Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

CHARACTERISTIC INDORSEMENT

absolutely nothing that would tend to excuse him or excite sympathy."

Yet this brute was able to command the assistance of a multitude of the best citizens in the community where he had formerly lived, and the services of the entire Congressional delegation from his State to work for his pardon. This final card was expected to prove the winning one, and it was played for its full effect; for the State would be needed by Mr. Roosevelt in the campaign of 1904, and its Senators and Representatives would have a share in the convention that was expected to nominate him to succeed himself.

The President scowled harder and harder as he read the pardon papers through. When he had finished the last one, he set his teeth, jabbed his pen into the ink with such force as almost to bend its nibs, and scribbled an indorsement on the petition, of which the conclusion ran thus:

"I sincerely regret it is not in my power materially to increase the sentence of this scounTHEODORE ROOSEVELT."

drel.

CHAPTER XVII

THE MAN OF MANY PARTS

A marvel of versatility-Spoiling an embryo naturalist-Perils of an emphatic style-Masterful manners-Mr. Roosevelt's work as an author-Method of composition-His newspaper reading.

ELSEWHERE I have referred to Mr. Roosevelt's many-sided quality. Even at long range this characteristic is observable, as shown by the skit in an English periodical which greeted his accession to the Presidency:

A smack of Lord Cromer, Jeff Davis a touch of him ;
A little of Lincoln, but not very much of him;
Kitchener, Bismarck, and Germany's Will,
Jupiter, Chamberlain, Buffalo Bill.

In all his varied characters he has been, and is, a marvel of energy. "A steam-engine in trousers" was what Senator Foraker dubbed him. "A volcano of electricity" was the phrase devised by the Populist Judge Doster, of Kansas. "Theodore the Sudden" was another title that

SPOILING A SCIENTIST

stuck for a time. One of his biographers describes him in an introductory paragraph as "that amiable and gifted author, legislator, fieldsportsman, soldier, reformer and executive."

This is a pretty good postscript for one man's name, but it is not a complete catalogue, for in the making of a popular leader was undoubtedly spoiled a very good natural scientist. The most conspicuous ornaments of his room in college were skins and stuffed animals. His birds he mounted himself. Live insects and reptiles were always in evidence in his study; his chums tell a funny story of a scene when he accidentally let loose on the floor of a Boston street-car a bundle of lobsters he was carrying to his rooms in Cambridge for dissection; and some of the other occupants of his lodging-house were thrown into a panic one day on confronting in an upper corridor an enormous tortoise which a friend had sent him from the South Seas, and which had escaped from his bootcloset and started for the bath-room in search of water. His graduating paper was an essay on natural history.

The late "Tom" Reed of Maine, although full of appreciation of Roosevelt's sturdy virtues, could not repress a bit of irony now and

then at the expense of his peculiarities. "If there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, Theodore," he said once, "it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments." This shot, of course, was aimed at Mr. Roosevelt's impressive way of stating well-settled and familiar truths in argument. But that trick of speech is not more characteristic than another, which I have never seen mentioned in any of the printed sketches of him. His love of fair dealing forbids his leaving a proposition half-stated, waiting for comment or questions from some interested party to draw out the rest, but moves him always to adjust the equilibrium at the outset.

For example, he never writes a line to defend his negro policy because it is simple justice to the negro, without adding that it will prove the best possible thing for the white man also in the long run. The civilized public thoroughly enjoyed his recent letter on the atrocities of lynch law, apropos of the frequency with which negroes were burned at the stake for the most hideous of crimes; but they had to read with it some equally wholesome comments on the crime itself and the punishment it deserved. His speeches on the right of labor to organize

BALANCING OPINIONS

for its own protection have always been coupled with a reminder that this right does not justify the commission of violence of any sort; and when his Trust policy had exposed him to attack as an enemy of capital, his answer was: "We shall find it necessary to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force." In telling an audience of something which he had done for a Catholic because the Catholic was a victim of religious proscription in the community where he lived, he took pains to add that he would have done just the same thing for a Protestant if the local situation had been reversed.

This is an admirable practise in most cases, because it insures a well-balanced instead of one-sided presentation of any subject. But now and then the equilibrizing process seems to have been dragged in, as it were, from pure force of habit, and then it mars the best effect of what Mr. Roosevelt has to say; as where, in expressing the sorrow of the American people for the death of Queen Victoria, he adopted the cautious prelude: "In view of the sympathy shown by the late Queen Victoria with our loss in the death of President McKinley," etc. And his description of the explosion of a Spanish shell

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »