japanese war and its termination. There was a Pan-American Congress at Rio de Janeiro, and we were bent upon using that occasion as a means of increasing our friendly relations with South America. Secretary Hay had passed away, and his place at the head of the Department of State had been filled by the Hon. Elihu Root.

Mr. Root, after five years of eminent service under McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War, had returned to the practice of law in New York, refusing to be a candidate for governor and a prospective candidate for the Presidency in 1908, and having no ambitions for further public office. But the call to be Secretary of State is one that it has been the tradition of eminent New York lawyers to accept. Even while Secretary of War, Mr. Root had been the leading member of the cabinet, and the President's chief adviser in foreign matters involving legal knowledge. He brought to the post of
Secretary of State a peculiar personal fitness for its duties, and a comprehensive knowledge of its problems.

Mr.   Root,   more   than any one else, had devised the   arrangement   which brings   Cuba   under   our protection and control in certain   emergencies.      It now   devolved   upon  him to find a way for the regulation of the broken-down finances  of  the  little  re-• public   of   San   Domingo. The  European powers were bent upon a forcible collection of their debts, San Domingo having defaulted   upon   its   foreign bonds.    Our   government virtually    guaranteed     a new   issue   of   San   Domingo securities, and was permitted to take charge of the custom-houses in order to satisfy foreign creditors and promote the peace of the distracted island. Mr. Root, meanwhile, proceeded upon a South American tour, visiting the Pan-American conference at Rio and receiving tributes at the leading capitals of other South American republics.

He had visited Canada with fruitful results for the settlement of all outstanding questions between the United States and the Dominion. His visit to South America was of so tactful and sympathetic a character, and so appreciative of everything creditable in South American statesmanship and progress, that it removed not a little of the prejudice that had existed among the polite peoples of Latinic origin in the Southern republics
against what they regarded as the brusque,  commercial Yankee nation.

Mr.  Taft,  furthermore, had  come home from the Philippines to take Mr. Root's former place as Secretary of War, and he had at once assumed a very influential place in the cabinet. With Mr. Root on his travels, and President Roosevelt in the West on a brief hunting trip, Mr. Taft was in special charge of the unfinished business relating to San Domingo, Cuba, and our outlying responsibilities in general. It was a little later on that a situation of chaotic turmoil somehow arose among the little republics of Central America. Again the man with the " Big Stick " spoke softly, and peace was restored. It was largely by Mr. Root's efforts that a plan was devised for settling Central American difficulties through a representative tribunal that was expected to prevent future hostilities among half a dozen small sovereignties. The plan was good, even if it has not as yet produced the expected results.

As the autumn advanced, the attention of the man who carried the big stick was centered upon the approaching session of Congress. It was his determination to secure the passage of a law that would put an end to the almost universal practice among the
railroads of granting rebates to the large corporations, and other favored shippers. The principle of national regulation of railroads had become firmly established, and it was considered that the one point above all others most necessary to be secured was the equal and impartial treatment of all whose business required them to use the means of interstate transportation. It was a hard fight, but the legislation was secured, its results were accepted by the railroads, and a great reform was put into effect that the railroads have since regarded as even more valuable to them  than  to those  who  had  so strenuously fought against the rebate system.

Along with  the granting of freight rebates, there disappeared the  granting of free passes to politicians and their henchmen, which   had  been   an   abuse   of  almost   incredible dimensions, and which had played no small part in the corruption of legislatures and the obstruction of honest government.

MR. Roosevelt's messages to Congress for that period are elaborate discussions of the economic and social conditions of the country. Their value as presentments of fact, and as contemporary discussion of evils and remedies, will have great appreciation at the hands of the future historian. Thus in the message of December, 1906, statements are made regarding the working of the recent Railway Rate bill; and it is shown that this and other recent legislative steps toward the better regulation of interstate commerce had already been justified in experience. In view of conditions that led, in 1910, to the enactment of the new Railroad Rate bill, with its enlargement of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, it is worth while to quote a little from Mr. Roosevelt's message of 1906. Let us take, for example, the following paragraphs:

It must not be supposed, however, that with the passage of these laws it will be possible to stop progress along the line of increasing the power of the national government over the use of capital m interstate commerce. For example, there will ultimately be need of enlarging the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission along several different lines, so as to give it a larger and more efficient control over the railroads.

It cannot too often be repeated that experience has conclusively shown the impossibility of securing by the actions of nearly half a hundred different State legislatures anything but ineffective chaos in the way of dealing with the great corporations which do not operate exclusively within the limits of any one State. In some method, whether by a national license law or in other fashion, we must exercise, and that at an early date, a far more complete control than at present over these great corporations,— a control that will, among other things, prevent the evils of excessive overcapitalization,—and that will compel the disclosure by each big corporation of its stockholders and of its properties and business, whether owned directly or through subsidiary or affiliated corporations.

These paragraphs set forth a program that Mr. Roosevelt well understood could not be carried out at once. It is precisely the program that President Taft took up in 1909, and that was included in (i) the Railroad Rate bill, which became a law in June, 1910; (2) the work outlined by President Taft for a commission to report upon the best way to regulate the issue of railroad stocks and bonds, and (3) the bill of Attorney-General Wickersham, providing for the federal incorporation of railroads and large industrial companies.

Many of the progressive ideas advocated by Mr. Roosevelt in 1905, and the two following years, which brought upon him the enmity and violent criticism of the exponents of great corporate wealth, had already, by the time Congress adjourned in the summer of 1910, found acceptance as self-evident and commonplace doctrine in the platforms of both wings of both great parties.

CHAPTER XXI
Some Activities of a Versatile President

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S hold upon the confidence of the country was again put to the test in the Congressional elections of 1906. It was recognized that the President and his policies formed the issue, and a clever cartoonist at the time depicted Mr. Roosevelt as the candidate in front of the polling booths of every State. The campaign was also notable as one in which the Republican party tried to obtain its funds by small popular subscriptions rather than in large sums from business interests.

Ever since the Civil War, the Republican party had made the protective tariff its shibboleth, and had relied upon the manufacturing interests to provide its election funds. This practise of collecting from wealthy business interests had been continued; but it became embarrassing when the government was attempting to enforce the Sherman antitrust law to break up illegal railroad practices and dissolve industrial combinations*

The election having resulted in an emphatic endorsement of the administration, Mr. Roosevelt broke the traditions which had held our President strictly upon American soil by making a trip to Panama to inspect personally the sanitary and engineering work of our new Canal Zone, and to pay his respects to the young Republic of Panama, which he had been accused of creating. He came back prepared to refute the attacks that had been made upon our beginnings with the canal, and besides his regular message to Congress, at its assembling in December, he prepared a special message on conditions at Panama,
providing each Congressman with a copy elaborately supplied with photographic illustrations

Incidentally it may be said that these messages to Congress were much commented upon by reason of their use of the simplified spelling that 'had been recommended by a group of learned gentlemen who had banded themselves together  to reform the spelling of the English language. They had appealed to Mr. Roosevelt during his summer vacation at Oyster Bay by telling him they had hit upon a method of arousing an apathetic nation to the adoption of phonetic spelling not by gradual process by a sudden stroke. If Mr. Roosevelt would but use the simplified form himself, and instruct the Government Printing Office at Washington to put all public documents in this new phonetic dress, the reformed system would be virtually established, and the newspapers and public schools would have to follow.

The outcome proved, however, that there were some things that even the dauntless President could not accomplish. The English language resisted the attack. Mr. Roosevelt accepted his defeat with entire cheerfulness. There was little if any reformed spelling in his Romanes lecture at Oxford three or four years later. About spelling reform. as about the revision of the tariff, Mr. Roosevelt was, in fact, at heart an opportunist. At one time or another he urged both reforms at the request of his earnest and convinced friends; but he himself could afford to abide the general verdict and await the slower processes of time.

Through all this period there was constant and relentless ef-;fort in the Department of Commerce and Labor, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Justice to prove and to punish violations of law by great corporations. Mr. Hitchcock had retired from the interior Department, to be succeeded by Mr. James R. Garfield. Mr. Cortelyou, after the successful campaign of 1904, had become Postmaster-General, and in the middle of Mr. Roosevelt's second term he had been transferred to the head of the Treasury Department upon the retirement of the Hon. Leslie M. Shaw. Mr. Moody, who had succeeded Mr. Knox as Attorney-General (Mr. Knox having entered the Senate) was as energetic as Knox himself in the prosecution of offending corporations. Meanwhile, a vacancy having occurred on the Supreme Bench, Mr. Moody was appointed to that high tribunal, and Mr. Charles J. Bonaparte became Attorney-General.

Mr. Oscar S. Straus had succeeded Mr. Cortelyou as head of the Department of Commerce, and Herbert Knox Smith had become head of the Bureau of Corporations succeeding Mr. Garfield. Mr. Pinchot, who had for a long time been Chief Forester under the veteran head of the Department of Agriculture (Mr. Wilson), had by this time become an official of great influence and power.

His strength was due to the greatness of the situations he had to deal with, and the breadth of his view and the strength of his grasp. When Mr. Pinchot had taken office years before, we were practically without forest reserves. No one had supposed that our timber supply could be exhausted. But by degrees it came to be understood that great lumber companies were managing to monopolize the forest areas that remained as part of the Western public domain, and that for reasons of large public policy the remaining timber areas must be kept as national forests.

President Cleveland had made an important beginning in this direction • President McKinley had gone still further, and it remained for President Roosevelt, with his exceptional knowledge of the physical conditions of the country, to make forest preservation, and the protection of other great natural resources, one of the leading concerns of his administration. There was earnest co-operation among all the executive departments to protect the public domain, to enforce the Interstate Commerce law in the interest of the people, and to see that the   law   was   enforced   against   oppressive combinations.

A delicate situation, moreover, had arisen on account of anti-Japanese riots in Pacific Coast States. Japanese laborers were not excluded under the law that prevented Chinese immigration. A good many Japanese laborers were finding employment. California demanded the extension of the Exclusion act to Japanese and Korean laborers. Japan's victory in the great war against Russia had naturally enhanced the consciousness of power and importance among the Japanese people, and they resented the idea of exclusion from America. The situation was met with tact and good-will by both governments.

The great financial panic that spread from the banks and trust companies of New York City throughout the country in the last weeks of 1907 created situations that called for government relief. Mr. Roosevelt, through his Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Cortelyou, acted with his accustomed promptness. The money stringency was relieved by the government's proposal to issue and place on the market many millions in Panama Canal bonds, and many more millions in short-term notes under a law that had been enacted in the period of the Spanish War.

The panic illustrated the need of a reform in our money and banking system; and Mr. Roosevelt did everything in his power to promote the view of those who were working for banking reform and an elastic currency. There were many financiers embarrassed by the panic who imagined at the time that President Roosevelt's efforts to enforce the law as respects interstate commerce and industrial monopolies had created distrust and brought about the crisis that was so disastrous to the stock market. Most of those men, two years later, in looking back upon the course of events, would have acknowledged their entire mistake as to the facts and causes.

The panic had been brought about by conditions of over-speculation and bad business methods that were brought clearly to' light when the strain came. The panic, in other words, was but a symptom of those very evils in the industrial and commercial world that Mr. Roosevelt had been pointing out and trying to remedy.

Out  of  the   intense  discussion  of  that  period, several plans of financial reform were evolved; and these had much debate during the ensuing Presidential campaign.    Thus Mr. Bryan made himself an advocate of the plan of guaranteeing bank deposits; and -he secured the endorsement of this plan in the Democratic platform. Mr. Roosevelt and his administration agreed with most of the bankers that the guaranteeing of deposits would not be wise. They advocated, on their part, the establishment of a general system of postal savings-banks, so that if the people were afraid to deposit their savings in ordinary banks they could commit them to the care of the government under reasonable conditions. It was believed that this might be an especially effective thing in times of business panic or distrust.

In the last two years of the administration, the place of Postmaster-General was filled by Mr. George von L. Meyer, who had served as ambassador at more than one leading European capital. Mr. Meyer bent all his energies toward securing the adoption by Congress of the postal savings-bank scheme; and although its success was deferred, there was every assurance that postal savings-banks would be established in the very near future. The plan was endorsed by the Republican national convention, and Congress accordingly passed the bill, with Mr. Taft and the Postmaster-General (Frank Hitchcock) also favoring it, early in 1910.

Mr. Roosevelt had managed through these years of high pressure and varied activity to avoid those effects of strain and over-work that few men have been able to escape whose responsibilities are great and whose duties are incessant. His, through the Presidential years, was always the clear, strong mind of the man who sleeps well, takes his exercise, and wards off the disease called worry.

Thus, as the panic came on Mr. Roosevelt was on his way back to Washington from a bear hunt in the Louisiana canebrakes. These absences were always well-planned, never interfered with public business, associated themselves with helpful visits to different parts of the country, and kept the President physically able to meet the tasks that only a strong man could survive.

That period of Mr. Roosevelt's Presidency was one in which his dominant note of justice and public duty was of more value to the country than any other tone or quality could have been. Whether the civil service, the national forests, tariff reciprocity with European countries, naval growth, insular questions, canal problems at Panama, an army and race theme like the Brownsville affair, or any other of a hundred topics was under consideration, Mr. Roosevelt brought to bear in every case the power of a vigorous mind and conscience. He saw in a clear, broad manner the thing that was right to be done, and demanded of Congress and the country the ethical solution and no other.

CHAPTER XXII
Refusing a Third Term

NOTHING like the Roosevelt third-term movement had ever before been known in American history.    The struggle to give President Grant a third term was entered upon by his friends and political beneficiaries, in the very face of a disapproving national and party sentiment.    But the movement to give Roosevelt a third term was national and almost irresistible, ^and its successful resistance was due to his own firm will and the use of his prestige and power to secure a different result.    

Naturally the Republican party desired success, and it was sure to win under his leadership. But he had made his announcement on election night in 1904, and he saw no good reason for changing his mind. He was, of course, plainly bound not to seek in any way a renomination, or to abet the movement. There was, however, no reason of honor or good faith that could have prevented his taking the oath of office and serving again, if he had been nominated and elected.

The President of the United States exercises in reality a greater power than do the hereditary rulers of monarchical countries. A masterful and positive President like Mr. Roosevelt, though loyal in all intent to the Constitution, drives swiftly to the ends he deems wise and right, and builds up for the executive an authority and an influence that tend to permeate the whole government. So popular a President as Roosevelt influences political situations in the States, and without any such precise purpose may bring under his moral sway many men in the Congresses he has helped to elect. He fills vacancies in the federal judiciary,—from the Supreme Bench to the district judgeships in all the States; and without a thought of undue influence over the judiciary, he may name a good many judges of his own way of thinking.

Thus the power of a strong President is cumulative; and there is wisdom and safety in the tradition that limits the President to a consecutive period of eight years. Mr. Roosevelt had not read American history amiss. If we had been in the thick of a great foreign war, and the country regardless of party had insisted upon his taking another term, he might have seen a sufficient reason for remaining at his post. But the country had an abundance of trained and capable men, and there was some reason to think that the time had come for a President of a different temperament. Few people will ever understand how great a pressure Mr. Roosevelt resisted. Even those politicians who were thought to be opposing him were constantly pressing the idea upon his attention. After it had become certain that Taft would win as against any of the other candidates, there was a renewed effort to nominate Roosevelt, both to make the election easier and also to clear the field for 1912.

CHAPTER  XXIII
Helping to Choose His  Successor

MR. TAFT'S candidacy was not of his own seeking, neither was it arbitrarily forced upon the party by Mr. Roosevelt.    It was the result of much consultation; and Mr. Taft, who would have preferred to return  to the  federal bench, became  a candidate only because it was the prevailing view of the administration  and the party that he was the most available man.    Until the very last moment, there were great numbers of Republicans who clung to the hope that  the  convention  would  be  stampeded  for Mr. Roosevelt.

There were those who said that while Roosevelt himself would be acceptable to them, they did not approve of his dictating the choice of his successor. Governor Hughes had entered upon a brilliant record in New York, and it was decided by a majority of the New York delegation that his name should be presented at the Chicago convention as a candidate for Presidential honors. Senator Knox was the favorite son of Pennsylvania, and his name also was offered to the convention. Vice-President Fairbanks had the endorsement of his own State of Indiana, and some strength in other parts of the country.

Speaker Cannon had the great State of Illinois behind him, although he himself regarded his Presidential boom in the light of a mere personal compliment, and was ready to support Taft. The delegation from Wisconsin was instructed to present the name of Senator La Follette by way of reminding the convention of the turn in that gentleman's fortunes since the refusal of the convention of 1904 to seat him and his friends.

But Mr. Roosevelt fully realized that if the convention were deadlocked by reason of the conflicting claims of too many favorite sons, the outcome would inevitably be his own re-nomination. He bent all his energies, therefore, toward the securing of enough pledged delegates to nominate Mr. Taft; and so the thing was accomplished. It was regarded by the country as an endorsement of the Roosevelt administration, and a determination to continue the Roosevelt policies.

For Mr. Taft had been a very conspicuous and highly trusted member of the administration, and at all times one of Mr. Roosevelt's two or three closest advisers. Mr. Roosevelt had a very high opinion of all his cabinet officers, but for the statesmanship of
Mr. Root and Mr. Taft he had an especial regard. He ranked them with the great men of the early period of the Republic in respect of attainments, experience and constructive statesmanship.

- Governor Hughes, who might have had the Vice-Presidency, was unwilling to accept it, and the New York delegation secured the convention's approval of the Hon. James S. Sherman. The ticket of Taft and Sherman was regarded as a little more conservative than Roosevelt himself, and the Democrats were ready to try their chances again under Mr. Bryan's leadership.

The old opposition to Bryan within the Democratic party had largely disappeared. There was a strong feeling that the ticket of Bryan and Kern might win against that of Taft and Sherman. Mr. Roosevelt as President could not, of course, go on the stump, but he took an intense and active interest in the work of the campaign, and did his best to refute the claims of Mr. Bryan that he, rather than Taft, was the true exponent of Roosevelt's progressive policies. The election of Mr. Taft was universally hailed as another Roosevelt victory.

It was a notable thing that both Taft and Bryan were presented to the country bv their chief exponents as true and fit successors of Roosevelt, in respect of their doctrines and policies and of their personal attitude toward their fellow-citizens at large. The whole campaign as conducted on both sides,—even though it developed the usual asperities and heated accusations,—was in reality a tribute to the character .of Roosevelt as a national figure who summed up the general aim and common belief of all honest and right-minded men, regardless of party.

The controversies of the campaign were not about fundamental things. The Republicans were accused of receiving campaign contributions from Wall Street,—with considerable truth, no doubt,—and the opponents of Mr. Taft were annoyed by disclosures connecting some of them with a certain Trust then under government prosecution. But these things were mere incidents, inevitable always in national campaigns. The Roosevelt administration was again before the country for endorsement. Taft was part and parcel of that administration, was the choice of Mr. Roosevelt, and was fully ratified by the party. And the country in the election once more gave a vote of its confidence in government of the Rooseveltian stamp.

CHAPTER XXIV
Last Phases of the Administration

MR. ROOSEVELT had by no means secured ready acquiescence by Congress in all of his policies, and his last year was full of storm and controversy. Thus in the session before the election of Mr. Taft he had laid down a program of rapid battleship construction, less than half of which had been endorsed. Nevertheless he had seen our navy grow to formidable dimensions.

Early in 1908, he had sent a great battleship fleet, under Admiral Evans, to make a tour of both South American coasts, then to cross the Pacific to Honolulu, Japan, the Philippines, and China, and to return by way of Australia, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean. This project was bitterly criticized, but it was most fortunate in its outcome.

Anti-Japanese riots in California had stirred up some feeling of antagonism to the United States among the more ignorant masses in Japan. It was predicted that if our ships entered Asiatic waters, they would encounter those of Japan in hostile action. As it turned out, the fleet was received with enthusiasm wherever it went, and nowhere more than in Japanese waters. Its visits of courtesy at the South American ports, and in the Far East, were felicitous in their strengthening of friendly ties with all the countries whose seaports were entered upon the route.

For a full year before the end of his term Mr. Roosevelt was using leisure moments
to plan his trip to Africa and to make thorough preparations for his expedition. His eager looking forward to a year of adventures in a new field strengthened his courage for the public business that was pressing upon his attention. The prosecution of the Central and Southern Pacific railroads had been entered upon with a view to breaking up the combination they had formed.

A great action was pending for the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company as an illegal trust. Meanwhile one of Mr. Roosevelt's judicial appointees, Judge Landis, had imposed an enormous fine upon the Standard Oil Company for violation of the law against rebates; and Judge Gross cup, of the Circuit Court, had reversed Judge Landis' decision. During the campaign the relations of the Standard Oil Company to the press and to politics were a topic of violent controversy. The decision of Judge Landis
was regarded by the business world as too drastic altogether, and there had grown up a feeling that Mr. Roosevelt was pressing with undue relentlessness a crusade against large business interests.

Whether or not there was good reason for this feeling, it involved the last year of Mr. Roosevelt's incumbency in heated argument and more show of temper and feeling than had been aroused at any previous stage in his career. At one time it had been thought that Mr. Roosevelt, in declining a third term as President, might accept a seat in the United States Senate. The term of Senator Platt was to expire on March 4, at the same time as that of the President. But Mr. Roosevelt, although at one time this idea appealed to him, had definitely rejected it, and Secretary Root was the unopposed choice of his party in New York for the Senatorial toga.

The last annual message sent to Congress by Mr. Roosevelt in December, 1908, was a document of great length, devoted in the main to a recapitulation of the views and policies which had so strongly characterized his administration. His State papers had been much more extensive, and his formal utterances to Congress and the public more frequent, than those of any of his predecessors in the Executive office. The message did not serve to abate controversy or to soothe the worn and inflamed nerves of railway presidents or Wall Street bankers. Business was in the dumps, and some one must be blamed.

Congress in the previous session had undertaken to limit the President in the use of secret service funds placed at his disposal for the detection of crime; and the scathing comment made by the President in his message was ill-received in both legislative chambers. Attempts were made to expunge sections of the message before receiving It and entering it upon the record of Congress. However absurd such proposals might have been, they pointed to a certain bitterness and strain that was to affect the relations of the Chief Magistrate and the law-making body through the remaining three months of Mr. Roosevelt's term. The attempt of Congress to punish Roosevelt for his message was not successful and produced in the public mind a reaction in his favor.

One of the controversies of that session had to do with the President's old subject, the civil service. In passing a law providing for the taking of the Census of 1910, Congress had disregarded the President's advice that the thousands of extra census employees should be appointed under civil service rules. In this controversy Mr. Roosevelt finally triumphed.

He had also succeeded in extending the principle of the merit system to the retention of postmasters appointed to the smaller or fourth-class offices. During all his seven and a half years in the Presidency he had been able, in one way after another, to extend thesphere and improve the working of the civil-service rules, and thus to reduce the evils of the spoils system to comparatively few and small areas.

Several months before his retirement from office it had been announced that his literary activities would be resumed, and that his African experiences would be productive of a series of articles to be published in Scribner's Magazine. It was further made known that he would have a regular connection, as a frequent writer and contributing editor with the Outlook, of New York, a widely read weekly periodical edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott. These announcements are reflected in two or three of the cartoons reproduced in the present chapter of our narration.

What may be regarded as the final controversy of his administration had to do with certain newspaper attacks upon the honesty of men connected with the purchase of the French  Panama company's assets and the beginnings of our work on the canal.
 
Mr. Roosevelt had made great progress with the work at Panama. He had abandoned the original plan of constructing the canal under the direction of a board of engineers chosen from civil life and railroad work, and had turned it over to engineer officers of the regular army, with the most fortunate results. He looked upon the Panama enterprise as in some respects the crowning work of his administration; and he could not allow libels upon the honesty and good faith of the government and its agents, as respects the Panama Canal, to pass unnoticed.

The charges had involved, by express mention, well-known men closely related to the President and to the President-elect; and the charges had thus reflected upon the honor both of Mr. Roosevelt and of Mr. Taft, who, as Secretary of War, was in immediate charge of Panama affairs. Libel suits were entered by direction of President Roosevelt, and while their prosecution was eventually abandoned, they were successful in their essential purpose. The prompt action taken by Mr. Roosevelt had secured complete retractions; and no stain had been left upon a page of our history that must always be memorable, and should, therefore, be without spot or tarnish.

CHAPTER XXV
Stepping Out of the White House

IF any man had ever seen Mr. Roosevelt in a mood of dejection or disheartenment, the fact had never been revealed.    He was  always  the  man  of  confidence  and  strong heart.    It was  not that he  took his responsibilities recklessly, but he never allowed them to burden or weigh him down.   There was never a day, however difficult, when he was not prepared to say of the Presidency, " I like my job," or to declare to friends and foes alike, " I am having a perfectly corking time."

Doubtless this was due in large part to his great physical vitality, to the evenness and regularity of his habits of life and work, and to the firmness of a nervous system that was not, like those of most other men, subject to reaction after excitement. In the language of a White House usher, who had served through several administrations, " there was never any man like him for hard work; yet no matter how late he was at it every night, he came downstairs each morning as fresh as the dew upon the roses." If Mr. Roosevelt ever had any days or hours of illness, the secret never leaked out.

All his work was planned well in advance and finished easily on time. If he had a speech-making tour ahead of him, his dates were well arranged, and the speech to be made at each place had been carefully drafted and put on paper. Some Presidents had never found time while in office to read a book. Mr. Roosevelt always kept up with current literature, and was always digging into more or less recondite fields of history and science. He read whole libraries while in the White House, although no one knows , how he found the time. He was conversant with early Celtic literature and with the sagas of the Teutonic North. He was more thoroughly familiar than any other American with all books relating in a general way to sportsmanship, travel, and natural history. His constant devotion to the interests and concerns of his family had kept him acquainted also with the books that interest young people and children.

At the moment of his leaving the White House and starting on his adventurous journey to Africa he was, without doubt, more completely and freshly informed about African hunting,—in so far as knowledge could come from the reading of books and conversation with sportsmen and travelers,—than any other man in the world. He left the White House with no regrets, and with a sense of having served the country to the best of his ability. And somehow the world did not think of him as a man passing into retirement, or as one who had run his race and finished his course. Everybody was asking what Roosevelt would do next.

On February 12, less than a month before Mr. Roosevelt retired from the Presidency, he went to Hodgenville, Kentucky, to speak at the farm where Abraham Lincoln was born, a hundred years before. His tribute to Lincoln on that occasion was, in rhetorical form, the most perfect speech he had ever prepared. Its portrayal of Lincoln's devotion to duty and high qualities as a great President was in some sense a revelation of Mr. Roosevelt's own ideals. It seemed to reflect something of the spirit in which, from his entrance into the political life of New York in 1882, through all his successive experiences, to the end of his term in the White House, he had given his own best courage and best effort for what he believed to be right causes.

CHAPTER XXVI
The Faunal Naturalist in Africa

EVEN in Africa Mr. Roosevelt was in a certain sense an official of the United States Government. He was the head of a scientific expedition, authorized by the Smithsonian Institution, to obtain faunal specimens for the National Museum. His expenses were otherwise provided for, but his mission was public and official. His preliminary report, made to Dr. Walcott as head of the Smithsonian, was forwarded from Khartum when the expedition disbanded.

Mr.  Roosevelt has fortunately given us, first in magazine articles in Scribner's and then   in   permanent   form   as   a   notable volume,   under   the   title   " African   Game Trails," an account of his experiences and achievements from the time of his leaving New York, March 23, 1909, to his arrival at Cairo in March,  1910.    No quest of wild creatures was ever more carefully planned or better justified by its purposes, its methods, and its results.    Its success was beyond Mr. Roosevelt's ardent expectations.

The first of two results that will best serve to give this expedition a place of its own, memorable and influential, must be the vast collection of African animals and birds that will be the chief treasure of the National Museum at Washington and that will be familiar to young Americans for generations to come. The second result must be the book itself,—written by Mr. Roosevelt while on the ground,—constituting one of the best volumes in the long series of his writings, and also one of the most valuable contributions to the literature of animal life and natural conditions in Africa.

Most of Mr. Roosevelt's experiences were in British East Africa and Uganda, where he came in contact also with British officials, missionaries, and ranchmen, whose fondness for the African wilderness recalled to him his own experiences as a ranchman on the intensely interested in race questions, and in all phases of life and nature in the portions of Africa where he sojourned,, hunted, and camped.

All of his experiences are set down in vivid form upon the fascinating pages of his book, just as other volumes of his tell us with swift and firm narration — but with the discursiveness of a naturalist who sees the whole environment — all about the hunting of game in our own Western wilds. The habit, to which we have already made reference, of giving immediate, vivid, and charming literary form to all of his active experiences out of doors, is one of the very best things attributable to his early life in his frontier ranch-house, where he had good books and not too many of them, and the power to see a narrative worth telling in each well-considered expedition after bear, mountain lion, or other creatures of highland and plain.

Accompanying Mr. Roosevelt, as his fellow members of the scientific Smithsonian African Expedition entrusted to  his   charge, were and Messrs. Mearns, Heller, and Loring, American naturalists; and Messrs. Cunninghame Tarlton, who were British experts on African hunting and travel.    More than 11,000 specimens   were   secured   for  the   National / Museum, including  nearly  5000  mammals, —most of them large, about 4000 birds, and a large number   of   reptiles   and   smaller creatures

The expedition would have been followed through Africa by an army of press representatives but for Mr. Roosevelt's stern insistence. So great, however, was the demand for news that there was some yielding to the tendency to manufacture it on the coast, or else to send to the European and American papers exaggerated tales based upon half-accurate rumors. There was no indiscriminate slaughter of animals, and no departure from the excellent plans originally made. Such plans, obviously enough, took into account all questions of climate, risk of illness, and sanitary precautions. Mr. Roosevelt was accompanied by his son, Mr. Kermit Roosevelt, whose skill and prowess as a hunter form a part of the true story of the expedition. 

Mr. Roosevelt's habit of applying all proper means to the ends that he wished to secure was perfectly illustrated in the African expedition throughout. Every detail of the itinerary had been planned and every item of equipment had been considered to a nicety. Even the books that he meant to read were carefully selected in advance, and all bound in pigskin, forming a compact little library for entertainment, diversion, and intellectual stimulus   in   hours   of   leisure   during  the African twelve month.

Thus the results to which we have alluded,—namely, the great Smithsonian collection of African fauna and the admirable . volume on " African Game Trails," together with the building up of physical vigor a»d the ripening of knowledge concerning colonial, imperial, and racial problems, as well as knowledge of natural history,—all these results, and many others, were not in the least matters of " Roosevelt luck " so-called, but were all of them matters of Roosevelt industry, perseverance, and faithful application of the right means to the desired ends.

The human family has grown very rapidly during the past century, in spite of that tendency to apply Malthusian checks which, —in highly civilized countries like France and the United States,—has led Mr. Roosevelt to utter warnings against what he has   _ called " race suicide."    And with    the multiplication   of  the  members  of  the   human species there has naturally been growth in the numbers of domesticated animals. But the wild creatures which had shared with man the vicissitudes of mundane existence have perforce become fewer in numbers and subject to conditions ever more precarious.

A knowledge of these fellow creatures,—t heir ways and struggles,—constitutes a very noble and interesting department of science. Mr. Roosevelt has taught the boys of America, and now also those of Europe as well, not merely to slaughter birds and beasts, but to know about them and to have the true attitude of mind towards them. His relation towards these fellow creatures has always been humane, never cruel.

There is always struggle among the animals themselves, whether in the American wilderness or in the African jungle. And if mankind had not struggled against powerful beasts of prey, the human race must long ago have perished from the earth.

Mr. Roosevelt's teachings and example in all these things,—from the time of his college essays and studies as a naturalist, and his early Western hunting trips, down to his last great quest of animals in Africa,—have been of immeasurable value in leading young Americans to the love of enjoyment of out-of-door things, and away from pleasures and occupations that would enervate mind and body.

CHAPTER XXVII
Strenuously Visiting Old Europe

THE expedition of our hunter and naturalist came to an end with its arrival and disbanding at Khartum, on March 14, 1910.    Here his wife and daughter were  awaiting  Mr.  Roosevelt,  as  were the   representatives   of   many   newspapers, both European and American. The remaining days of March were spent in Egypt; and April, May, and the early part of June were taken up with a memorable tour of Europe.

 It is the object of this chapter chiefly to bring together some of the amusing caricatures and cartoons that were produced in consequence of a journey that caused more comment than any other of recent times. Our former chapters show how large a figure Mr. Roosevelt as President had become in the estimation of the world. 

It was not strange, therefore, that Europe should have manifested a keen interest in his visit, and that there should have been a general desire to extend a hearty welcome to the best-known   and  most  typical of  Americans   as  the   opportunity   offered. 

In an address at the University of Egypt he told the Nationalists what preparation 'for self-government meant; and was naturally criticized by hot-headed patriots for giving some excellent counsel. For the Egyptians to seek independence at the present time would mean chaos and ruin; and Mr. Roosevelt's words of praise for England's usefulness in Egypt were wisely spoken, and at the time and place where they could serve the best use.

Mr. Roosevelt was received with honor and cordiality by rulers and by people throughout Italy. His visits in Naples and Rome were notable, and he found ovations awaiting him at Milan, Genoa, and Venice. He was received with the highest honors at Vienna; and at Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary there was boundless enthusiasm among a people who remembered well the story of Kossuth's reception in the United States.    The sympathy of Hungary was to be expected. 

The many European cartoons that are reproduced in this chapter indicate at once the amusement, liking, and aroused curiosity of the intelligent public all the way from Italy to
Norway, and from Hungary to the British Isles. It was in Paris, on the 23d of April, that Mr..Roosevelt delivered his address on " Citizenship in a Republic," as had been planned long in advance. From Paris the journey was continued, by way of Belgium and Holland, to the Scandinavian countries. His reception in Holland was especially hearty because of his own Dutch ancestry. At Christiania, following visits and royal receptions in Copenhagen and Stockholm, he made an address upon world peace, in recognition of his having received the Nobel Prize.

The  death of King Edward of  England changed his   plans   somewhat,   but   lie   proceeded to Berlin, where he was privately received and entertained by the Kaiser, in company with whom he reviewed a body of

German troops, and where on May 12 (the Emperor attending) he addressed the University of Berlin on " The World Movement." 

In the meanwhile, President Taft had notified him by cable of his appointment as a special ambassador to England to represent the United States at the funeral of King Edward. He arrived in London on May 16, and his ambassadorial rank, together with his own prestige, made him one of the most conspicuous of the personages who were in official attendance at the royal funeral. A few days later he received a degree at the University of Cambridge, and on May 31 he was granted the freedom of the city of London, making an address in the Guildhall, in which he discussed especially England's status in Egypt.

His endorsement of a firm policy on the part of the British Government in the land of the Nile became a matter of world-wide comment and argument. The British Prime Minister, some time after Mr. Roosevelt's departure for America, commended the speech on the floor of Parliament; and it produced a visible effect upon public opinion as regards England's mission in Egypt and our own in the Philippines. On June 7, at the University of Oxford, he delivered the Romanes lecture, which was the primary occasion of his visit to England, his subject being " Biological Analogies in History." A day or two later he set sail for New York.

CHAPTER XXVIII
His Home-Coming and Welcome

IN Europe the plain people had received Roosevelt gladly everywhere.   The European   enemies   of  America   have   always been among the rulers and privileged classes.    The  United  States  has  meant  to the workman and the peasant of Europe the land of opportunity and of promise, and Roosevelt's name had become familiar as that of the man typifying the best things in the life of the American people.

The European press had received Roosevelt with interest, curiosity, and expressions of amusement more or less polite. His address at the Guildhall, which was admirable in form and spirit, quite shocked the British newspapers because it was the conventional British thing to appear shocked. In reality, nobody was in the smallest degree perturbed or offended.

But much more important than Europe's casual impressions, and the comments of the European press, was the sort of effect upon the state of mind of his own countrymen that Mr. Roosevelt's return was destined to produce. His last year in the White House had been difficult, and many of the newspapers had been harsh in their criticisms. The President is a man of great power by virtue of the bearings his office has upon the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of men who are of some consequence in their own communities. When Mr. Roosevelt refused another term and his successor was duly elected people began to think of the man who was coming into power and who was already choosing- his official associates, rather than of the man who was not only laying down the sceptre of rule, but who was also going into a voluntary exile, banishing himself to the heart of Africa, in order that there might be no man able to say that Roosevelt out of office was still trying to order the affairs of the country.

There was widespread interest in his African movements, but only scanty news. Not one word of authorized interview, or of comment upon American affairs or his own intentions, did Mr. Roosevelt utter during his entire absence. Many business men throughout the country, led by Wall Street, had expressed themselves, with rather brutal frankness, as happy to have Mr. Roosevelt go to Africa. They were eager to enter upon the expected years of calmness and unruffled business prosperity that were sure to come with the wise and steady administration of Taft, succeeding the headstrong and turbulent years of the Rough Rider in leadership of the nation.

It is not the President alone, however, who makes our politica1 and financial weather. Mr. Taft's first year was stormier than any one of Mr. Roosevelt's seven and a half years. This was for many reasons; some of which were subject to Mr. Taft's control. Many of them, however, were beyond his power.

It happened, nevertheless, that just as Wall Street and the people whose state of mind  is determined by the business barometers had formed the habit  of abusing Mr. Roosevelt with extreme exaggeration, even so had they in one short year begun to abuse Mr. Taft quite as unsparingly.   And since Mr. Taft was the man at the helm, it was easy enough to forget the other man's faults and to wish that he were steering the ship again. 

And so a good many of the men who had been willing to have Roosevelt exile himself, but who had not been willing in March, 1909, to go down the harbor to bid him God-speed, were quite elated to find themselves appointed to serve on the large reception committee of June, 1910; and down the harbor they cheerfully went, to welcome Mr. Roosevelt back home with effusion, if not with life-long affection.

The country as a whole, however, welcomed him home with an enthusiasm and a devotion that were sincere beyond any doubt. He was greeted with an applause that rang true in every State and Territory. Nothing of its kind so impressive had ever been seen in New York as the crowds that lined the route of his drive from the Battery up Broadway to Central Park at high noon of June 18, 1910.

It would be easy to make up a volume of the clever and amusing cartoons drawn for the American newspapers in the few days just before and just after Mr. Roosevelt's arrival. We have selected a few of these, in order to give some impression of the spirit and character of the country's greeting. It was deeply gratifying to Mr. Roosevelt to be welcomed home with such heartiness; and the little speech he made, in response to Mayor Gaynor's formal but kindly words of welcome, must be recorded in these pages as belonging to our condensed chronicle of Roosevelt's career. The speech in full was as follows:

I thank you, Mayor Gaynor. Through you I thank your committee, and through them I wish to thank the American people for their greeting. I need hardly say I am most deeply moved by the reception given me. No man could receive such a greeting without being made to feel both very proud and very humble.

I have been away a year and a quarter from America, and I have seen strange and interesting things alike in the heart of the frowning wilderness and in the capitals of the mightiest and most highly polished of civilized nations. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself, and now I am more glad than I can say to get home, to be back in my own country, back among the people I love.

And I am ready and eager to do my part, so far as I am able, in helping solve problems which must be solved if we of this the greatest democratic Republic upon which the sun has ever shone are to see its destinies rise to the high level of our hopes and its opportunities.

This is the duty of every citizen, but it is peculiarly my duty; for any man who has ever been honored by being made President of the United States is thereby forever after rendered the debtor of the American people, and is bound throughout his life to remember this as his prime obligation, and in private life as much as in public life, so to carry himself that the American people may never have cause to feel regret that once they placed him at their head.

On the following page is a picture of Mr. Roosevelt in the act of uttering these appropriate words. The meaning of the statement was clear beyond a doubt. Mr. Roosevelt meant as ex-President to serve his country as best he could, doing everything in his power to promote progress and justice, without seeking anything for himself.

CHAPTER XXIX
An Ex-President in His Active Retirement

FOR ex-Presidents there is no established code of duty or of etiquette. It has come to be well understood that a Vice-President should be dignified, without seeming to be aspiring or expectant, and without allowing himself to be influential. What ex-Presidents, however, ought to do, besides remembering that they are to set an example of dignity and of unselfish devotion to country, is a question that has always been debated but never conclusively answered.

There are those who would make our ex-Presidents  Senators for life.    There are others who would not permit them to hold any kind of public office. John Quincy Adams, after leaving the White House, in 1829, was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served for eighteen years,—-until his death,—as a contentious and eloquent- member of Congress.

President Cleveland was sixty years old when he left the White House in 1897, and he died at the age of seventy-one. His quiet and consistent life at Princeton was not without its relation to public opinion and the country's affairs; but his health was not vigorous, and his life as an ex-President was private rather than public.

President Harrison practiced law and wrote an excellent book on constitutional government in the short period of life remaining to him after leaving office in 1893. President Arthur lived less than two years after his retirement in 1885. President Hayes retired to his country home in Ohio, in 1881, after four years in the White House, and died in 1893. He was highly useful, for twelve years, in many causes of philanthropy and education.
General Grant was an ex-President for eight years, and most of that period was actively spent in a blaze of publicity. His tour around the world occupied more than two years, from May 17, 1877, to November 12, 1879. He was received with the highest honors in all the countries he visited. In the years immediately following he visited Mexico and Cuba, and was a United States commissioner to make a commercial treaty with Mexico. In 1880 he was again a candidate for the Presidency, his name holding together a large body of delegates through thirty-six- ballots. In the period of illness before his death, he wrote his memoirs, without dreaming of the importance of this contribution to our knowledge of the Civil War and of his own career.

Of the earlier ex-Presidents, Jefferson was by far the most influential. He retired from the Presidency in March, 1809, and died July 4, 1826. His seventeen years of retirement were spent, for the most part, at his Virginia home, Monticello; but he was during all that time the real head of the great political party to which he belonged, and his relation to public affairs was constant and important. In this period of retirement, also he founded and created the University of Virginia, and produced much that appears in his collected writings.

 By   a   strange   coincidence,   ex-President John Adams (father of John Quincy Adams) died on the same day as Jefferson.    He had   been an ex-President for twenty-five years, and his almost complete withdrawal  from public    affairs    was    in    marked    contrast with Jefferson’s varied and vital activities.  

President Jackson, after his eight years in the White House, imitated Washington in the issuing of a farewell address to the nation, and retired to his home called the Hermitage, near Nashville, Tenn. Like Mr. Roosevelt, he had influence enough to select, nominate, and help elect his successor; and he remained an influential public personage during the remaining eight years of his life. 
An exceedingly active and untiring ex- President was Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren. He was President from 1837 to 1841,— running for a second term in 1840 but beaten by William Henry Harrison, of the opposing party. Four years later, in 1844, Van Buren was again a candidate before the Democratic convention, where he had a clear majority of the delegates but was unable, on account of the " two-thirds rule," to win the nomination. He had opposed the annexation of Texas, and the Southern Democrats nominated and elected James K. Polk against Henry Clay- By 1848, ex-President Van Buren had gone over to the Free Soil movement, and was the Presidential nominee of the new party. His candidacy won no electoral votes, but it defeated the Democrats and put the Whigs into power. He was an active supporter of Pierce in 1852, of Buchanan in 1856, and stood with his party against Lincoln in 1860. But he became a War Democrat, supporting Lincoln's policies until his own death in 1862, at his country home near Kinderhook, New York.
However men may differ as to the public uses to make of an ex-President,  most men of thought and experience would agree that there ought to be some salary or pension granted him,—as to a retired judge,—until his death. Mr. Monroe and General Grant were not the only ex-Presidents whose last days were more or less clouded by financial difficulties. Mr. Roosevelt, returning to the plaudits and greetings of a friendly nation, was subject to extraordinary expenditures by reason of those numerous demands of hospitality, correspondence, travel, and the like, that a public man cannot evade.

Mr. Roosevelt had agreed, before going abroad, to make use of a room in the editorial offices of the Outlook, a weekly family paper published in New York, and to contribute to the paper as he might be able. He had also to put his new book through the press, and to prepare the speeches which he had agreed to make at the John Brown celebration in Kansas, the Conservation Congress at St. Paul, and on other occasions, at the end of August and in the months of September and October. 

He had gone to Harvard College at commencement time, where he had met Governor Hughes of New York and paid his respects to President Taft, who was summering at Beverly, Mass. Meanwhile, except for a few hours a week at the Outlook office, he was at home at Sagamore Hill, where many public men from different parts of the country called upon him, and where it was believed by the newspapers and the cartoonists that he was much interested in hearing about the political affairs of the State of New York and the strain in the Republican party between the regulars and the so-called " insurgents " or " progressives." 
It was known that he would visit Indiana to make a speech  on behalf of the reelection of Senator Beveridge, and this was regarded as an endorsement of the " progressives." It was also known that he would make a speech on behalf of Senator Lodge's reelection in Massachusetts, and this was said to be a matter of personal friendship rather than of championship of the New England junta of high-tariff Senators.
Unquestionably Mr. Roosevelt's general sympathies were with progressives movements in the Republican party. At the moment when Governor Hughes had call a special session of the New York Legislature, Mr. Roosevelt at the Governor's request had declared himself in favor of the Governor's bill for primary elections. In the preliminary plans for the New York State convention, and in the discussion of possible candidates for the Governorship, Mr. Roosevelt's influence was undoubtedly against the further control of the so-called " machine " or " Old Guard," and in favor of Republican progress as it had been exemplified by men of the type of Governor Hughes.

And it was well known in advance that this spirit would be expressed in the speech to be delivered at Ossawatomie, Kansas, on the last day of August. It had become evident that Mr. Roosevelt was to be highly active, and to regard the ex-Presidency as a post of public duty. It was also clear that the cartoonists would find it necessary to keep him under continued observation, and that a record like this which had been prepared with some historical perspective must needs end abruptly, or else be continued in daily postscripts.

The End

A concluding word from Robert J.  Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoy our books.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people.  He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations, if we read what he has said.  We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government. 

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”.  A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.  Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive.  It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions.  Policies that foster a special privileged class was the type of government policies Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won.  He was a visionary.  He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong.  He was an intrepid pioneer that blazed a trail through a jungle of corrupt government, so that others might follow his proven and highly successful common sense approach toward honest government.  His fearless course helped make America a beacon of hope to all that seek justice.  His endless devotion to America helped make America a super power that no just nation has needed to fear as long as our citizens value his lofty resolute square deal policy toward our fellow citizens and those of other nations. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us.  It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages.  His message is an example, clearly defined.  It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country.  Join the good fight today.  You only need to read and interest others to do the same.  

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we read. ” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt.  It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”.  Dare to help make Theodore Roosevelt the standard and not the exception.  America needs to adopt a wise, fearless and honest role model as the standard we revere, so that our public servants know what we expect.  The first step to honest government is no harder than setting proper standards of conduct for our public servants through the use of a proper role model.  Can you find one quality in Theodore Roosevelt that is not right in a public servant?  If you think you can, I bet your conjecture is based upon something other than truth and honest reasoning and this American would love an opportunity to debate any such conjecture.