Part 2

Order the squadron, except the _Monocacy_, to Hongkong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war, Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish Squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in the Philippine Islands. Keep _Olympia_ until further orders.

Roosevelt.

I believe he was never again permitted to be Acting Secretary. But the deed was done. The wise word of readiness had been spoken and was not recalled. War came, and as April closed, Dewey, all prepared, slipped out of Hongkong and on May 1st fought the battle of Manila Bay.

Roosevelt, however, did not continue long in the Navy Department. Many of his friends felt that he was doing such admirable work there that he ought to remain, but as soon as war was declared he determined to go, and his resolution was not to be shaken. Nothing could prevent his fighting for his country when the country was at war. Congress had authorized three volunteer regiments of Cavalry, and the President and the Secretary of War gave to Leonard Wood--then a surgeon in the Regular Army--as colonel, and to Theodore Roosevelt, as lieutenant colonel, authority to raise one of these regiments, known officially as the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, and to all the country as the "Rough Riders." The regiment was raised chiefly in the Southwest and West, where Roosevelt's popularity and reputation among the cowboys and the ranchmen brought many eager recruits to serve with him. After the regiment had been organized and equipped they had some difficulty in getting to Cuba, but Roosevelt as usual broke through all obstacles, and finally succeeded, with Colonel Wood, in getting away with two battalions, leaving one battalion and the horses behind.

The regiment got into action immediately on landing and forced its way, after some sharp fighting in the jungle, to the high ground on which were placed the fortifications which defended the approach to Santiago. Colonel Wood was almost immediately given command of a brigade, and this left Roosevelt colonel of the regiment. In the battle which ensued and which resulted in the capture of the positions commanding Santiago and the bay, the Rough Riders took a leading part, storming one of the San Juan heights, which they christened Kettle Hill, with Roosevelt leading the men in person. It was a dashing, gallant assault, well led and thoroughly successful. Santiago fell after the defeat of the fleet, and then followed a period of sickness and suffering--the latter due to unreadiness--where Roosevelt did everything with his usual driving energy to save his men, whose loyalty to their colonel went with them through life. The war was soon over, but brief as it had been Roosevelt and his men had highly distinguished themselves, and he stood out in the popular imagination as one of the conspicuous figures of the conflict. He brought his regiment back to the United States, where they were mustered out, and almost immediately afterwards he was nominated by the Republicans as their candidate for governor of the State of New York. The situation in New York was unfavorable for the Republicans, and the younger men told Senator Platt, who dominated the organization and who had no desire for Roosevelt, that unless he was nominated they could not win. Thus forced, the organization accepted him, and it was well for the party that they did so. The campaign was a sharp one and very doubtful, but Roosevelt was elected by a narrow margin and assumed office at the beginning of the new year of 1899. He was then in his forty-first year.

Many problems faced him and none were evaded. He was well aware that the "organization" under Senator Platt would not like many things he was sure to do, but he determined that he would have neither personal quarrels nor faction fights. He knew, being blessed with strong common sense, that the Republican Party, his own party, was the instrument by which alone he could attain his ends, and he did not intend that it should be blunted and made useless by internal strife. And yet he meant to have his own way. It was a difficult role which he undertook to play, but he succeeded. He had many differences with the organization managers, but he declined to lose his temper or to have a break, and he also refused to yield when he felt he was standing for the right and a principle was at stake. Thus he prevailed. He won on the canal question, changed the insurance commissioner, and carried the insurance legislation he desired. As in these cases, so it was in lesser things. In the police commission he had been strongly impressed by the dangers as he saw them of the undue and often sinister influence of business, finance, and great money interests upon government and politics. These feelings were deepened and broadened by his experience and observation on the larger stage of State administration. The belief that political equality must be strengthened and sustained by industrial equality and a larger economic opportunity was constantly in his thoughts until it became a governing and guiding principle.

Meantime he grew steadily stronger among the people, not only of his own State but of the country, for he was well known throughout the West, and there they were watching eagerly to see how the ranchman and colonel of Rough Riders, who had touched both their hearts and their imagination, was faring as governor of New York. The office he held is always regarded as related to the Presidency, and this, joined to his striking success as governor, brought him into the presidential field wherever men speculated about the political future It was universally agreed that McKinley was to be renominated, and so the talk turned to making Roosevelt Vice President. A friend wrote to him in the summer of 1899 as to this drift of opinion, then assuming serious proportions. "Do not attempt," he said, "to thwart the popular desire. You are not a man nor are your close friends men who can plan, arrange, and manage you into office. You must accept the popular wish, whatever it is, follow your star, and let the future care for itself. It is the tradition of our politics, and a very poor tradition, that the Vice Presidency is a shelf. It ought to be, and there is no reason why it should not be, a stepping-stone. Put there by the popular desire, it would be so to you." This view, quite naturally, did not commend itself to Governor Roosevelt at the moment. He was doing valuable work in New York; he was deeply engaged in important reforms which he had much at heart and which he wished to carry through; and the Vice Presidency did not attract him. A year later he was at Philadelphia, a delegate at large from his State, with his mind unchanged as to the Vice Presidency, while his New York friends, anxious to have him continue his work at Albany, were urging him to refuse. Senator Platt, for obvious reasons, wished to make him Vice President, another obstacle to his taking it. Roosevelt forced the New York delegation to agree on some one else for Vice President, but he could not hold the convention, nor could Senator Hanna, who wisely accepted the situation. Governor Roosevelt was nominated on the first ballot, all other candidates withdrawing. He accepted the nomination little as he liked it.

Thus when it came to the point he instinctively followed his star and grasped the unvacillating hand of destiny. Little did he think that destiny would lead him to the White House through a tragedy which cut him to the heart. He was on a mountain in the Adirondacks when a guide made his way to him across the forest with a telegram telling him that McKinley, the wise, the kind, the gentle, with nothing in his heart but good will to all men, was dying from a wound inflicted by an anarchist murderer, and that the Vice President must come to Buffalo at once. A rapid night drive through the woods and a special train brought him to Buffalo. McKinley was dead before he arrived, and that evening Governor Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States.

Within the narrow limits of an address it is impossible to give an account of an administration of seven years which will occupy hundreds of pages when the history of the United States during that period is written. It was a memorable administration, memorable in itself and not by the accident of events, and large in its accomplishment It began with a surprise. There were persons in the United States who had carefully cultivated and many people who had accepted without thought, the idea that Roosevelt was in some way a dangerous man. They gloomily predicted that there would be a violent change in the policies and in the officers of the McKinley administration. But Roosevelt had not studied the history of his country in vain. He knew that in three of the four cases where Vice Presidents had succeeded to the Presidency through the death of the elected President their coming had resulted in a violent shifting of policies and men, and, as a consequence, in most injurious dissensions, which in two cases at least proved fatal to the party in power. In all four instances the final obliteration of the Vice President who had come into power through the death of his chief was complete. President Roosevelt did not intend to permit any of these results. As soon as he came into office he announced that he intended to retain President McKinley's Cabinet and to carry out his policies, which had been sustained at the polls. To those overzealous friends who suggested that he could not trust the appointees of President McKinley and that he would be but a pallid imitation of his predecessor he replied that he thought, in any event, the administration would be his, and that if new occasions required new policies he felt that he could meet them, and that no one would suspect him of being a pallid imitation of anybody. His decision, however, gratified and satisfied the country and it was not apparent that Roosevelt was hampered in any way in carrying out his own policies by this wise refusal to make sudden and violent changes.

Those who were alarmed about what he might do had also suggested that with his combative propensities he was likely to involve the country in war. Yet there never has been an administration, as afterwards appeared, when we were more perfectly at peace with all the world, nor were our foreign relations ever in danger of producing hostilities. But this was not due in the least to the adoption of a timid or yielding foreign policy; on the contrary, it was owing to the firmness of the President in all foreign questions and the knowledge which other nations soon acquired that President Roosevelt was a man who never threatened unless he meant to carry out his threat, the result being that he was not obliged to threaten at all. One of his earliest successes was forcing the settlement of the Alaskan boundary question, which was the single open question with Great Britain that was really dangerous and contained within itself possibilities of war. The accomplishment of this settlement was followed later, while Mr. Root was Secretary of State, by the arrangement of all our outstanding difference with Canada, and during Mr. Root's tenure of office over thirty treaties were made with different nations, including a number of practical and valuable treaties of arbitration. When Germany started to take advantage of the difficulties in Venezuela the affair culminated in the dispatch of Dewey and the fleet to the Caribbean, the withdrawal of England at once, and the agreement of Germany to the reference of all subjects of different to arbitration. It was President Roosevelt whose good offices brought Russia and Japan together in a negotiation which closed the war between those two powers. It was Roosevelt's influence which contributed powerfully to settling the threatening controversy between Germany, France, and England in regard to Morocco, by the Algeciras conference. It was Roosevelt who sent the American fleet of battleships round the world, one of the most convincing peace movements ever made on behalf of the United States. Thus it came about that this President, dreaded at the beginning on account of his combative spirit, received the Nobel prize in 1906 as the person who had contribute most to the peace of the world in the preceding years, and his contribution was the result of strength and knowledge and not of weakness.

At home he recommended to Congress legislation which was directed toward a larger control of the railroads and to removing the privileges and curbing the power of great business combinations obtained through rebates and preferential freight rates. This legislation led to opposition in Congress and to much resistance by those affected. As we look back, this legislation, so much contested at the time, seems very moderate, but it was none the less momentous. President Roosevelt never believed in Government ownership, but he was thoroughly in favor of strong and effective Government supervision and regulation of what are now known generally as public utilities. He had a deep conviction that the political influence of financial and business interests and of great combinations of capital had become so great that the American people were beginning to distrust their own Government, than which there could be no greater peril to the Republic. By his measures, and by his general attitude toward capital and labor both, he sought to restore and maintain the confidence of the people in the Government they had themselves created.

In the Panama Canal he left the most enduring, as it was the most visible, monument of his administration Much criticized at the moment for his action in regard to it, which time since then has justified and which history will praise, the great fact remains that the canal is there. He said himself that he made up his mind that it was his duty to establish the canal and have the debate about it afterwards, which seemed to him better than to begin with indefinite debate and have no canal at all. This is a view which posterity both at home and abroad will accept and approve.

These, passing over as we must in silence many other beneficent acts, are only a few of the most salient features of his administration, stripped of all detail and all enlargement. Despite the conflict which some of his domestic policies had produce not only with his political opponents but within the Republican ranks, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1904, and when the seven years had closed the country gave a like majority to his chosen successor, taken from his own Cabinet. On the 4th of March, 1909, he returned to private life at the age of fifty, having been the youngest President known to our history.

During the brief vacations which he had been able to secure in the midst of the intense activities of his public life after the Spanish War he had turned for enjoyment to expeditions in pursuit of big game in the wildest and most unsettled regions of the country. Open-air life and all its accompaniment of riding and hunting were to him the one thing that brought him the most rest and relaxation. Now, having left the Presidency, he was able to give full scope to the love of adventure, which had been strong with him from boyhood. Soon after his retirement from office he went to Africa, accompanied by a scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian Institution. He landed in East Africa, made his way into the interior, and thence to the sources of the Nile, after a trip in every way successful both in exploration and in pursuit of big game. He then came down the Nile through Egypt and thence to Europe, and no private citizen of the United States--probably no private man of any country--was ever received in a manner comparable to that which met Roosevelt in every country in Europe which he visited. Everywhere it was the same--in Italy, in Germany, in France, in England Every honor was paid to him that authority could devise, accompanied by every mark of affection and admiration which the people of those countries were able to show. He made few speeches while in Europe, but in those few he did not fail to give to the questions and thought of the time real and genuine contributions, set forth in plain language always vigorous and often eloquent. He returned in the summer of 1910 to the United States and was greeted with a reception on his landing in New York quite equaling in interest and enthusiasm that which had been given to him in Europe.

For two years afterwards he devoted himself to writing, not only articles as contributing editor of the Outlook, but books of his own, and addresses and speeches which he was constantly called upon to make. No man in private life probably ever had such an audience as he addressed, whether with tongue or pen, upon the questions of the day, with a constant refrain as to the qualities necessary to make men both good citizens and good Americans. In the spring of 1912 he decided to become a candidate for the Republican nomination for the residency and a very heated struggle followed between himself and President Taft for delegations to the convention. The convention when it assembled in Chicago was the stormiest ever known in our history President Taft was renominated, most of the Roosevelt delegates refusing to vote, and a large body of Republicans thereupon formed a new party called the "Progressive" and nominated Mr. Roosevelt as their candidate. This division into two nearly equal parts of the Republican Party, which had elected Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft in succession by the largest majorities ever known, made the victory of the Democratic candidate absolutely certain. Colonel Roosevelt, however, stood second in the poll, receiving 4,119,507 votes, carrying six States and winning eighty-eight electoral votes. There never has been in political history, when all conditions are considered, such an exhibition of extraordinary personal strength. To have secured eighty-eight electoral votes when his own party was hopelessly divided, with no great historic party name and tradition behind him, with an organization which had to be hastily brought together in a few weeks, seems almost incredible, and in all his career there is no display of the strength of his hold upon the people equal to this.

In the following year he yielded again to the longing for adventure and exploration. Going to South America, he made his way up through Paraguay and western Brazil, and then across a trackless wilderness of jungle and down an unknown river into the Valley of the Amazon. It was a remarkable expedition and carried him through what is probably the most deadly climate in the world. He suffered severely from the fever, the poison of which never left him and which finally shortened his life.

In the next year the great war began, and Colonel Roosevelt threw himself into it with all the energy of his nature. With Major Gardner he led the great fight for preparedness in a country utterly unprepared He saw very plainly that in all human probability it would be impossible for us to keep out of the war. Therefore in season and out of season he demanded that we should make ready. He and Major Gardner, with the others who joined them, roused a widespread and powerful sentiment in the country, but there was no practical effect on the Army. The Navy was the single place where anything was really done, and that only in the bill of 1916, so that war finally came upon us as unread as Roosevelt had feared we should be. Yet the campaign he made was not in vain, for in addition to the question of preparation he spoke earnestly of other things, other burning questions, and he always spoke to an enormous body of listeners everywhere. He would have had us protest and take action at the very beginning, in 1914, when Belgium was invaded. He would have had us go to war when the murders of the Lusitania were perpetrated He tried to stir the soul and rouse the spirit of the American people, and despite every obstacle he did awaken them, so that when the hour came, in April, 1917, a large proportion of the American people were even then ready in spirit and in hope. How telling his work had been was proved by the confession of his country's enemies, for when he died the only discordant note, the only harsh words, came from the German press. Germany knew whose voice it was that more powerfully than any other had called Americans to the battle in behalf of freedom and civilization, where the advent of the armies of the United States gave victory to the cause of justice and righteousness.

When the United States went to war Colonel Roosevelt's one desire was to be allowed to go to the fighting line. There if fate had laid its hand upon him it would have found him glad to fall in the trenches or in a charge at the head of his men, but it was not permitted to him to go, and thus he was denied the reward which he would have ranked above all others, "the great prize of death in battle." But he was a patriot in every fiber of his being, and personal disappointment in no manner slackened or cooled his zeal. Everything that he could do to forward the war, to quicken preparation to stimulate patriotism, to urge on efficient action, was done. Day and night, in season and out of season, he never ceased his labors. Although prevented from going to France himself, he gave to the great conflict that which was far dearer to him than his own life. I can not say that he sent his four sons, because they all went at once, as everyone knew that their father's sons would go. Two have been badly wounded; one was killed. He met the blow with the most splendid and unflinching courage, met it as Siward, the Earl of Northumberland receives in the play the news of his son's death:

Siw. Had he his hurts before?

Ross. Ay, on the front.

Siw. Why, then, God's soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And so his knell is knoll'd.

Among the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and there are none greater in all the literature of man, _Macbeth_ was Colonel Roosevelt's favorite, and the moving words which I have just quoted I am sure were in his heart and on his lips when he faced with stern resolve and self-control the anguish brought to him by the death of his youngest boy, killed in the glory of a brave and brilliant youth.

He lived to see the right prevail; he lived to see civilization triumph over organized barbarism; and there was great joy in his heart. In all his last days the thoughts which filled his mind were to secure a peace which should render Germany forever harmless and advance the cause of ordered freedom in every land and among every race. This occupied him to the exclusion of everything else, except what he called and what we like to call Americanism. There was no hour down to the end when he would not turn aside from everything else to preach the doctrine of Americanism, of the principles and the faith upon which American government rested, and which all true Americans should wear in their heart of hearts. He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end.