THE OPTIMISM OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT.
rilHE two latest speeches by President Roosevelt are 1 worthy of careful attention. The first was addressed to the Governors of the separate States of the Union assembled in conference, and reveals a fact which has hitherto escaped European attention. President Roosevelt, who is warned by all the many Departments of his Gpvernment, informs his audience that they are using up the resources of the States too fast, that they cut down too many trees, that they sell their " water privileges " too often to monopolists who deprive the people of their use, and that they sometimes part with large tracts of land to speculators intent only on profiting by increasing prices. The warning has been accepted throughout the country as much needed,—the experienced men who listened to it well knowing that the European idea of the limitless resources of the Union is an exaggeration based upon a state of affairs which with every fresh decade is rapidly passing away. The forests, in particular, are perishing under the demands of the newspapers and publishers of cheap literature, who use wood-pulp to make a very bad, because friable, paper. The second speech was addressed to the Methodist Conference, and is important as exhibiting one of the strongest characteristics alike of the speaker and of his countrymen. For the last six years the President has been urging in almost every speech grounds of political and social apprehension, has been. condemning the tendency to tolerate "graft," the dis- position to admire millionaires, Trusts, and vast combina- tions, all of which tend to impair freedom in seeking the means of accumulation; and generally the conditions of equality. He has seemed to pose as the orator of pessimism. Nevertheless, he says now that, recognising as he does all the causes of evil and all the reasons for apprehension, he is essentially au optimist, and believes that the rich are not getting richer and the poor poorer, though, owing to unexpected prosperity, a cleavage has become visible between the very rich and the masses of the workmen. He says "No nation in the world has more right than ours to look with proud confidence toward the future. Nowhere else has the ex- periment of democratic government, of government by the people and for the people, of government based on the principle of treating each man on his innate worth as a man, been tried on so vast a scale as with us ; and on the whole the experiment has been more successful than anywhere else. Moreover, on the whole I think it can be said that we have grown better and not worse, for if there is much evil, good also greatly abounds, and if wrong grows, so in even greater measure grows the stern sense of right before which wrong must eventually yield. It would be both unmanly and unwarrantable to become faint-hearted or despairing about the nation's future. Clear-eyed and far-sighted men, who are both brave of heart and cool of head, while not for a moment refusing to see and acknowledge the many evils around us, must yet also feel a confident assurance that in the struggle we shall win and not lose."
Many as are the speeches from the President which his fellow-countrymen have warmly applauded, we believe that none will bring him closer to their hearts than the one from which we have just quoted, for it is a short and strong em- bodiment of their innermost feeling. The Americans as a nation are optimists. It may be owing to the immense extent of their territory, the absence of dangerous neighbours on their frontiers, or to their enjoyment of acknowledged though not quite real equality, or possibly to the self-confidence born of two hundred years of continuous and successful effort, or it may even be owing to some exhilarating quality of the atmosphere in which they live ; but at any rate Americans at heart are all contented and cheerful men. Collectively and individually they all believe that, however unpleasing may be the circumstances of the moment, they will in the end " muddle through " and come out the stronger for their trials. No one despaired when it seemed for a moment as if the Union must be broken up, and no one quails now, though every foreign observer believes that the grand struggle between the " Haves " and the " Have-nots " which is to mark this century will be fought out first of all upon American soil. They will somehow find, they think, a preventive of that great danger in the principles of democracy. They see their numbers continually increasing ; they see the Old World shrinking from any contest with their growing strength ; they deny, or at least they do not recognise, that any moral change has passed over their millions ; and they perceive, as they listen to their present President, that now, as in the great Civil War, they will throw up out of the depths of their elective system adequate and trust- worthy leaders. In 1860 they found Abraham Lincoln, and in 1908 they are listening—and was there ever so vast or so attentive an audience P—to Theodore Roosevelt. They wait, therefore, in the full confidence that, how- ever dark the path may momentarily appear, the way will open, and they will emerge conscious not only of safety, but, as their President says in soldier-like phrase, of " triumph."
A nation penetrated with that feeling cannot be beaten, and we only wish that we saw more of it among the nations of Europe, and more especially in our own despondent land. Here we are always talking as if everything must go wrong ; as if India were pondering the means of throwing us off ; and as if, should we ever be invaded, we should have no option except to buy off our triumphant enemy with the dearest of our possessions. This mood of pessimism is not a passing phase of opinion, but a per- manent difficulty-in the way of our leaders, a recurrent source of every political disease except despair. There is always an Armada on its way to our coasts. When we lost America we protested that we were ruined ; when Napoleon became Emperor we were sleepless from fear of invasion, and covered every headland with the means of making signal-fires to summon an untrained population to resist the greatest military genius of the age. Now we are oppressed with problems—education, licensing, unem- ployment, provision for the children and the aged, and above all the increase of crime and of disorder— and out of none of them can we see an easy or expeditious path. In the minds of the critical we are a doomed people without a leader and without the means of meeting any enemy who may take advantage of our momentary gloom. Contrasting London with Washington, one cannot help wondering what is the ultimate cause of difference. Every separate observer will give a separate answer ; but, for ourselves, we cannot but think that the difference is the difference between youth and maturity, and that the historians were right who used to preach to us that the prospects of Englishmen in battle were never so bright as at the moment when the soldiers began to dream that all was over. Englishmen, say the doctors, " enjoy the blue devils." That may not be true ; but it certainly is true that they are most luxuriously at ease when in their fits of pessimism they think of England as Holland, and forget that they are twice as numerous, twice as well organised, and incomparably richer than they were when they fought and defeated the master of Europe.
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