Theodore Roosevelt Part 10

During the first years of Roosevelt's Administration he had to encounter many conditions which existed rather from the momentum they had from the past than from any living vigor of their own.

It was a time of transition. The group of politicians dating from the Civil War was nearly extinct, and the leaders who had come to the front after 1870 were also much thinned in number, and fast dropping off. Washington itself was becoming one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with its broad avenues, seldom thronged, its circles and squares, whose frequenters seemed never busy, its spirit of leisure, its suggestion of opulence and amplitude, and of a not too zealous or disturbing hold on reality. You still saw occasionally a tiny cottage inhabited by a colored family cuddled up against a new and imposing palace, just as you might pa.s.s a colored mammy on the same sidewalk with a millionaire Senator, for the residential section had not yet been socially standardized.

Only a few years before, under President Cleveland, a single telephone sufficed for the White House, and as the telephone operator stopped work at six o'clock, the President himself or some member of his family had to answer calls during the evening.

A single secretary wrote in long hand most of the Presidential correspondence. Examples of similar primitiveness might be found almost everywhere, and the older generation seemed to imagine that a certain slipshod and dozing quality belonged to the very idea of Democracy. If you were neatly dressed and wide awake, you would inevitably be remarked among your fellows; such remark would imply superiority; and to be superior was supposedly to be undemocratic.

Nevertheless this was a time of transition, and the vigor which emanated from the young President pa.s.sed like electricity through all lines and hastened the change. He caused the White House to be remodeled and fitted on the one hand for social purposes which required much more s.p.a.cious accommodation, and on the other for offices in which he could conduct the largely increased Presidential business. Instead of one telephone there were many working night and day, and instead of a single longhand secretary, there were a score of stenographers and typists.

Before he left Washington he saw a vast Union Station erected instead of the over-grown shanties at Sixth Street, and he had encouraged the laying-out of the waste places beyond the Capitol, thus adding to the city another and imposing section. His interest did not stop at politics, nor at carrying through the reforms he had at heart. He attended with equal keenness and solicitude to external improvements.

Now at first, as I have suggested, his chief duty was to continue President McKinley's policies, which concerned mostly the establishment of our insular dependencies, and the readjustment of our diplomatic relations. I have described how he closed the dispute over the Alaskan Boundary, over our joint control with England over the Isthmus of Panama, and how he circ.u.mvented the attempt of the Colombian blackmailers to block our construction of the Ca.n.a.l.

We must now glance at a matter of almost equal importance--our relations with Germany. The German attack on civilization, which was openly delivered in 194, revealed to the world that for twenty years before the German Emperor had been secretly preparing his mad project of Universal Conquest. We see now that he used all sorts of base tools German exchange professors, spies, bribers, conventional insinuators and corrupters, organizers of pro-German sentiment, and of societies of German Americans. So little did he and his lackeys understand the American spirit that they a.s.sumed that at the given signal the people of the United States would gladly go over to them. He counted on securing North and South America by commerce and corruption, and not by armed force. The reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine by President Cleveland in 1895 seriously troubled him; for he contemplated planting German colonies in Central and South America without resistance, but the Monroe Doctrine in its latest interpretation forbade him or any foreign government from establishing dominion in either American continent. Still, two things comforted him: the Americans were, he thought, a loose, happy-go-lucky people, without any consecutive or deep-laid policy, as foolish republicans must be; and next, he knew that he had the most powerful army in the world, which, if put to the test, would crush the undisciplined American militia at the first onset. He adopted, therefore, a double policy: he pretended openly to be most friendly to the Americans; he flattered all of them whom he could reach in Berlin, and he directed an effusive propaganda in the United States. In secret, how ever, he lost no occasion to harm this country. When the Spanish War came in 1898, he tried to form a naval coalition of his fleet with those of France and England, and it was only the refusal of England to- join in it which saved this country from disaster. The United States owe Mr. Balfour, who at that time controlled the British Foreign Office, an eternal debt of grat.i.tude, because it was he who replied to the Kaiser's secret temptation: "No: if the British fleet takes any part in this war, it will be to put itself between the American fleet and those of your coalition."

The Kaiser expressed his real sentiment towards the United States in a remark which he made later, not expecting that it would reach American ears. "If I had had ships enough," he said, "I would have taken the Americans by the scruff of the neck." As it was, he showed his purpose to those who had eyes to see it, by ordering the German Squadron under Diederichs to go to Manila and take what he could there. Fortunately before he could take Manila or the Philippines he had to take the American Commodore, George Dewey, and when he discovered what sort of a sea-fighter the mountains of Vermont had produced in Dewey, he decided not to attack him. Perhaps also the fact that the English commander at Manila, Captain Chichester, stood ready to back up Dewey caused Diederichs to back down. The true Prussian truculence always oozes out when it has not a safe margin of superiority in strength on its side.

The Kaiser was not to be foiled, however, in his determination to get a foothold in America. As the likelihood that the Panama Ca.n.a.l would be constructed became a certainty, he redoubled his efforts. He tried to buy from a Mexican Land Company two large ports in Lower California for "his personal use." These would have given him, of course, control over the approach to the Ca.n.a.l from the Pacific. Simultaneously he sent a surveying expedition to the Caribbean Sea, which found a s.p.a.cious harbor, that might serve as a naval base, on an unoccupied island near the main line of vessels approaching the Ca.n.a.l from the east, but before he could plant a force there; the presence of his surveyors was discovered, and they sailed away.

He now resorted to a more cunning ruse. The people of Venezuela owed considerable sums to merchants and bankers in Germany, England, and Italy, and the creditors could recover neither their capital nor the interest on it. The Kaiser bethought him self of the simple plan of making a naval demonstration against the Venezuelans if they did not pay up; he would send his troops ash.o.r.e, occupy the chief harbors, and take in the customs. To disguise his ulterior motive, he persuaded England and Italy to join him in collecting their bill against Venezuela. So warships of the three nations appeared off the Venezuelan coast, and for some time they maintained what they called "A peaceful blockade."

After a while Secretary Hay pointed out that there could be no such thing as a peaceful blockade; that a blockade was, by its very nature, an act of war; accordingly the blockaders declared a state of belligerency between themselves and Venezuela, and Germany threatened to bombard the seacoast towns unless the debt was settled without further delay. President Roosevelt had no illusions as to what bombardment and occupation by German troops would mean. If a regiment or two of Germans once went into garrison at Caracas or Porto Cabello, the Kaiser would secure the foothold he craved on the American Coast within striking distance of the projected Ca.n.a.l, and Venezuela, unable to ward off his aggression, would certainly be helpless to drive him out. Mr.

Roosevelt allowed Mr. Herbert W. Bowen, the American Minister to Venezuela, to serve as Special Commissioner for Venezuela in conducting her negotiations with. Germany. He, himself, however, took the matter into his own hands at Washington. Having sounded England and Italy, and learned that they were willing to arbitrate, and knowing also that neither of them schemed to take territorial payment for their bills, he directed his diplomatic attack straight at the Kaiser. When the German Amba.s.sador, Dr.

von Holleben, one of the pompous and ponderous professorial sort of German officials, was calling on him at the White House, the President told him to warn the Kaiser that unless he consented, within a given time--about ten days--to arbitrate the Venezuelan dispute, the American fleet under Admiral Dewey would appear off the Venezuelan coast and defend it from any attack which the German Squadron might attempt to make. Holleben displayed consternation; he protested that since his Imperial Master had refused to arbitrate, there could be no arbitration. His Imperial Master could not change his Imperial Mind, and the dutiful servant asked the President whether he realized what such a demand meant. The President replied calmly that he knew it meant war. A week pa.s.sed, but brought no reply from Berlin; then Holleben called again at the White House on some unimportant matters; as he turned to go the President inquired, "Have you heard from Berlin?" "No," said Holleben. "Of course His Imperial Majesty cannot arbitrate." "Very well, " said Roosevelt, "you may think it worth while to cable to Berlin that I have changed my mind. I am sending instructions to Admiral Dewey to take our fleet to Venezuela next Monday instead of Tuesday." Holleben brought the interview to a close at once and departed with evident signs of alarm. He returned in less than thirty-six hours with relief and satisfaction written on his face, as he informed the President, "His Imperial Majesty consents to arbitrate."

In order to screen the Kaiser's mortification from the world, Roosevelt declared that his transaction--which only he, the Kaiser, and Holleben knew about--should not be made public at the time; and he even went so far, a little later, in speaking on the matter as to refer to the German Emperor as a good friend and practicer of arbitration.

Many years later, when Roosevelt and I discussed this episode we cast about for reasons to account for the Kaiser's sudden back-down. We concluded that after the first interview Holleben either did not cable to Berlin at all, or he gave the message with his own comment that it was all a bluff. After the second interview, he consulted Buenz, the German Consul-General at New York, who knew Roosevelt well and knew also the powerfulness of Dewey's fleet. He a.s.sured Holleben that the President was not bluffing, and that Dewey could blow all the German Navy, then in existence, out of the water in half an hour. So Holleben sent a hot cablegram to Berlin, and Berlin understood that only an immediate answer would do.

Poor, servile, old bureaucrat Holleben! The Kaiser soon treated him as he was in the habit of treating any of his servile creatures, high or low, who made a fiasco. Deceived by the glowing reports which his agents in the United States sent to him, the Kaiser believed that the time was ripe for a visit by a Hohenzollern, to let off the pent-up enthusiasm of the German-Americans and to stimulate the pro-German conspiracy here.

Accordingly Prince Henry of Prussia came over and made a whirlwind trip, as far as Chicago; but it was in no sense a royal progress. Mult.i.tudes flocked to see him out of curiosity, but Prince Henry realized, and so did the German kin here, that his mission had failed. A scapegoat must be found, and apparently Holleben was the chosen victim.

The Kaiser cabled him to resign and take the next day's steamer home, alleging "chronic illness" as an excuse. He sailed from Hoboken obediently, and there were none so poor as to do him reverence. The sycophants who had fawned upon him while he was enjoying the Imperial favor as Amba.s.sador took care not to be seen waving a farewell to him from the pier. Instead of that, they were busy telling over his blunders. He had served French instead of German champagne at a banquet for Prince Henry, and he had allowed the Kaiser's yacht to be christened in French champagne. How could such a blunderer satisfy the diplomatic requirements of the vain and petty Kaiser? And yet! Holleben was utterly devoted and willing to grovel in the mud. He even suggested to President Roosevelt that at the State Banquet at the White House, Prince Henry, as a Hohenzollern, and the representative of the Almightiest Kaiser, should walk out to dinner first; but there was no discussion, for the President replied curtly, "No person living precedes the President of the United States in the White House."

Henceforth the Kaiser understood that the United States Government, at least as long as Roosevelt was President, would repel any attempt by foreigners to violate the Monroe Doctrine, and set up a nucleus of foreign power in either North or South America. He devoted himself all the more earnestly to pushing the sly work of peaceful penetration, that work of spying and lying in which the German people proved itself easily first. The diabolical propaganda, aimed not only at undermining the United States, at seducing the Irish and other hyphenate groups of Americans, but at polluting the Mexicans and several of the South American States; and later there was a thoroughly organized conspiracy to stir up animosity between this country and j.a.pan by making the j.a.panese hate and suspect the Americans, and by making the Americans hate and suspect the j.a.panese. I alluded just now to the fact that German intrigue was working in Bogota, and influenced the Colombian blackmailers in refusing to sign the Hay Herran Ca.n.a.l Treaty with the United States, and peered about in the hope of snapping up the Ca.n.a.l rights for Germany.

Outwardly, during the first decade of the twentieth century, the Kaiser seemed to be most active in interfering in European politics, including those of Morocco, in which the French were entangled. In 1904 the war between Russia and j.a.pan broke out.

Roosevelt remained strictly neutral towards both belligerents, making it evident, however, that either or both of them could count on his friendly offices if they sought mediation. At the beginning of the war, it was generally a.s.sumed that the German Kaiser shed no tears over the Russian reverses, for the weaker Russia became, the less Germany needed to fear her as a neighbor.

At length, however, when it looked as if the j.a.panese might actually shatter the Russian Empire, Germany and the other European Powers seemed to have had a common feeling that a decided victory by an Asiatic nation like j.a.pan would certainly require a readjustment of world politics, and might not only put in jeopardy European interests and control in Asia, but also raise up against Europe what the Kaiser had already advertised as the Yellow Peril. I have no evidence that President Roosevelt shared this anxiety; on the contrary, I think that he was not unwilling that a strong j.a.pan should exist to prevent the dismemberment of Eastern Asia by European land-grabbers.

By the spring of 1905, both Russia and j.a.pan had fought almost to exhaustion. The probability was that Russia with her vast population could continue to replenish her army. j.a.pan, with great pluck, after winning amazing victories, which left her weaker and weaker, made no sign of wishing for an armistice.

Roosevelt, however, on his own motion wrote a private letter to the Czar, Nicholas II, and sent George Meyer, Amba.s.sador to Italy, with it on a special mission to Petrograd. The President urged the Czar to consider making peace, since both the Russians and the j.a.panese had nearly fought them selves out, and further warfare would add to the losses and burdens, already tremendous, of both people. Probably he hinted also that another disaster in the field might cause an outbreak by the Russian Revolutionists.

I have not seen his letter--perhaps a copy of it has escaped, in the Czar's secret archives, the violence of the Bolshevists--but I have heard him speak about it. I have reason to suppose also that he wrote privately to the Kaiser to use his influence with the Czar. At any rate, the Czar listened to the President's advice, and by one of those diplomatic devices by which both parties saved their dignity, an armistice was arranged and, in the summer of 1905, the Peace was signed. The following year, the Trustees of the n.o.bel Peace Prize recognized Roosevelt's large part in stopping the war, by giving the Prize to him.

Meanwhile, the irritation between France and Germany had increased to the point where open rupture was feared. For years Germany had been waiting for a propitious moment to swoop down on France and overwhelm her. The French intrigues in Morocco, which were leading visibly to a French Protectorate over that country, aroused German resentment, for the Germans coveted Morocco themselves. The Kaiser went so far as to invite Roosevelt to interfere with him in Morocco, but this, the President replied, was impossible. Probably he was not unwilling to have the German Emperor understand that, while the United States would interfere with all their might to prevent a foreign attack on the Monroe Doctrine, they meant to keep their hands off in European quarrels. That he also had a clear idea of William II's temperament appears from the following opinion which I find in a private letter of his at this time: "The Kaiser had weekly pipe dreams."

The situation grew very angry, and von Billow, the German Chancellor, did not hide his purpose of upholding the German pretensions, even at the cost of war. President Roosevelt then wrote--privately--to the Kaiser impressing it upon him that for Germany to make war on France would be a crime against civilization, and he suggested that a Conference of Powers be held to discuss the Moroccan difficulty, and to agree upon terms for a peaceful adjustment. The Kaiser finally accepted Roosevelt's advice, and after a long debate over the preliminaries, the Conference was held at Algeciras, Spain.

That Roosevelt understood, or even suspected, the great German conspiracy which the Kaiser's hire lings were weaving over the United States is wholly improbable. Had he known of any plot he would have been the first to hunt it down and crush it. He knew in general of the extravagant vaporings of the Pan-Germans; but, like most of us, he supposed that there was still enough sanity, not to say common sense, left in Germany to laugh such follies away. Through his intimate friend, Spring-Rice, subsequently the British Amba.s.sador, he had early and sound information of the conditions of Germany. He watched with curiosity the abnormal expansion of the German Fleet. All these things simply confirmed his belief that the United States must attend seriously to the business of making military and naval preparations.

Secretary Hay had already secured the recognition by the European Powers of the policy of the Open Door in China, the year before Roosevelt became President, but the struggle to maintain that policy had to be kept up for several years. On November 21, 1900, John Hay wrote to Henry Adams: "At least we are spared the infamy of an alliance with Germany. I would rather, I think, be the dupe of China, than chum of the Kaiser. Have you noticed how the world will take anything nowadays from a German? Billow said yesterday in substance--'We have demanded of China everything we can think of. If we think of anything else we will demand that, and be d--d to you'--and not a man in the world kicks."*

* W. R. Thayer: John Hay, II, 248.

By an adroit move similar to that by which Hay had secured the unwilling adherence of the Powers to his original proposal of the Open Door, he, with Roosevelt's sanction, prevented the German Emperor from carrying out a plan to cut up China and divide the slices among the Europeans.

Equally adroit was Roosevelt's method of dealing with the Czar in 1903. Russian mobs ran amuck and ma.s.sacred many Jews in the city of Kishineff. The news of this atrocity reached the outside world slowly: when it came, the Jews of western Europe, and especially those of the United States, cried out in horror, held meetings, drew up protests, and framed pet.i.tions, asking the Czar to punish the criminals. Leading American Jews besought Roosevelt to plead their cause before the Czar. As it was well known that the Czar would refuse to receive such pet.i.tions, and would regard himself as insulted by whatever nation should lay them before him by official diplomatic means, the world wondered what Roosevelt would do. He took one of his short cuts, and chose a way which everybody saw was most obvious and most simple, as soon as he had chosen it. He sent the pet.i.tions to our Amba.s.sador at Petrograd, accompanying them with a letter which recited the atrocities and grievances. In this letter, which was handed to the Russian Secretary of State, our Government asked whether His Majesty the Czar would condescend to receive the pet.i.tions. Of course the reply was no, but the letter was published in all countries, so that the Czar also knew of the pet.i.tions, and of the horrors which called them out. In this fashion the former Ranchman and Rough Rider outwitted, by what I may call his straightforward guile, the crafty diplomats of the Romanoffs.

CHAPTER XV. ROOSEVELT AND CONGRESS

In a previous chapter I glanced at three or four of the princ.i.p.al measures in internal policy which Roosevelt took up and fought through, until he finally saw them pa.s.sed by Congress. No other President, as has been often remarked, kept Congress so busy; and, we may add, none of his predecessors (unless it were Lincoln with the legislation required by the Civil War) put so many new laws on the national statute book. Mr. Charles G. Washburn enumerates these acts credited to Roosevelt's seven and a half years' administration: "The Elkins Anti-Rebate Law applying to railroads; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor and the Bureau of Corporations; the law authorizing the building of the Panama Ca.n.a.l; the Hepburn Bill amending and vitalizing the Interstate Commerce Act; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection laws; the law creating the Bureau of Immigration; the Employers'

Liability and Safety Appliance Laws, that limited the working hours of employees; the law making the Government liable for injuries to its employees; the law forbidding child labor in the District of Columbia; the reformation of the Consular Service; prohibition of campaign contributions from corporations; the Emergency Currency Law, which also provided for the creation of the Monetary Commission." *

* C. G. Washburn, 128, 129.

Although the list is by no means complete, it shows that Roosevelt's receptive and sleepless mind fastened on the full circle of questions which interested American life, so far as that is controlled or directed by national legislation. Some of the laws pa.s.sed were simply readjustments--new statutes on old matters. Other laws were new, embodying the first attempt to define the att.i.tude which the courts should hold towards new questions which had grown suddenly into great importance. The decade which had favored the springing-up and amazing expansion of the Big Interests, had to be followed by the decade which framed legislation for regulating and curbing these interests.

Quite naturally, the monopolists affected did not like to be harnessed or controlled, and, to put it mildly, they resented the interference of the formidable young President whom they could neither frighten, inveigle, nor cajole.

And yet it is as evident to all Americans now, as it was to some Americans at the time, that that legislation had to be pa.s.sed; because if the monopolists had been allowed to go on unrestrained, they would either have perverted this Republic into an open Plutocracy, in which individual liberty and equality before the law would have disappeared, or they would have hurried on the Social Revolution, the Armageddon of Labor and Capital, the merciless conflict of cla.s.s with cla.s.s, which many persons already vaguely dreaded, or thought they saw looming like an ominous cloud on the horizon. It seems astounding that any one should have questioned the necessity of setting up regulations.

And will not posterity wonder, when it learns that only in the first decade of the twentieth century did we provide laws against the cruel and killing labor of little children, and against impure foods and drugs?

Year after year, the railroads furnished unending causes for legislative control. There were the old laws which the railroad men tried to evade and which the President, as was his duty, insisted on enforcing; and still more insistent and spectacular were the new problems. Just as three or four hundred years ago the most active and vigorous Frenchmen and English men tried to get possession of large tracts of land, or even of provinces, and became counts and dukes, so the Americans of our generation, who aspired to lead the pushing financier cla.s.s, worked day and night to own a railroad. Naturally one railroad did not satisfy a man who was bitten by this ambition; he reached out for several, or even for a transcontinental system. The war for railroad ownership or monopoly was waged intensely, and in 1901 it nearly plunged the country into a disastrous financial panic. Edward H.

Harriman, who had only recently been regarded as a great power in the struggle for railroad supremacy, clashed with James J. Hill, of Minnesota, and J. P. Morgan, a New York banker, over the Northern Pacific Railroad. Their battle was nominally a draw, because Wall Street rushed in and, to avert a nation-wide calamity, demanded a truce. But Harriman remained, until his death in 1909, the railroad czar of the United States, and when he died, he was master of twenty-five thousand miles of road, chief influencer of fifty thousand more miles, besides steamboat companies, banks, and other financial inst.i.tutions. He controlled more money than any other American. I summarize these statistics, in order to show the reader what sort of a Colossus the President of the United States had to do battle with when he undertook to secure new laws adequate to the control of the enormously expanded railway problems. And he did succeed, in large measure, in bringing the giant corporations to recognize the authority of the Nation. The decision of the Supreme Court in the Northern Securities case, by which the merger of two or more competing roads was declared illegal, put a stop to the practice of consolidation, which might have resulted in the ownership of all the railroads in the United States by a single person. Then followed the process of "unscrambling the omelet," to use J. P.

Morgan's phrase, in order to bring the companies already illegally merged within the letter of the law. Probably a lynx-eyed investigator might discover that in some of the efforts to legalize operations in the future, "the voice was Jacob's, but the hands were the hands of Esau."

The laws aimed at regulating transportation, rates, and rebates, certainly made for justice, and helped to enlighten great corporations as to their place in the community and their duties towards it. Roosevelt showed that his fearlessness had apparently no bounds, when in 1907 he caused suit to be brought against the Standard Oil Company in Indiana--a branch of a monopoly which was popularly supposed to be above the law--for receiving a rebate from a railroad on the petroleum shipped by the Company. The judge who tried the case gave a verdict in favor of the Government, but another judge, to whom appeal was made, reversed the decision, and finally at a re-trial, a third judge dismissed the indictment. "Thus," says Mr. Ogg, "a good case was lost through judicial blundering." *

* Ogg, 50.

But the greatest of Roosevelt's works as a legislator were those which he carried through in the fields of conservation and reclamation. He did not invent these issues; he was only one of many persons who understood their vast importance. He gives full credit to Mr. Gifford Pinchot and Mr. F. H. Newell, who first laid these subjects before him as matters which he as President ought to consider. He had himself during his days in the West seen the need of irrigating the waste tracts. He was a quick and willing learner, and in his first message to Congress (December 1, 1901) he remarked: "The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital internal problems of the United States." Years later, in referring to this part of his work, he said:

'The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still obtained, and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent and condition. The relation of the conservation of national resources to the problems of national welfare and national efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the reelection or defeat of a Congressman here and there--a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.'*

* Autobiography, p. 430.

The public lands saved mounted to millions of acres. The long-standing practice of stealing these lands was checked and put a stop to as rapidly as possible. Individuals and private companies had bought for a song great tracts of national property, getting thereby, it might be, the t.i.tle to mineral deposits worth fabulous sums; and these persons were naturally angry at being deprived of the immense fortunes which they had counted on for themselves. A company would buy up an entire watershed, and control, for its private profit, the water-supply of a region. Roosevelt insisted with indisputable logic that the States and Counties ought them selves to own such natural resources and derive an income from them. So, too, were the areas restored to man's habitation, and to agriculture, by irrigation, and by reforesting. A company, having no object but its own enrichment, would ruthlessly cut down a thousand square miles of timber in order to convert it into wood pulp for paper, or into lumber for building; and the region thus devastated, as if a German army had been over it, would be left without regard to the effect on the climate and the water supply of the surrounding country. Surely this was wrong.

It seems to me as needless now to argue in behalf of Roosevelt's legislation for the conservation of national resources as to argue against cannibalism as a practice fit for civilized men.

That lawyers of repute and Congressmen of reputation should have done their utmost, as late as 1906, to obstruct and defeat the pa.s.sage of the Meat Inspection Bill must seem incredible to persons of average sanity and conscience. If any of those obstructionists still live, they do not boast of their performance, nor is it likely that their children will exult over this part of the paternal record.

In order not to exaggerate Roosevelt's importance in these fundamental reforms, I would repeat that he did not originate the idea of many of them. He gladly took his cue for conservation from Gifford Pinchot, and for reclamation from F. H. Newell, as I have said; the need of inspecting the packing-houses which exported meat, from Senator A. J. Beveridge, and so on. The vital fact is that these projects got form and vigor and publicity, and were pushed through Congress, only after Roosevelt took them up.

His opponents, the packers, the land-robbers, the mine-grabbers, the wood-pulp pirates, fought him at every point. They appealed to the old law to discredit and d.a.m.n the new. They gave him no quarter, and he asked for none because he was bent on securing justice, irrespective of persons or private interests. It followed, of course, that they watched eagerly for any slip which might wreck him, and they thought they had found their chance in 1907.

That was a year of financial upheaval, almost of panic, the blame for which the Big Interests tried to fasten on the President. It resulted, they said, from his attack on Capital and the Corporations. A special incident gave plausibility to some of their bitter criticism. Messrs. Gary and Frick, of the United States Steel Corporation, called on the President, and told him that the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that, if it went under, a general panic would probably ensue. To prevent this financial disaster, their Corporation was willing to buy up enough of the Tennessee Company to save it, but they wished to know whether the President would allow the purchase. He told them that he could not officially advise them to take the action proposed, but that he did not regard it as a public duty of his to raise any objection. They made the purchase, and the total amount of their holdings in the Tennessee Company did not equal in value what they had originally held, for the stock had greatly shrunk. The Attorney-General subsequently informed the President that he saw no reason to prosecute the United States Steel Corporation. But the President's enemies did not spare their criticism. They circulated grave suspicions; they hinted that, if the whole truth were known, Roosevelt would be embarra.s.sed, to say the least.

What had become of his pretended impartiality when he allowed one of the great Trusts to do, with impunity, that which others were prosecuted for? The public, which seldom has the knowledge, or the information, necessary for understanding business or financial complexities, usually remarks, with the archaic sapience of a Greek chorus, "There must be some fire where there is so much smoke." But the public interest was never seriously roused over the Tennessee Coal and Iron affair, and, six years later, when a United States District Court handed down a verdict in which this matter was referred to, the public had almost forgotten what it was all about.

The great result from Roosevelt's battle for conservation, which I believe will glorify him, in the future, to heroic proportions as a statesman, is that where he found wide stretches of desert he left fertile States, that he saved from destruction, that he seized from the hands of the spoilers rivers and valleys which belonged to the people, and that he kept for the people mineral lands of untold value. Nor did he work for material and sanitary prosperity alone; but he worked also for Beauty. He reserved as National Parks for the use and delight of men and women forever some of the most beautiful regions in the United States, and the support he gave to these causes urged them forward after he ceased to be President.