have become inseparably connected with his name:
"Speak softly, but carry a big stick."
At the same time he was somewhat anxious about
ii2 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
the Japanese situation. There was and is a chau-
vinist or jingo party in Japan just as there is a
chauvinist or jingo faction in the United States.
If Japan intended to make war, Roosevelt intended
to be prepared for it and he told me that his in-
structions were that the Fleet was always to be
prepared for action no matter where it was. He
did not propose to have anybody "pull a gun" on
him and tell him to throw up his hands. He said
that in an official speech privately addressed to a
group of higher officers of the Fleet he had told
them if war came and any commander lost a ship
because he was surprised or unprepared he might
just as well never come home himself.
What the effect of this voyage was upon the
Japanese Government I do not of my own knowl-
edge know, but I can testify that the Germans
were particularly impressed. In 1910, during
Roosevelt's memorable tour through Europe, I
was present at a reception given to him jointly
by our naval and our military attaches in Berlin.
The guests, with three or four exceptions, were
distinguished officers of the Kaiser's army and
navy. The naval men in particular did not con-
ceal their eagerness to meet the man who had
performed a military deed at sea which they had
regarded, when it was undertaken, as the fool-
STATESMANSHIP 113
hardy venture of an inexperienced braggart. More
than one of them said to me that such an achieve-
ment was a stroke of genius and they literally
crowded about Roosevelt eager to shake his hand as
if he had been a kind of modern Neptune. It was
perfectly manifest that their respect for him, and for
the country which he represented, had been enor-
mously increased by the fact that he had done what
they, confident in their own skill as seamen, had
predicted that neither he nor they nor any one else
could do. It is no detraction from the heroic and
splendid performance of the American Navy in the
European war to believe, as I do, that if Mr.
Roosevelt had been President in 1914, and had
notified the Kaiser — as he certainly would have
done — that he would throw the American Navy into
the struggle the moment the foot of an invading
German soldier was set upon the soil of Belgium
the world would have been spared much of the
bloodshed of the past four years and much of the
chaos of the present day.
But Theodore Roosevelt's nationalism was not
exclusive of internationalism; it was, rather, com-
plementary to it. He believed that the nations
of the earth could not and should not live together
as members of one family like a gigantic Brook
Farm or a Oneida Community but as independent
ii 4 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
and strongly developed families in a well-organized
neighbourhood. He used to say that a man who
professes to love all other families as much as he
loves his own is likely not only to be a failure as a
husband and father but also to be an undesirable
neighbour. "Keep your eye on such a man," he
once remarked to me; "he is not only foolish but he
is liable to be dangerous. " Roosevelt had no
patience with the communistic vagaries of the
French revolutionary philosophers. While so-
cially and economically he was much more demo-
cratic than Hamilton or even, I venture to think,
than Washington, he liked them better and trusted
them more than Jefferson because of Jefferson's
flirtations with the unpractical and closet idealists
of the First French Republic.
In trying to interpret Mr. Roosevelt's national-
ism I do not know how I can do better than to
quote a passage from his "Life of Gouverneur
Morris," in the American Statesmen Series. It
was written when he was twenty-nine years old :
Jefferson led the Democrats to victory only when he had
learned to acquiesce thoroughly in some of the fundamental
principles of Federalism, and the government of himself and
his successors was good chiefly in so far as it followed out
the theories of the Hamiltonians; while Hamilton and the
Federalists fell from power because they could not learn the
one great truth taught by Jefferson — that in America a
STATESMANSHIP 115
statesman should trust the people, and should endeavour
to secure to each man all possible individual liberty, confi-
dent that he will use it aright. The old-school Jeffersonian
theorists believed in a "strong people and a weak govern-
ment." Lincoln was the first who showed how a strong peo-
ple might have a strong government and yet remain the
freest on earth. He seized — half unwittingly — all that was
best and wisest in the traditions of Federalism; he was the
true successor of the Federalist leaders; but he]grafted on their
system a profound belief that the great heart of the nation
beat for truth, honour, and liberty.
This estimate of Lincoln, made before Roose-
velt was thirty years old, became stronger and
stronger during his life. He had a kind of divine
reverence for Lincoln. He once told me that
whenever he was facing a puzzling problem of
action he would ask himself: "What would Lincoln
have done in such a case ?" — and would then try to
shape his course according to what he believed
would have been Lincoln's example.
During the Progressive campaign in 191 2 Roose-
velt made a speech entitled "The New National-
ism" which he later expounded by other speeches
afterward collected and published in a fairly good-
sized volume. These pronouncements at once at-
tracted the attention of the country and created
almost a furore of public discussion. It was said
by his opponents that the theories and proposals
in these speeches were subversive of the Constitu-
n6 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
tion, that Roosevelt wished to alter the very struc-
ture of our government. His proposals, however,
except in some minor details, were not at all new or
radical when measured by his utterances and acts
over a long period of years. They were simply a
restatement, in more elaborate form, of the thought
expressed in the foregoing quotation from the Life
of Morris. He wished to show that a strong cen-
tralized government is not only compatible with
but necessary to the protection of popular rights
and even-handed justice in a representative democ-
racy. Provided that the people have the free
and untrammelled right to select their representa-
tives at the ballot box, their best protection, he
believed, lies not in the diffusion but in the con-
centration of power coupled with direct responsi-
bility to the people for the exercise of that power.
This brings me logically to what I believe was
the next most important article in his creed of
statesmanship:
POLITICAL, INDUSTRIAL, AND SOCIAL
REFORM. — While he was an ardent Nationalist
and believed in a centralized government in which
the ablest men were given great responsibilities and
held to strict accountability, he recognized that as
efficiency is a greater power for good so corruption
STATESMANSHIP n 7
is a greater power for evil in a strongly centralized
government. He therefore endeavoured not only
to improve the standards and personnel of govern-
ment officials but, by what was literally preaching
and exhorting, to arouse a sense of civic responsi-
bility among the great body of citizens. No Presi-
dent, probably, has issued more or longer Messages
to Congress, but while these papers were techni-
cally addressed to Congress they were really ad-
dressed to the whole country. He often spoke of
his public and official speeches as "preaching,"
and he more than once said that he put what he
had to say in the form of sermons because he had
such a "bully pulpit." The result was that he
attracted to his side and surrounded himself with
official colleagues and associates who had the same
enthusiasm and the same high standards that he
himself had.
Political service in office took on a different
meaning under the inspiration of his theory and
practice. I think it not unfair to say that forty
years ago a man in public office, particularly of a
subordinate character, was generally regarded with
some suspicion by the so-called "better citizens"
until he had proved himself innocent. It was not
an uncommon assumption that every man in pub-
lic office took the position because he could get his
nS IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
hands and feet in the public trough. This at
least is my recollection of the political atmosphere
in 1880 when I cast my first presidential vote for
Garfield. It was at this date that Roosevelt was
elected to the New York Legislature. Roosevelt
did more than any other American, in my judg-
ment, to modify this attitude completely. At the
close of his administration the public began to feel,
as it ought always to feel, that the badge of public
office is a badge of respect; it began to regard
Federal officials as well as Federal clerks as it re-
gards the officers and enlisted men in the Army
and the Navy. -
Certainly this was what Mr. Roosevelt wanted
to accomplish. He believed that a man or a
woman who works for the Government in any civil
capacity ought to be actuated by the same patriotic
motives and regard the service with the same pa-
triotic respect that prevail in the Army and the
Navy. No President has done more than did
Roosevelt to discredit and put out of joint the old
Jacksonian theory of party government that "To
the victors belong the spoils."
Along with this work of political reform he
undertook, in the face of the most overwhelming
difficulties, the reform of the industrial corpora-
tions. He did not believe, to quote the words of
Underwood ii: Underwood
Theodore Roosevelt as President . Taken at his desk in
the White House during his second term
STATESMANSHIP 119
President Wilson, that "the American people are
living a life of economic serfdom," but he was con-
vinced that there was altogether too much secret
and corrupt meddling with politics by the cor-
porations for their own selfish benefit. He was a
believer in the corporation as an instrument of in-
dustry. He did not at all think that badness is an
essential element of bigness. He had not the slight-
est objection to the corporations doing a business on
a gigantic scale, provided that these operations were
honest, above-board, visible, subject to proper gov-
ernment control, and based on a just, fair, and civi-
lized treatment both of employees and of the small
investor. As a matter of fact, he cordially disliked
the attitude of the extremists who seemed to feel
that the corporations were enemies of society with
whom there could be no possible basis of associa-
tion.
In February, 1903, while he was struggling to
obtain Federal legislation to put an end to railway
rebates, he wrote me a long letter from the White
House which contained the following paragraph :
No respectable railroad or respectable shipping business
can openly object to the Rebate Bill; and the Nelson amend-
ment and the bill to expedite legislation, to both of which
there has been most violent opposition, have now been rather
sullenly acquiesced in. But as soon as the business interests
showed any symptoms of acquiescence, certain individuals
120 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
at once asserted that the legislation was bad, because they
did not want it unless it frightened the corporations.
He was not trying to destroy the corporations;
he was not even trying to frighten them; he was
trying to cooperate with them in making them real
servants of society. His differentiation between
"good" trusts and "bad" trusts was ridiculed at
the time, but the European war has demonstrated
the soundness of the principle. Tremendous or-
ganization is needed to accomplish tremendous
tasks. The organization is to be judged by its
spirit, its aims, and its accomplishments — not by
its size.
His successful attacks upon the Standard Oil
Company and the Sugar Trust were not made be-
cause these organizations were big, but because of
certain pernicious practices. He could not tolerate
what one of his colleagues, Senator Beveridge, has
defined as "invisible government" — that secret
partnership between "big business" and pliable
politicians which grew to such huge proportions
after the Civil War and reached its climax just
about the time that Mr. Roosevelt became Presi-
dent. Under his administration the Federal De-
partment of Commerce and Labour was estab-
lished and the policy of government regulation of
railways was greatly strengthened. He was one
STATESMANSHIP 121
of the first public men in this country to espouse
the doctrine of industrial democracy, that is to say,
the doctrine that the workers and toilers shall not
only have their proper share of the profits of in-
dustry but also some voice in the management of
industry. In this connection it may not be out of
place for me to quote from a letter that Mr. Roose-
velt wrote to me in the summer of 1907:
I continually get points from the Outlook. If you do not ob-
ject, I am going to work into one of my speeches your ad-
mirable little thesis on adding democracy in industry to
democracy in political rights, education, and religion. You
have exactly hit upon my purpose, but you phrase my pur-
pose better than I have ever phrased it myself.
What the Outlook had said, eliciting this com-
ment, was that as the Reformation and the
emigration of the Puritans to the Western Hemi-
sphere had established the equal rights or freedom
of men in their religious activities; as the Amer-
ican Revolution and the Civil War had established
the equal rights or freedom of men in politics; and
as the establishment of the American public school
system had established equal rights or freedom in
education; so the American people, perhaps halt-
ingly but with evident purpose, were entering
upon a moment to establish equal rights or freedom
in industry. Equal rights in religion of course
122 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
does not mean that every man shall be a bishop;
in politics, that every man shall be a United States
senator; or in education, that every man shall be a
college president. But it does mean that every man
shall have some kind of a voice in choosing his
bishop, his senator, or the head of his educational
system. So the workers who constitute what is
called labour are not merely to be paid their real
share of the total product of labour, but they are to
have some opportunity to determine and regulate
the conditions under which they shall work. It
should never be forgotten, I think, that Mr. Roose-
velt was one of the foremost pioneers in the move-
ment, now rapidly accelerating, to establish Indus-
trial Democracy, where all men shall have equal
rights under the law and where there shall be no
privileged or special interests exempt from the
operations of the law.
CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RE-
SOURCES.— -The old theory with regard to the
natural wealth of the United States was that the
forests and lumber, the water power, the oil wells,
the coal, and other minerals belong to the private
owner of the land to exploit and sell as he pleases
for private profit. Along with this theory ran the
policy of the Government, undoubtedly desirable
STATESMANSHIP 123
and beneficial within proper limits, of giving away
vast tracts of public land to the pioneer who
would develop the natural wealth and so contribute
to the general welfare of the country.
This system led not only to the concentration
of riches in private hands but to the rapid exhaus-
tion of certain forms of national wealth, especially
lumber-bearing forests. The natural desire for
quick profits was proving to be more powerful than
the cautionary motive of preserving our capital
resources for future generations. If Mr. Roose-
velt did not invent the term "Conservation of
National Resources," he was the first great leader
in this country to espouse and establish the new
theory with regard to our national wealth. This
theory is that the Government — acting for the
people, who are the real owners of public prop-
erty — shall permanently retain the fee in public
lands, leaving their products to be developed by
private capital under leases, which are limited in
their duration and which give the Government
complete power to regulate the industrial opera-
tions of the lessees.
On June 8, 1908, Mr. Roosevelt, then President,
appointed a National Conservation Commission.
This commission made an inventory of our na-
tional wealth, which was published in 1909. It
i2 4 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
was the first inventory of its kind in history. Gif-
ford Pinchot, an intimate personal friend and
official colleague of President Roosevelt's, was
chairman of the Commission and Mr. Pinchot,
with the approval and support of Roosevelt, rap-
idly became the public representative of the Con-
servation movement. The country has by no
means yet succeeded in putting an end to the ex-
traordinary waste of its public wealth. In the
Atlantic Monthly for March, 1919, Mr. Arthur D.
Little, an accomplished and able chemical engineer
of Boston, writes as follows:
The wastes in lumbering are proverbial, and, as Mark
Twain said about the weather, we all talk about it, but noth-
ing is done. With a total annual cut of forty billion feet,
board-measure, of merchantable lumber, another seventy
billion feet are wasted in the field and at the mill. In the
yellow-pine belt the values in rosin, turpentine, ethyl alco-
hol, pine oil, tar, charcoal, and paper-stock lost in the waste
are three or four times the value of the lumber produced.
Enough yellow-pine pulp-wood is consumed in burners, or
left to rot, to make double the total tonnage of paper pro-
duced in the United States. Meanwhile, our paper-makers
memorialize the community on the scarcity of paper-stock,
and pay #18 a cord for pulp- wood which they might buy for
$3. It takes many years to produce a crop of wood, and
wood-waste, which now constitutes from one-half to two-
thirds of the entire tree, is too valuable a raw material to be
longer regarded merely as an encumbrance, except by an
improvident management.
But the wastes in lumbering, colossal though they are in
STATESMANSHIP 125
absolute amount, are trivial compared to the losses which
our estate has suffered, and still endures, from forest fires.
The French properly regard as a national calamity the de-
struction of perhaps a thousand square miles of their fine
forests by German shells. And yet the photographs that
they show of this wreck and utter demolition may be repro-
duced indefinitely on ten million acres of our forest lands,
swept each year by equally devastating fire for which our own
people are responsible. You have doubtless already for-
gotten that forest fire which last autumn, in Minnesota,
burned over an area half as large again as Massachusetts,
destroying more than twenty-five towns, killing four hundred
people, and leaving thirteen thousand homeless.
Mr. Little is somewhat beside the mark in say-
ing: "We all talk about it but nothing is done. ,,
Something has been done. The most important
work of President Roosevelt in domestic states-
manship, next to his injection of moral ideas and
moral impetus into administrative politics, was his
inauguration and fostering of Conservation. I
have space only to state that opinion here. The
reader who is interested will find in the New Inter-
national Encyclopaedia under the title " Conserva-
tion " the best brief account, which has come under
my eye, of the results and purposes of the Conser-
vation movement inaugurated by Roosevelt with
the aid of Gifford Pinchot.
Roosevelt was never greatly interested in mere
questions of finance, nor in economics on its merely
statistical side. But the moment that he per-
126 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
ceived the human relationships of an economic
question he threw himself into the problem with
his fullest energies. It was the human aspect
of Conservation that aroused his championship.
Some other things that he did, as President, were
so much more spectacular that there is danger of
his leadership in Conservation being lost sight of.
On the contrary, it deserves the fullest study of
future historians.
The abject pacifism and the wasteful folly of the
Chinese with regard to their natural resources
stirred him about equally and he often referred
to the lack of patriotic nationalism on the one hand,
and to private greed in exploiting our national re-
sources on the other as tendencies which, if per-
sisted in, would "Chinafy" the United States. He
believed that the incentives of private profit and of
brave and virile pioneering are important factors
in developing American character and American
citizenship. But he also believed that they should
be directed not by the whims of individuals but by
the common and united determination of all the
people.
COLONIAL POLICY— By determining, at the
close of the Spanish War, that Cuba should not be
taken over by the United States— as all Europe
STATESMANSHIP 127
expected, and as an influential section of his party
hoped that it would be— but should be given every
opportunity to govern itself, he established the
precedent for the colonial policy which the Peace
Conference of Paris has now embodied in the so-
called "mandatory" principle, namely, that colonies
should be administered as a trust for the benefit of
the inhabitants. It is true that Cuba was set on
her own feet during the Presidency of McKinley,
but when under the Piatt Amendment the United
States intervened in Cuba during the Roosevelt
Administration there would have been every po-
litical and many moral justifications for our annexa-
tion of the island. This Roosevelt would not con-
sent to. In his autobiography he refers to his
Cuban policy as follows:
We made the promise to give Cuba independence; and
we kept the promise. Leonard Wood was left in as governor
for two or three years, and evolved order out of chaos, rais-
ing the administration of the island to a level, moral and ma-
terial, which it had never before achieved. We also, by-
treaty, gave the Cubans substantial advantages in our mar-
kets. Then we left the island, turning the government
over to its own people. After four or five years a revolution
broke out, during my administration, and we again had to
intervene to restore order. We promptly sent thither a small
army of pacification. Under General Barry, order was re-
stored and kept, and absolute justice was done. The Amer-
ican troops were then withdrawn and the Cubans reestab-
lished in complete possession of their own beautiful island,
128 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
and they are in possession of it now. There are plenty of
occasions in our history when we have shown weakness or
inefficiency, and some occasions when we have not been as
scrupulous as we should have been as regards the rights of
others. But I know of no action by any other government
in relation to a weaker power which showed such disinter-
ested efficiency in rendering service as was true in connection
with our intervention in Cuba.
In numerous speeches and addresses he expressed
his belief in a strong and efficient colonial govern-
ment, but a government which should be admin-
istered for the benefit of the colonial people and
not for the profit of the people at home. It is
worth while to quote on this subject from a speech
which Mr. Roosevelt made in Christiania, Norway,
on May 5, 1910. The occasion was a public dinner
given in his honour on the evening of the day when
the celebration was held in recognition of the
award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize. He had
made his set and carefully prepared speech in the
afternoon. At this dinner he spoke unexpectedly
and wholly extemporaneously, but the address was
taken down stenographically. In the course of it
he said:
I was particularly pleased by what you said about our
course, the course of the American people, in connection
with the Philippines and Cuba. I believe that we have the
Cuban Minister here with us to-night? [A voice: "Yes."]
Well, then, we have a friend who can check off what I am
STATESMANSHIP 129
going to say. At the close of the war of '98 we found our
army in possession of Cuba, and man after man among the
European diplomats of the old school said to me: "Oh, you
will never go out of Cuba. You said you would, of course,
but that is quite understood; nations don't expect promises