THEODORE ROOSEVELT.*

Loan CriAnNwoon did a very useful service to the English- speaking world by his life of Lincoln. He has done another by his study of the personality of Theodore Roosevelt. Like a wise man, he has not attempted to give a full or detailed biography of the great President, but has made us see in a very vivid way the image of the soul (animi figura) of the great American. One of the best things about Lord Charnwood's biography is that he does not over-emphasize any of Roosevelt's special characteristics. There is not too much about the cowboy side, or too much about the anti-corruption politician, or about the 100 per cent. American. The man is seen in his true proportions and without any kind of caricature. There are none of the tricks that the decadent and academic artists of the seventeenth century employed when they • Thoodore Booseoeli. By Lord Llarnwood, London: Constable and Co. 173, C.1. net.] wanted to make an heroic portrait or an heroic statue. Again, there is no attempt to show him in the pose of a Republican

Magnifico. Instead, he appears what, after all, he was, a man bold and yet reasonable, a man of moderation and yet a man of force.

I remember well once writing to Mr. Roosevelt and telling him that, though he probably would not like it, he was the best living example of a true Whig. I added that I had just finished a course of reading Sydney Smith and thought that his political writings were full of the best kind of Whig com- mon sense and humanity. I specially noted.how I had been reading Sydney Smith's dressing clown of a bishop who had crushed a curate for alleged heresy, and how Sydney Smith added that we should never forget that a curate trodden on feels as great a pang as when a bishop is confuted. I got an immediate reply from Roosevelt, though he was thenPresident and as busy as Presidents always are, saying that he was

delighted with my remarks about Whigs and proud to be regarded as one. He went on to say that, oddly enough, he too had just been reading Sydney Smith and had delighted in him. He added that he was one of the people who still read Macaulay with delight and edification.

I hope Lord Charnwood does not bow to the anti-Whig views now prevalent. But even if he does, he will, I am sure, pardon me for saying what I have said as to the subject of his historical study. He will remember that the Whigs, though they became ossified, like every other party which enjoys power too long, were originally people full of dash and vigour, of enterprise as well as the love of liberty.

I am not going to criticise Lord Charnwood's book in detail, but I should like to endorse all he says as to few Americans having understood England as well as Roosevelt, and no Americans and few Englishmen having understood the British Empire as well as he did. I am not so sure, however. that it is true to say that he had no Anglo-Saxon feeling. I should prefer to put it that he thought he had no Anglo- Saxon feeling and did not want to be more friendly with the English-speaking peoples than with other peoples. Therefore he took the view which a great many Englishmen of good intent think they ought to take about America. And yet, as usually happens in such cases, the people outside his own country with whom Roosevelt had the best relations always happened to be Englishmen I A will protest to B that he does not think there is anything in family ties or any reason why a man should be specially fond of his near relations, and he will add, " I admit that I am devoted to my own brothers, but that is not because they are my brothers. It is because, curiously enough, they happen to be some of the finest and most trustworthy people that I have ever known ; and so, of course, I like them." It is in his analysis of this point that Lord Charnwood makes a comment that I do not remember to have seen elsewhere— a comment which shows the irony of circumstance. Roosevelt, like his father, was intensely strong on the side of the North during the Civil War. His mother, however, was a fierce Southerner. " Two uncles of his served in the Southern Navy ; one of them designed that ill-omened ship, the Alabama' ; the other fired her last gun. They lived to become in England somewhat virulent British Tories, but never to cherish bitterness against their victorious kinsfolk."

In this context there is a delightful story of how when Roosevelt was a little boy and was on his knees saying his prayers to his mother he " once got back his own, after some rebuke from her, by invoking a blessing on the Northern arms." That intensity in action was extremely characteristic.

At the end of his book Lord Charnwood has printed a chronological table of Roosevelt's life, provided by Mr.

Hermann Hagedorn, Director of the Roosevelt Memorial Association. Each epoch is illustrated by a quotation from Roosevelt's writings or speeches. Here is the quotation assigned to the period between 1882 and 1884, when. Roosevelt was a member of the New York State Assembly :-

" I put myself in the way of things happening ; and they hap- pened. . . . During my three years' service in the -Legislature I worked on a very simple philosophy of government: It was that personal character and initiative arc the prime requisites in political and social life."

The passage assigned to 1915 in regard to neutrality is admirable :- " The kind of neutrality' which seeks to preserve peace' by timidly refusing to live up to our plighted word and to denounce and take action against such wrong as that committed in the case of Belgium is unworthy of an honourable and powerful people. Dante reserved a special place of infamy in the Inferno for those base angels who dared side neither with evil nor with good. Peace is ardently to be desired, but only as the handmaid of righteousness. The only peace of permanent value is the peace of righteousness. There can be no such peace until well-behaved, highly-civilized small nations are protected from oppression and subjugation."

Equally good is the passage as to the end for which America was fighting, given under the date 1917 :—

" Peace is not the end. Righteousness is the end. . . . If I must choose between righteousness and peace I choose righteousness."

There was the man. He was not bellicose or militarist, or domineering, but he was passionate that the right should

prevail.

J. ST. Lou STRACHEY.