CHAPTER 17 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE  WALKS  WITH  KINGS

FOR a year, in spite of his absence from the scenes of its vital affairs, the world, and especially that part of it which calls itself the United States, had been talking of Theodore Roosevelt and arguing about Theodore Roosevelt and asking what Theodore Roosevelt would say about this and do about that, and counting the days until Theodore Roosevelt should emerge from his self-imposed exile and take up once more his leadership of the forces of progress.  Unexpected, disquieting things had happened meanwhile.  The Republican party was in a bad way, the country was in a ferment, a tide of popular unrest was rising. 

Roosevelt refused to make any statement on the political situation.  He was out of politics, he said. 

The world gave Theodore Roosevelt its glad 

"Welcome home!" at Khartoum amid beating drums and flying banners.  He made speeches here and there, he inspected a college, he reviewed troops.  The British officials praised him as a great statesman, the fellaheen in their blue robes at the river's edge cheered him as a mighty hunter.  

He had planned to slip through Europe as a private citizen.  Khartoum taught him that he had evidently made a miscalculation.  He cabled to New York for a stenographer. 

His trip down the Nile was a series of receptions and speeches to cheering crowds.  

At Luxor, a discordant note broke harshly into the enthusiastic harmony.  He received word indirectly from the Egyptian revolutionary party that in case he should presume to pass judgment on the assassination of the Egyptian Premier, Boutras Pasha, a month previous, he would himself be assassinated.  

He knew the facts.  Boutras Pasha had stood for law and order.  The Nationalists, who had abetted his murder, stood for chaos and anarchy.  Three days later he spoke at Cairo before the University of Egypt, and in unequivocal terms condemned the assassination and all who defended it. 

There was a violent outcry.  Extra guards were set about him wherever he went.  The Nationalist newspapers excoriated him.  But sober public sentiment applauded; and no one made the threatened attack against his life. 

He proceeded to Rome and was immediately the center of another bitter controversy.  He had asked to be presented to the Pope.  The Vatican had sought to make his presentation conditional on his declaration that he would not call at the college of the Methodists, the Church's active opponents in Rome.  Roosevelt felt that self-respect and his position as an American citizen forbade his acceptance of any restriction on his freedom of action, and, knowing that the most effective foe of misunderstanding was publicity, gave the full correspondence to the press.  The newspapers of Europe and America flamed with the story.  A fierce religious controversy threatened.  Roosevelt sent out a statement to the American people "expressing the earnest hope that the incident would be treated in a matter-of-fact way, as merely personal, and, above all, as not warranting the slightest exhibition of rancor and bitterness"; rebuked the head of the Methodists in Rome who attempted to make capital out of it; and flung himself with zest into the celebrations of every sort arranged for him by the King of Italy, the Italian government, and the City of Rome. 

The journey of the "private American citizen" north through Italy to Venice and along the Riviera was a triumphant succession of receptions and wildly cheering crowds.  At the home of his sister-in-law, Miss Carow, at Porto Maurizio, he rested to catch up with his mail.  But from all directions came distinguished Italians; the municipality welcomed him as "the promoter of international peace and the champion of human fraternity and solidarity," conferred on him the freedom of the city, and named a street after him; laymen and prelates sought his counsel; peasants and artisans bombarded his carriage with flowers as he drove by.  '' Viva, viva, viva Roosevelt!" was the cry on all sides. 

Once more he was on the wing, first to Venice, then to Vienna.  At the Austrian frontier he was met by a representative of the Emperor Francis Joseph, who welcomed him to Austria in the name of "His gracious Catholic Majesty. " The people who lined the streets saw in him the foremost fighter in the world for popular rights against special privilege; the princes and diplomats who crowded about him in the palace recognized the powerful administrator, the champion of law and order, the rounded and magnetic personality.  Hunters and soldiers and scientists and men of letters vied with one another to do him honor. 

Before his coming, the Viennese had expressed doubts of his real greatness.  Those doubts his visit dissipated.  

"Ist das ein Mensch!" was the phrase.  "What a man!"

And the head waiter of the hotel where Roosevelt was stopping stared with large eyes at the crowd gathered to see the great American enter his carriage, and cried: "This is wonderful.  I never saw anything like it before, and yet we have had many kings staying here. "

He proceeded to Hungary.  At the station at Budapest thousands were waiting for him in a heavy downpour of rain.  Here he met the same enthusiasm he had found in Rome and Vienna.  In the Hungarian House of Parliament, Count Apponyi greeted him officially as "the champion of human rights and liberty and international justice. " He called on Francis Kossuth, the son of the great Hungarian patriot. 

"I am ill," said Kossuth, "but if you had not been kind enough to call on me, I should have been conveyed to your hotel on a litter. "

He drove out into the country, and in every village through which he passed he was greeted with delegations and garlands, with triumphal arches, and flowers and cheers.  He returned to the city, and tens of thousands of people, filling the avenues along the Danube outside his hotel, cheered, and would not cease cheering until he appeared. 

The Hungarian people, aching for liberty, recognized in him the kind of leader of whom they themselves were most sorely in need. 

Roosevelt went to Paris, and on April 23d, in the amphitheater of the ancient Sorbonne, delivered his address on "Citizenship in a Republic. " Once more the streets through which he passed were filled with immense crowds, and in the hall where he spoke three thousand of the most eminent men of France were gathered to hear him. 

It was a message from the citizen of one republic to the citizens of another that he delivered there, vivid and pungent and eloquent, a denunciation of cynicism and intellectual aloofness, and a laudation of those "commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues" which make character and which he had persistently in season and out of season exalted among his own people.  In ringing words he denounced the phrase-maker in a republic, '' the phrase-monger" whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, and held high      the man of action who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great , enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. 

Paris and all Prance were stirred by his words.  His speech was sent to every school-teacher in the republic.  Political leaders gained new courage from it, the people new inspiration.  Not only during his stay, but for weeks after he had gone, the speech and the man were still the main topic of conversation.  The French Cabinet dared, on May ist, to present a firmer front under the threat of an unruly Socialist demonstration than any French government had in fifteen years dared to do. 

He left in the minds of these people," said a Parisian, '' some of that intangible spirit of his they felt what he would have felt in a similar emergency, and for the first time in their lives showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon mischief. "

Roosevelt went to Brussels and was entertained by King Albert and the Queen; he went to The Hague and was received by Queen Wilhelmina and the Prince Consort; he went to Copenhagen, to Christiania.  Everywhere were banners and elaborate decorations and royalties on the station platform, and banquets and cheering crowds and statesmen and scientists and soldiers and poets crowding round him to have a minute's talk.  To these men he was the personification of the moral force in man which translates ideals into accomplished benefits; and they studied him as a strange and wonderful expression of a new spirit in the affairs of men. 

At Christiania he delivered a lecture on "Inter-national Peace" before the Nobel Prize Committee which, in 1906, had awarded him the peace prize for bringing about the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, pleading for a league of nations backed by adequate force.  He went to Stockholm, and again he was received with the honors of a king. 

He turned southward.  At Stockholm he had received news of the death of King Edward VII of England, and all further festivities had every  where been canceled.  The German Emperor had planned a series of entertainments of extraordinary magnificence for this hero of his whom he so frankly idolized, but King Edward's death made these impossible.  Roosevelt was not sorry.  He had had more than his share of state banquets, and a gala performance at the opera had no charms for one to whom any performance at the opera was a torture. 

Berlin was on the surface as enthusiastically hospitable as the other capitals of the Continent.  The Roosevelt party arrived early in the morning.  At noon they were escorted to Potsdam by the Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, von Schoen.  The Emperor was on the steps of the Imperial Palace, awaiting them.  It was late afternoon before he allowed them to depart. 

The next morning Roosevelt was again at the Emperor's side, on horseback, riding to the great troop maneuvers at Doeberitz.  For five hours they watched the maneuvers of the thousands on thousands of trained troops; then the long, brilliant march past. 

At last the maneuvers were over.  The competing generals with their staffs gathered about the Emperor for discussion. 

The Emperor turned to his guest.  "Roosevelt, my friend," he said, "I wish to welcome you in the presence of my Guards.  I ask you to remember that you are the only private citizen who ever reviewed the troops of Germany. "

The next day, May i2th, the Emperor and Empress and the highest military and civil officials of the government gathered with the faculty and student body of the University of Berlin to hear Roosevelt's lecture on "The World Movement. " They waited and waited.  Roosevelt did not appear.  He arrived at last, some twenty minutes late.  The crowds at Berlin, it seemed, were as enthusiastic as the crowds elsewhere.  They had jammed the street through which Roosevelt's car had to pass to reach the university, and kept him a prisoner with their ovation. 

But though the Emperor was cordial, the news-papers, on the whole, friendly, and the populace vociferous, Roosevelt was conscious in Berlin as nowhere else of a veiled hostility to himself and to the United States.  The truth was that the professors thought his address platitudinous, without realizing, as the French intellectuals did, that the Ten Commandments are platitudes; the statesmen were not interested in it, for they were not interested in its theme, which was international cooperation; the military officers resented the Emperor's attentions to a civilian, and were frank in their expressions of displeasure that a mere American should have been allowed to review Prussian troops. 

All the leading officials were undisguisedly scornful of America; none of them made the slightest attempt to conceal his hostility.  They frankly asserted their conviction . that America was a land of dollar-chasers in which a man of Roosevelt's idealism was the exception which proved the rule.  One German newspaper described him as a spiritual descendant of Frederick the Great, and another as so much like Bismarck as really to have no American qualities at all.  In this respect the German papers followed those of Italy and France, which persisted in praising him at the expense of his countrymen.  Rome thought him much more like Garibaldi than like an average American; Paris considered him as distinctly Gallic in temperament; London declared that he was much more of the type of an English than an American statesman.  All agreed that the hero-worship of Theodore Roosevelt was not American, but European.  "America," they declared, "America does not understand the man whom Europe delights to honor. "

Roosevelt arrived in London the middle of May. 

The King's death had, of course, completely altered the arrangements made for his visit; and a message from President Taft appointing him special ambassador of the United States at the funeral altered his own status.  He made his headquarters at Dorchester House, the residence of Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador, which immediately became a Mecca whose only rival was the somber Abbey where the body of a dead king lay in state. 

London was full of living kings during the days preceding the funeral, and one after another broke all the rules of royal custom by calling in person at Dorchester House.  The footmen suffered spasms at being confronted at any hour of the day by some king wishing to pay his respects to a Certain Eminent Private Citizen; and Whitelaw Reid, who had a fondness for earthly grandeur, beamed.  But Roosevelt, trying frantically to catch up with his correspondence, was heard to exclaim, when a flustered footman announced another sovereign:

"Hang these kings! I wish they would leave me alone!"

The kings were plentiful, and they had curious ways.  The King of Bulgaria was in London, at daggers'-points with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, because each had wished to have his special car immediately next to the engine on the Orient Express two days before, and though the King of Bulgaria had won on that question, the Archduke had revenged himself by not letting the King pass through his car on the way to the diner. 

The German Emperor was there also, evidently glad to see Roosevelt again. 

One evening at Buckingham Palace, in a room that was full of kings, Roosevelt was conversing with Ferdinand of Bulgaria.  The Emperor suddenly and brusquely interposed. 

"Friend Roosevelt," he cried, "come over here! Here's a man you really want to talk to. "

Roosevelt was amused and wondered what the "bush-league czar" was thinking.  The other man was the King of Spain. 

And so Alphonso and the American who had done more than any other man to break Spain's hold on her island possessions met after twelve years and cordially shook hands. 

The funeral of King Edward was a great and solemn pageant, but to the eye of an American it was not without its humorous aspects.  The elaborate ceremoniousness was a source of unending amusement to the man who had been the most democratic of American Presidents since Jackson.  The seriousness with which ambassadors of foreign states, even of republics, took each detail of gilded pomp struck him as hugely comic.  He had all he could do to prevent the ambassador with whom he rode in the procession from making an international issue of the fact that the coach assigned to them was not a glass coach, as the coaches of the kings were, and that the footmen who rode before and behind wore black livery when the footmen of the kings were wearing red. 

Roosevelt was glad for the inspiration which had impelled him, after an overdose of royalties, a fortnight before, to cable to Seth Bullock, United States marshal in South Dakota, to come over to London as his guest.  He wanted to see somebody who talked his own language. 

He remained in England a little short of four weeks.  Late in May Cambridge University conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws; early in June Oxford made him a Doctor of Civil Law. 

On a day halfway between these solemn academic occasions he made a speech at the Guildhall in London that set all England by the ears. 

It was about Egypt.  The Lord Mayor had conferred on him the freedom of the City of London.  In expressing his thanks he spoke of his experience in four English protectorates in Africa during the past year.  He lauded British rule there, but declared flatly that in the case of Egypt the attitude of the British government was weak, timid, and sentimental. 

Either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not, either it is or it is not your, duty to establish and keep order.  If you feel you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do no wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt.  .  .  .  Some nation must govern Egypt.  I hope and believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation. 

The speech raised a storm.  The Liberals attacked Roosevelt as a meddler who had no business to give his advice on matters which were no concern of his; the extreme radicals were wild; the extreme conservatives contemptuous; the majority of thoughtful men, however, commended Roosevelt'h courage and vision.  Statesmen who had the interests both of Egypt and of England at heart expressed their gratitude.  The affair came up in Parliament.  The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, thereupon announced that he had seen the address before its delivery and approved of it; that it had, in fact, been delivered at his expressed desire. 

The opposition collapsed.  Roosevelt sailed for home with the cheers of Englishmen, high and low, ringing in his ears. 

'' Mr.  Roosevelt came to a Europe which was sick and weary of talk, perpetual talk, about rights," said an American commentator on the Continent, "and it listened with avidity and hope to a man who spoke of duties, and spoke of them plainly and emphatically. "

"It is, in the end, as a sort of whirlwind of purification that one thinks of him," said a notable Englishman. 

And a Frenchman added: "It was a great reputation that had preceded him, that he was forced to live up to.  He succeeded.  He goes a greater man in the eyes of Europe than he was when he came.