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 Miller would have been thought insufferably vulgar if he had not been a notoriety: as it was, everyone paid court to him." But various letters and references in Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden show that Miller returned Lord Houghton's courtesies in America, in 1875, and attempted to bring about a meeting between his English friend and Whitman. Furthermore, Miller speaks of traveling with Lord Houghton in Greece; and in a note of the Bear Edition he gives interesting hints at the sort of figure that he himself made in English country life:

With so much cordiality manifesting itself abroad and so little at home, it is not strange that Miller,

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 after this second visit to England, should have entertained for a time the notion of fixing his residence in a foreign land. It behooved him, furthermore, as a faithful follower of Lord Byron, to dwell in Italy. He says, with customary indefiniteness as to dates, that, in the of his hero, he "lived long enough at Genoa to find that his life there, along with the Shelleys, was simple, sincere, and clean. From Genoa I went to Florence, as the guest of our Consul General, Lorimer Graham. I wanted to live with Mr. Graham because he and his most amiable lady lived in the house occupied by Byron and the Shelleys, when they made their home in Florence. At Venice, under the guidance of Browning, who had left Florence to live in this latter place, after the death of his gifted wife, I found only the same story of industry, sobriety and devotion to art." Charles Warren Stoddard gives a glimpse of Miller's secretive life in Rome, picturing him driving out with the "Pink Countess," and declares that Miller's Italian novel, The One Fair Woman, 1876, with its epigraphs from Byron, Browning, Swinburne, and Hay, "embodies" much of Miller's Roman life, and is "one of the truest tales he ever told." Additional light on this period is thrown by Songs of Italy, 1878, a collection manifestly produced under the influence of Browning. The Ship in the Desert, published in book form in 1875, is preceded by an eloquent prose inscription to his parents, dated August, 1874, at Lake Como. At

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 about this time, Miller bought some land near Naples and, in company with an English poet, meditated settling there; but malarial fever attacked them both, his friend died, and the Italian chapter of his life was ended.

In November, 1875, Miller dated at Chicago an introductory allegorical poem, prefixed to Mary Murdock Mason's little Italian novel, Mae Madden, published in 1876. In the course of the next decade he roved widely, as was his wont, but this is, in general, the period of his experiments at living in eastern cities, including Boston, New York, and Washington, where he built himself a log cabin, and, in his frontier costume, became the picturesque publicity man for the "Western school." Bret Harte and Mark Twain, now at the height of their production, were creating a lively demand for the tales of the pioneers; and Miller perhaps perceived that if he was to have his due profit of the popular interest he must renounce his Italian and Oriental inclinations and return to his native fields. In 1876, at any rate, he published First Fam'lies of the Sierras, a prose tale of the Forty-Niners, marked by that chivalric sentiment for women and by that idealization of the noble men in red shirts, which are distinctive "notes" of this literary movement. In The Baroness of New York, 1877, a long romantic medley in verse, he dismally failed in his attempt to extend the adventures of his western heroine into the society of the metropolis. A

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 presentation copy of this book, now in the possession of the University of Chicago, bears the author's own veracious comment that it "isn't worth a damn." Though he salvaged a portion of it in "The Sea of Fire," the original title disappeared from his collective edition. Soon after his return to America, he began to be visited by dramatic aspirations; and in 1881 he achieved considerable success with The Danites in the Sierras. The three other plays which he preserved—Forty-Nine, Tally-Ho, and An Oregon Idyl—are like The Danites in presenting incidents in the story of the frontier. In 1881, he published also The Shadows of Shasta, a prose tale anticipating Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona in indignation at our treatment of the Indians. In 1884 falls the interesting but very fragmentary autobiographical miscellany called Memorie and Rime. With The Destruction of Gotham, 1886, a sensational novel of class-conflict in New York City, Miller somewhat significantly terminated his search for fortune and glory in the Eastern states.

He had been a sentimental pilgrim in England, a poetic refugee in Italy, and a picturesque visitor—an ambassador from the Sierras—even in New York and Washington. Though he had enjoyed playing all these parts, perhaps by 1886 he felt that he and his public were beginning to lose their zest for one another. Furthermore he had now married again and at least entertained the thought of settling down. The loss of considerable money in Wall

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 Street speculations had shaken his faith in "capitalistic society" and had weakened the Babylonian attractions of metropolitan life. He remembered the mountains and the seas of the West. He remembered also Sir Walter Scott's castle and estate at Abbotsford as a general model of the fashion in which a great poet should live. Mingled with these memories, in the background of his mind there was a curious accumulation of Utopian and Arcadian dreams which from his boyhood he had vaguely desired to realize. And so at last the prophet returned to his own country, and, entering upon a tract of land upon the hills looking over Oakland to San Francisco Bay, he built there a little wooden house for his wife, which he called The Abbey (commemorating at once her name and Dryburgh and Newstead Abbeys), a second cottage for his old mother, a "bower" for his daughter, and a little guest-house for whatever visitor, white, black, or yellow, cared to occupy it. There, too, he planted thousands of trees in the shape of a gigantic cross, and beneath them on the crest of the hill he built for himself a funeral pyre of the rough cobble, and he erected three monumerts of stone to three heroes: General Fremont, Robert Browning, and Moses.

Miller says that his choice of this retreat on the hills was determined by the relative cheapness of the land; but he was not a practical man, and he must soon have forgotten this practical considera-

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 tion in the more characteristic reflection that. The Hights was just the right setting for a man like him. His primary purpose there was not to follow any gainful occupation, but to live as all poetic Utopians have held that a man should live, toiling a couple of hours each day at honest labor of the hands and devoting the rest of life to love, friendship, art, and preaching the gospel of beauty. The literary expression of his dream appears in The Building of the City Beautiful, 1893, a Utopian romance obviously related to the writings of Ruskin and William Morris, but apparently inspired directly by Miller's conversations with a Jewish radical in Palestine. He had it in mind also to gather around him like-minded workers and friends, who should give to the world below them an illustration of the felicity in store for humanity when the base passions which now govern society are eradicated. Several young poets and artists came to him and tarried for a time in his guest-house, moved by curiosity or the hopes of youth—among them several Japanese, including Yone Noguchi. And students from the University in Berkeley and travellers from remoter places made little pilgrimages up into the hills to visit this romantically costumed poet and seer who had fought with Indians and now preached universal peace. To his disciples and lovers he lectured in a somewhat oracular tone on the laws of the new American poetry, on the conduct of life, and

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 on the new religious spirit which is to embrace all mankind.

Miller's visitors did not always, however, find him preaching peace. His pacificism, like the popular American variety, was tempered by hatred of oppression and readiness to fight "on the side of the Lord." He accepted the "idealistic" interpretation of the Spanish-American War, and chanted lustily his encouragement of the struggle to free the Cubans from the tyranny of Spain. On the other hand, in his Chants for the Boer, 1900, he protested indignantly against the British imperial policy in South Africa; and his strong pro-English sympathies give a certain moral quality to his indignation. "Find here," he cries, "not one ill word for brave old England; my first, best friends were English. But for her policy, her politicians, her speculators, what man with a heart in him can but hate and abhor these? England's best friends to-day are those who deplore this assault on the farmer Boers, so like ourselves a century back."

There was an interesting element of inconsistency between the popular American humanitarianism which Miller had gradually adopted as his religion and his strongest poetical impulses, which were adventurous and imperialistic. In these later years the fire of his fighting youth slumbered in the veins of the white-bearded seer, but it was never extinguished, and, every now and then, it flashed out. In such seasons pilgrims to The Hights found that

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 he was not at home. He was a restless soul—like most Utopists, ill adapted to the permanency of a Paradise. There was, moreover, a steadily disquieting feature in the prospect from his hills. At his feet, the great ships rode at anchor. But before his eyes daily they lifted anchor and spread their wings and sailed away, out through the shining Golden Gate into the Pacific, and disappeared on pathless ways over the rim of the world. For him, even at the age of sixty, the attraction of unknown places was magical. He followed "the gleam" to the islands of the South Seas, to Japan, to Alaska. In 1897–8 he was correspondent of the New York Journal in the Klondike. Trying to pass from the Klondike to the Bering Sea by way of the Yukon, he finds the river closed at the edge of the Arctic Circle. "It was nearly two thousand miles to the sea, all ice and snow, with not so much as a dogtrack before me and only midnight round about me. There was nothing to do but to try to get back to my cabin on the Klondike. In the line of my employment I kept a journal of the solitary seventy-two days and nights—mostly night—spent in the silent and terrible ascent of the savage sea of ice." The imaginative harvest of these later adventures was first gathered up in As it Was in the Beginning, 1903, a curious poetical fantasy, oddly brought forth in San Francisco in pamphlet form with a cover decorated by a figure of a stork bearing in his bill the infant Roosevelt in spectacles. In 1907,

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 worked over and shorn of its more grotesque features, the poem reappeared in dignified form as Light, with the interesting prefatory avowal: "My aspiration is and ever has been, in my dim and uncertain way, to be a sort of Columbus—or Cortez." (In the collective edition the title is changed once more to A Song of Creation.)

When Miller finally reviewed his own work and prepared his collective edition, he saw that much of his verse had been hastily written, journalistic, prolix, lacking in form and concentration; and he manfully discarded many long passages of it. At the same time, he felt as never before the importance of his own position in American poetry. He had not really achieved a distinctive poetical style. He had not been a thinker. He had been a pathfinder of the imagination; like Whitman, he had blazed a way into new territories. He had brought something of undiscovered beauty and splendor into American literature. He exulted in the wide lands and seas which he first had annexed to the provinces of song. He had sung the exodus across the plains. He had pictured the great American desert. He had celebrated the forested heights of the Sierras, the giant trees of the Mariposa Grove, and the falls of the Yosemite. He had been a myth-maker and had sown with poetic legends all his western land from the snowy peaks of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shasta through the golden poppy fields of the central valleys to San Diego Bay, Nicaragua, and the

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 Amazon River. He had made captive for romance the outlaws of old Spanish California, the priests and bandits of Mexico, the scouts of Fremont, dusky Indian heroines, and the motley multitude of the gold-seekers. He had been the champion of oppressed peoples—the Southern Confederacy, the native American tribes, the Jews of Russia and Palestine, the Cubans, the Boers, the yellow men and the Mexicans in California. And then, to widen his horizon at sunset, he had threaded the golden straits and had sailed "on and on" to the Arctic Seas, to Hawaii, to the Orient, chanting as he sailed, every ready for fresh adventure, ever in love with light, color, and movement, ever himself the romantic troubadour, the picturesque incarnation of the spirit which pervades his poems.

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Many of the things which Carl Sandburg relishes I relish: the jingle of the "American language" in the making; the Great Lakes, prairies, mountains, and the diurnal and seasonal scene-shifting of the elements; all kinds of workmen with their tools in city and country, and the "feel" of an axe or shovel in my own hands; the thunder of overland trains and the cross-fire of banter in a barber shop; eating ham-and-eggs with a Chinese chemist at a wayside lunch-counter at four o'clock in the morning, sun-time; the mixed human contacts to be had, for example, in a "common" up-country smoker, where black men, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Japanese, Indians, and Germans commune happily in a thick blue mist, and a fluent young travelling man "making" the resort towns drops into the seat beside me and asks what "line" I am carrying, and I exchange matches and crackers with a Dutchman from Java in blue overalls moving from the sugar-beet fields of Wisconsin to the raspberry district of Michigan, accounting spontaneously for the "yoost" and the

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 "vob" in his vocabulary by his long contact with the North Germanic people.

All these things I relish and am familiar with; and yet, as I study my fourth volume of Mr. Sandburg's poems, I wonder why Mr. Untermeyer and the other fugelmen of the "movement" congratulate the public on the ease with which they may read and enjoy poetry, now that classical allusions and the traditional poetic diction have been banished. It is a sham and a delusion. Mr. Sandburg is not easy to read. He is as difficult in his own fashion as John Donne or Browning. If any of the men in my common smoker should glance over my shoulder at the pages before me, they would see abundance of familiar words: "taxi-drivers, "window-washers," "booze-runners," hatrunners," "hat [sic]-cleaners," "delicatessen clerks." Perhaps also "shovel-stiffs," "work-plugs," "hoosegow," and "exhausted eggs heads" would be familiar to them. But I think they would gasp and stare at "sneaking scar-faced Nemesis," "miasmic" women, and "macabre" moons. I think they would meditate a long while before they felt any emotion whatever in the presence of such word patterns as:

And I believe they might read the long title-poem, "Slabs of the Sunburnt West," twenty times without suspecting for a moment that it is a meditation

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 on God, civilization, and immortality, conceived on the brink of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

Now, the considerable obscurity in Mr. Sandburg's work may be accounted for in two ways.

In the first place, his literary allegiance is mixed. When in his interesting poem on "The Windy City" he begins a lucid paragraph thus: "Mention proud things, catalogue them"—he is writing under the formative influence of Whitman; and both his language and his emotion are straightforward and sincere. But in "Fins," for example, and in "Pearl Horizons," where he asks the "pearl memories" to flick him and hold him even and smooth, he is writing under the deformative influence of the most artificial phase of Imagism; and both his language and his emotion are tortured and insincere.

In the second place, Mr. Sandburg thinks that he is really sympathetic with the "working classes" and with the unloved and not altogether lovely portion of humanity which Mr. Masefield has sung as "the scum of the earth"; and he imagines that he is pretty much out of sympathy with "the great ones of the earth" and with all those who speak complacently of "the established order." Robert Burns sympathized with the Scotch peasant and wrote of him and for him, incidentally pleasing the rest of mankind. The late James Whitcomb Riley sympathized with the farmer's boy and wrote of him and for him; and as there were a great many farmers' boys in the land, he pleased a wide audience. But Mr.

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 Sandburg, who sympathizes with the taxi-drivers and delicatessen clerks, does not write for them; he writes for the literary smart set, for the readers of The Freeman, The Liberator, The Dial, Vanity Fair, etc.

As a consequence of his confronting this audience, Mr. Sandburg appears to me to lack somewhat the courage of his sympathies. He seldom individualizes his working-man; almost never does the imaginative work of penetrating the consciousness of any definite individual and telling his story coherently with the concrete emotion belonging to it. Instead, he presents a rather vague lyrical sense of the surge of but slightly differentiated "masses"; he gives, as the newspaper does, a collection of accidents to undifferentiated children; he is the voice of the abstract city rather than of the citizen. He chants of dreams, violences, toils, cruelties, and despairs. In his long poem, "And So To-day," commemorating the burial of the Unknown Soldier, he finds, however, an appointed theme; he is in the presence of an almost abstract fate, which he renders piteously concrete by a curious parody of Whitman's threnody on Lincoln in a language of vulgar brutality—a language reflecting, it is to be supposed, the vulgarity and brutality of the civilization for which the Unknown Soldier died, as Mr. Sandburg bitterly suggests, in vain. In the short ironical piece, "At the Gate of the Tombs," adopting once more the most biting lingo of the mob, he expresses

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 powerfully the attitude, let us say, of The New Republic towards the government's treatment of political prisoners and conscientious objectors—"gag 'em, lock 'em up, get 'em bumped off." Radical journals, like. The Nation and. The New Republic, radical journalists like Mr. Upton Sinclair, and radical poets like Mr. Sandburg, create for themselves purely artistic problems of very great difficulty, of which they do not always find triumphant solutions. When, for instance, Mr. Sinclair presents the entire American press, the churches, and the universities as bought, corrupt conspirators against truth, he creates for himself the pretty problem of showing where truth lodges: it is an artistic necessity—till he has shown that, his great picture of iniquity seems incredible, illusory. When Mr. Sandburg, in his poem, "And So To-day," presents the official pageant of mourning for the Unknown Soldier as a farcical mummery; the President, the commanding officers, the "honorable orators, buttoning their prinz alberts," as empty puppets; and the people from sea to sea as stopping for a moment in their business—"with a silence of eggs laid in a row on a pantry shelf"—when Mr. Sandburg presents a great symbolic act of the nation as vacuous and meaningless, he creates for himself the pretty problem of showing where the meaning of the nation lies: till he has shown that, and with at least equal earnestness and power, he is in danger. He is in grave danger of leaving his readers with a sense

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 either that his conception of the nation is illusory or that both he and they inhabit a world of illusions—a world of dreams, violences, toils, cruelties, and despairs, in which nothing really matters, after all.

Mr. Sandburg is not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. To take a similar case, even Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, a man who habitually insists upon the hopeless condition of the Republic and the brainlessness and heartlessness of all our public men—even Mr. Villard, insensitive as he is to the "antique symmetry," is apparently not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. At least jonce or twice every year Mr. Villard drops the muck-rake with which he harries Washington, and/writes an editorial in behalf of the New Testament and the character of Christ, as if to prove to his anxious readers that he really has a definite standard in mind for the administration of the War Department. Mr. Sandburg does likewise. When he has me all but persuaded that he himself is at heart a barbarian, that he feels a deep and genuine gusto in violence and brutality, that his talk about building a "city beautiful" is for the consumption of ladies who actually bore him, that in fact he chafes at the slight discipline which our civilization as yet imposes, and that we are all callous "galoots" and may as well acknowledge it and act accordingly—then he brings me to a pause by his sympathy for the "insignificant" private life, by the choking pathos of his

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 epigram on "the boy nobody knows the name of"; then he stuns me by enjoining himself, with a studious nonchalance, to

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Andrew Carnegie's countrymen felt in his lifetime that $350,000,000 worth of power over them was more than any man ought to hold. Accordingly, except when they were asking him to found a library or to endow a college, they did what they could to keep him humble and to persuade him that no one envied him and that no one would bow an inch lower to him out of reverence for his fabulous wealth. This was no doubt sound democratic discipline. He himself must have applauded the spirit of it. "It was long," he says in commenting on his own radically democratic upbringing, "before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and therefore earned the right to public respect." But he knew all the time, and his countrymen knew at heart, that adding up his stocks and bonds would not summarize his talents and virtues. His gifts made him appear the most magnificent philanthropist that the world had ever seen. And by qualities which remained with him after he had distributed his fortune, he was one

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 of the most original, interesting, and representative men of his generation.

The Iron Master possessed intelligence of the first rank in its kind, an open and free spirit coupled with extraordinary firmness of character, indefatigable energy and initiative and a "creative" benevolence, together with abundant humor, poetic sentiment, and deep feeling with regard to the things that matter. Hs was, in short, a personality. He appreciated, furthermore, the significant and picturesque aspects of his own career and savored its contrasts like a man of letters. When in his old age, at his retreat on the Scotch moors, he undertook at the insistence of his friends to compose his memoirs, he had the material, the perspective, and the mood for a book fit to stand on the shelf by Franklin's. Following his own precept and Franklin's example, he wrote out his recollections simply, modestly, blithely, like an old gentleman with a good conscience telling the story of his life to his friends and relatives.

The war diverted him from his work before the manuscript was in shape for publication. He wrote on the margin: "Whoever arranges these notes should be careful not to burden the public with too much. A man with a heart as well as a head should be chosen." Professor John C. Van Dyke was selected as an editor possessing both these qualifications. His task, which he says was little more than to arrange the matter in chronological sequence, he

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 has performed unobtrusively—just a shade too unobtrusively. Carnegie had far more than the ordinary manufacturer's respect for literature, and he clearly hoped that his autobiography would be considered, in the stricter sense, as "literature." It contains, however, more instances of the "dangling participle" than perhaps ever before appeared in a single volume. There should be nothing sacred, to one charged with the editing of an unfinished manuscript, about Mr. Carnegie's dangling participles. Before the book goes into its second edition, these and such like easily corrigible slips should be silently amended. Then the really charming spirit which pervades it—I do not recall a harsh or ill-natured word from the beginning to the end of it—should make it a place in the best company, where it belongs.

Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 at Dunfermline, Scotland, son of a damask weaver who was ruined by the introduction of steam looms, and who in 1848 borrowed twenty pounds to bring his family to America, where "Andy" made his "start in life" at the age of thirteen as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at a dollar and twenty cents a week. A second-rate "self-made man" might have attributed his success to the change of environment and to his own industry. It is a characteristic and attractive trait in Carnegie, creditable to both his heart and his head, that he recognizes and handsomely acknowledges his obligations not merely to his em-

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 ployers and employees and partners, but to a multitude of benign forces co-operating in his success.

Though he had, for example, but a few years of common schooling, he makes it beautifully clear that he received from various directions the incentives of an excellent education. He declares that he was fortunate in his ancestors and supremely fortunate in his birthplace. He is proud of a grandfather on one side who was familiarly known as "the professor," of a grandfather on the other side who was a friend of Cobbett, of an uncle who went to jail to vindicate the right of public assembly, of a father who was one of five weavers that founded the first library in Dunfermline, and of a mother capable of binding shoes to help support the family, in her morality an unconscious follower of Confucius, in her religion consciously a disciple of Channing. As for the town, it had the reputation of being the most radical in the kingdom: the stimulus of political and philosophic ideas was in the air; the editorials of the London Times were read from the pulpit; "the names of Hume, Cobden, and Bright were upon everyone's tongue." Dunfermline was radical, but with a radicalism nourished on history and inclined to hero-worship; for, in the midst of her, Abbey and ruined tower fired the young heart with remembrance of King Malcom and Wallace and Bruce. "It is a tower of strength for a boy," says the old man, "to have a hero." The thought of Wallace made him face whatever he was afraid

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 of, and remained "a real force in his life to the very end."

When the Carnegie family settled in America, their capital was brains, pluck, honesty, willingness to work, and loyalty to one another. The early stages in their pecuniary progress were marked first by payment of their debts, then by purchase of their first little house, and later by their first investment, in five shares of the Adams Express Company. "Andy" did not long remain a telegraph messenger, because he promptly developed his faculty for doing "something beyond the sphere of his duties," which attracted the attention of those over him. He picked up telegraphy while waiting for messages; he learned to receive by ear while others used the paper slip; he mastered the duties of a traindispatching superintendent of division while sending the messages of his superior. When his chief's arrival at the office was delayed one morning and the division was in confusion, he assumed responsibility and sent out the orders in the superintendent's name, saying to himself "death or Westminster Abbey." The union of special knowledge with courage, which made "the little white-haired Scotch devil" a first-rate assistant at the age of eighteen, promoted him in six years to the superintendency of the Pittsburgh Division. "I was only twenty-four years old," he says, "but my model then was Lord John Russell." Two years later he was assistant director of telegraphs and military railroads

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 for the government. After the Civil War, by swift combinations of his forces and rapid marches into new fields he established his position at the centre of the industries on which the internal development of the country most directly depended. At the age of thirty-three, he had an annual income of fifty thousand dollars; its subsequent expansion there is not space to recite.

That the son of an impecunious weaver should, while acting as telegraph operator in Pennsylvania, have taken Lord John Russell as his model strikes one as astonishing—till one studies the portrait of this young man at sixteen. The bearing and the features—the full brow, the clear penetrating eyes, the firm but sensitive mouth, are those of a well-bred, even of a high-bred youth, quite the stuff, one should say, to develop into a Lord Rector of St. Andrews University, laird of Skibo Castle, and conspirator with Lords Morley and Bryce and Grey for the world's welfare. The record of his early life bears out the impression given by the photograph. It shows a boy grounded by family discipline in self-respect, moral purity, and intellectual ambition. It indicates that the wide beneficence of his later years was not the mere after thought and diversion of a satiated money-getter, but the object towards which his efforts tended from the start.

As a messenger boy he was reading Macaulay, Bancroft, and Shakespeare, and was learning the oratorios of Handel. His first note to the press,

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 written at the same period, was a plea to have a certain small library opened to working boys of his class. The 7,689 organs that he afterwards gave to churches and the 2,800 libraries that he founded were his acknowledgment to society for the impulse it had given him. He had worshipped a popular hero, Wallace, from the Dunfermline days; and the hero funds that he established throughout the world were tokens of his lifelong hero-worship. By the school of thought in which he was nourished, war among civilized nations was reckoned an obsolescent and absurd instrument of statecraft; his Palace of Peace commemorated the aspirations of a genuine friend of all the people.

In 1868 he had made a memorandum, indicating it as his intention to retire in two years and to "settle in Oxford and get a thorough education," and then to "take part in public affairs, especially those connected with education and improvement of the lower classes." Like another famous man of our time, he discovered that it is not easy for a leader in the fullness of his power to retire—"he had come to the ring and now he must hop." But he continued his education and his educating, when he could, by reading Plato, Confucius, and Buddha, by travelling in various lands, and by earnestly advising and taking the advice of philosophers, presidents, kaisers, prime ministers, secretaries of state, and other experts. He acknowledged the impulse to intellectual growth that society had given

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 him by gifts of buildings or endowment funds to five hundred educational institutions at home and abroad and by his great central foundation with its liberal charter for "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States."

Some of us criticized him because he did not give away his three hundred and fifty millions stealthily and secretly, as we slip a quarter into the collection box, God alone being aware of our munificence. But he knew that one of the most important of his benefactions was precisely the publicity with which he restored his vast accumulations to the people and put them at the service of the upward-striving members of society. It was for him to declare conspicuously and with magnificent and unmistakable emphasis what money is good for; to promote science and literature and music and peace and heroism. He owed the friendship, he tells us, of Earl Grey, who later became a trustee of the ten-million-dollar fund for the United Kingdom, to the publication in the Times of these sentences from his instructions to the trustees of his gifts to Dunfermline:

To bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more "of sweetness and light," to give them—especially the young—some charm, some happiness, some elevating conditions of life which residence elsewhere would have denied, that the child of my native town, looking back in after years, however far from home it may have

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 roamed, will feel that simply by virtue of being such, life has been made happier and better. If this be the fruit of your labors, you will have succeeded; if not, you will have failed.

Large-scale beneficence—doing good to towns and entire classes of society and nations—establishes one as a member of a privileged order, which the average man regards with a certain uneasy envy. If Carnegie had not taken from us that $350,000,000 we might all and each have had the credit of contributing to the purchase of those organs, the foundation of those libraries, the establishment of those hero funds, the building of that Palace of Peace, the pensioning of those employees, the endowment of those universities, that great fund for the advancement of knowledge. True, we might have contributed. We might have taxed ourselves at that rate. We might have made similar investments in human progress. But we know pretty well that we wouldn't have done so. After we had taxed ourselves for the necessary upkeep and expansion of our army and navy, we should have felt too poor, even had steel sold for some dollars a ton less,—we should still have felt too poor to bear an additional tax for such remote objects as the promotion of heroism or science. We should have felt that we owed it to ourselves and to our families to apportion our little "surplus" to our tobacco funds and our soft-drink funds for the tranquillizing of our nerves and the alleviation of our thirst, or

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 perhaps, if we were a notch above such sensual indulgence, to our fund for the collection of cancelled postage stamps.

In the age of individualism which produced Andrew Carnegie, society had scarcely begun to "tap the resources" of collective effort for any genuine amelioration of common conditions. The people "perished" because they had no vision of powers united. In this present hour, clamoring for a high leadership which fails to appear, we average men may look back a little regretfully at our Carnegies, shrewd and level-headed in their means but whole-heartedly and aspiringly democratic in their ends, being fain to confess, we average men, that it is the pressure of the "hero's" exaction, the spur of high example, a vision not our own, a power not ourselves, that we must depend upon, if we are ever, in Pindar's great phrase, "to become what we are."

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Mr. Roosevelt's great and fascinating personality is part of the national wealth, and it should, so far as possible, be preserved undiminished. Since his death those who have spoken of him have observed somewhat too sedulously the questionable maxim, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. To say nothing but good of a great man is generally fatal alike to biographical vivacity and to truth. In this case it is a serious detraction from that versatile and inexhaustible energy which Lord Morley admired when he declared that the two most extraordinary works of nature in America were Niagara Falls and the President in the White House. "He made," says William Hard with the intensity of one catching breath after the close passage of a thunderbolt, "he made. Theodore Roosevelt the most interesting thing in the world," and he made "the world itself momentarily immortally interesting." That touches the heart of the matter: it explains comprehensively

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 why his friends loved and his enemies admired him. It leaves him with his aggressive definiteness, his color, and his tang. Mr. Roosevelt, as he proudly insisted and as he admirably painted himself in many a capital chapter of his Rough Riders and his hunting and exploring books, was stained with the blood and sweat and dust of conflict. No image presents him whole that lacks a dash of the recklessness which appears in Frederick Macmonnies' vaulting trooper and a touch of the ruthlessness hinted by the fiercely clenched fist in a well-known photograph of him pacing the deck of the flagship with "Fighting Bob" Evans. He lived and died fighting, and he gave a thousand proofs that the keenest joy he knew was the joy of battle. No memorial so little preserves him as a whitewashed plaster bust. Better than all the eulogies pronounced in public places I suspect he would have relished the tribute paid to him in private conversation by one of our distinguished visitors from abroad. "It may be," he said, "that Mr. Wilson possesses all the virtues in the calendar; but for my part I had rather go to hell with Theodore Roosevelt." Mr. Wilson, he implied, might get off in a corner somewhere with Saint Peter and Colonel House, and arrange something of the highest importance to the heavenly host; but all the cherubim and seraphim of healthy curiosity would be leaning over the impassable gulf to see what Mr. Roosevelt would do next.

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 It is because such notes as these recall the most interesting man of our times, "the great Achilles whom we knew," that I have heard and read with a certain languor the conventional tributes evoked by his death, and, more recently, have gone through the posthumous biographies without entire satisfaction. Excepting Mr. G. S. Viereck's saucy apology for being a pro-German, the cue of recent writers has been canonization. Mr. MacIntire, for example, prefaced by General Wood, has written a purely "inspirational" narrative with a conquering hero ready for the moving-picture screen or a Henty novel or a place on the juvenile bookshelf beside "The Boys' King Arthur." As a specimen of its critical quality, I select the following passage, with the suggestion that it be read in connection with the report of the Federal Commission on the Packers: "One shudders to think of what fate would have befallen the United States if the monopolies which Roosevelt curbed while he was President had been allowed to flourish until this era of revolution." The first three volumes of "Roosevelt, His Life, Meaning, and Messages," is a collection of important speeches, articles, and messages arranged by William Griffith; the fourth volume by Eugene Thwing is a rapid biographical compilation, journalistic, readable, and concluding with the happy thought that if the meaning of Roosevelt's life is fully appreciated we shall find in the next generation of Americans "a veritable race of moral

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 giants." Mr. Lewis's book, for which Mr. Taft supplies an introduction, is, of course, a work of quite another order. For the earlier period it is almost as entertaining as the Autobiography, and for the latter years, particularly for the history of the Progressive movement, in which the author was an important participant, it is an independent authority and an animated and agreeable one with many small intimate strokes of appreciation. Mr. Lewis candidly announces that he considers his subject too near for "impartial judgment," and he lives up to his declaration most loyally, contending that practically everything Roosevelt said and did was exactly the right thing to say and do.

The eulogists and biographers claim rather too much, and one could wish that they would take a little more pains to harmonize their favorite facts. In order to illustrate the power of mind over matter, they all foster the tradition of Roosevelt's sickly youth. But Mr. MacIntire speaks of him in the New York Assembly as "this puny young chap" at just the period in which Mr. Thwing, after a reference to his "puny voice and puny hand," exhibits him knocking out the slugger Stubby Collins and mopping up the floor with "several" others. There is a similar discrepancy with regard to his linguistic attainments. Roosevelt himself testified that he was "lamentably weak in Latin and Greek"; but Mr. Thwing asserts that he was "a scholar of the first rank in the classics." One observer describes

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 his conversational French at a luncheon in the White House as voluble, but regardless of accent and grammar; but Mr. Thwing says that "the savants of the Sorbonne heard him address them in as flawless French as they themselves could employ." Mr. MacIntire credits Roosevelt with the message ordering Dewey to sail into the port of Manila; Mr. Lewis says it has been established that Secretary Long sent it. Mr. Thwing makes him the discoverer and namer of the River of Doubt; Mr. Lewis represents him as only the explorer of that river which in his honor was renamed Teodoro by the Brazilian Government. When there is a difference with regard to verifiable facts, Mr. Lewis appears generally to be right. In the total estimates, however, there is no significant difference; the biographers agree that Roosevelt was "our typical American," and possessed every important virtue that we admire.

When the critical biographer arrives he will re-examine this total estimate. Perhaps he will be challenged to re-examination by a certain passage towards the end of Mr. Lewis's book: "In the year 1918, a friend referred to the year 1921 as the year when he (Roosevelt) would again enter the White House. He had been in one of his jocular moods, but he immediately became very serious. 'No,' he said, 'not I. I don't want it, and I don't think I am the man to be nominated. I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy'."

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 Mr. Roosevelt knew "the people." When he said, "I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy," he admitted what none of the biographers concedes, the waning of his star, his perception that he could no longer, as in 1904, say "We believe" with strong confidence that he was uttering the convictions of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. Both he and "the people" had changed, but the people had changed more profoundly than he in ways which I shall attempt to indicate by sketching an answer to three questions: First, what were the dominant aspects of the national character at about the time of Mr. Roosevelt's advent in public life? Second, what significant alterations in the national psychology did he produce in the period during which his personality was most heartily accepted as an incarnation of the national character? Third, how and to what extent has his national representativeness diminished?

Mr. Roosevelt did not emerge conspicuously on the national horizon till late in the nineties. The preceding decade appears to have contained extraordinarily little to kindle the imaginations of spirited and public-minded young men. There had been no war since the youth of their fathers. The Government pursued a policy of sombre rather than "splendid" isolation. The country offered its imposing

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 attractions chiefly to the big business men. Captains of industry flourished like the green bay tree. For diversion there was riotous striking in the Carnegie Steel Works at Homestead; but the State militia put it down. In 1893 there was a financial panic; but it blew over. In 1894 Coxey led an army of the unemployed to Washington; but it dispersed like the chorus of a musical comedy amid general laughter. The Columbian Exposition, at the opening of which Chauncey Depew assisted, was on the whole a symbol of a period of unexampled material prosperity in commerce, agriculture, and manufactures. In 1896 William McKinley, son of an iron manufacturer and author of a tariff bill designed to protect the farmers from the plain people as the manufacturers had already been protected, was elected President under the skilful management of Mark Hanna, wholesale grocer, coal and iron merchant, later United States Senator. Mr. Roscoe Thayer remarks in his life of Hay that the most representative American in the third quarter of the century was P. T. Barnum; and the methods and ideals of Mark Hanna as political manager he compares to the methods and ideals of Barnum. From the popular magazines, reflecting current standards of success, the aspiring youth learned that by frugality and industry he might become as rich as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller or as noble and distinguished as Chauncey Depew.

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 The Plutocratic era lacked—outside the field of business—ideas, imagination, animating purpose.

Mark Twain, in some ways a singularly sensitive person, curiously illustrates the point. He possessed ambition and a restless energy which should, of course, have found satisfaction and ample reward in the production of literature; but in this decade he seems to have been irresistibly driven by the time-spirit to compete with the acknowledged leaders of American life in their own field. He spent himself trying to get rich and live in the grand style like his friend Carnegie and his friend Henry Rogers. Feverishly pushing his publishing house, his typesetting machine, and a half dozen projects for rolling up a fortune, he began to use literature as a mere handmaid to finance and to regard himself as a financier. He felt himself daily on the brink of immense wealth while he was actually headed for bankruptcy. His recently published letters give the emotional reaction. Reading the morning papers, he says, makes him spend the rest of the day "pleading for the damnation of the human race." "Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before; and so I have lost my pride in him, and can't write praisefully about him any more." He thinks that he detects in Howells something of his own ennui: "indifference to sights and sounds once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel; the secret sigh

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 behind the public smile; the private What-in-hell-did-I-come-for."

With less bitterness Mr. Dooley—in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's jubilee—testifies to the same effect in summarizing the achievements of his own time in America:

It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the effect of this busy but mercenary and humdrum national mind upon the finer spirits in the political arena. John Hay, for example, as Secretary of State under McKinley, seems to have gone earnestly about his work, suppressing now a yawn of disgust, now a sigh of despair. "Office holding per se," he writes in 1900, "has no attraction for me." He has some far-sighted policies for his department, but he can't put them through, for "there will always be 34 per cent of the Senate on the blackguard side of every question that comes before them." Even more of this quiet disgust with American public

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 life appears in the now celebrated diary of Henry Adams, a man who "had everything," born into the governing class yet holding no higher office than that of private secretary to his father, unless it was the position of assistant professor of history at Harvard. When the latter position was offered to him, he remarked in a blasé tone which would have thunderstruck his great-grandfather: "It could not much affect the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in Washington, or began talking to boys in Cambridge." Still more striking is Adams' analysis of the American character in government circles. It might be true, he said, in New York or Chicago, that the American was "a pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors;" but it was not true in Washington. "There the American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, as inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money. That the American by temperament worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it; he had no use for wealth."

While the national mind was absorbed in business

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 why should young men born to wealth and social position strive to thrust themselves in between the captains of industry and their political representatives? Possessing at the start the objects of the race, why should they contend? Politics was generally described as dirty and uninspiring; why should they subject themselves to its soil and fatigue? How some of them were answering such questions, Jacob Riis revealed in his life of Roosevelt:

Then came the impact upon the national character of the Rooseveltian personality, persuaded that there are a hundred more interesting things than making money, all "worth while:" hunting grizzlies, reforming, exploring, writing history, traveling, fighting Spaniards, developing a navy, governing men, reading Irish epics, building canals, swimming the Potomac with ambassadors, shooting lions, swapping views with kaisers, organizing new parties, and so on forever. Under the influence of this masterful force the unimaginative plutocratic

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 psychology was steadily metamorphosed into the psychology of efficient, militant, imperialistic nationalism. When Roosevelt heard of the young man to whom nothing seemed much worth while, he is said to have struck the table a blow with his fist, exclaiming: That fellow ought to have been knocked in the head. I would rather take my chances with a blackmailing policeman than with such as he." Mr. Riis remarks, "This is what Roosevelt got out of Harvard." But clearly he didn't get it out of Harvard. He found it—this wrath at the sluggard—in his own exuberant temperament. Most of his biographers foolishly insist that he had no extraordinary natural endowment. The evidence is all otherwise, indicating a marvellous physical and mental energy and blood beating so hot and fast through brain and sinew that he was never bored in his life. He never felt the ennui or the horrid languor of men like Hay and Henry Adams. He had such excess of animal spirits that, as every one knows, he was accustomed, after battling with assemblymen or Senators, to have in a prizefighter to knock him down.

Whatever delighted him he sought to inculcate upon the American people so that Rooseveltism should be recognized as synonymous with Americanism. Mr. Lewis is at some pains to point out that in his private life he was an old-fashioned gentleman and invariably dressed for dinner. The fact is mildly interesting, but its public influence

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 was absolutely negligible. Rooseveltism can never be interpreted to mean dressing for dinner. Practically he was a powerful aider and abettor of the movement to banish the word "gentleman" from the American vocabulary, except as a term of contempt. He was ostentatious about his friendships with Mike Donovan, Fitzsimmons, Sullivan, and Battling Nelson, just as he was about his pursuit of the big game of North America, because he loved the larger vertebrates and wished to implant an affection for them in the national mind. In his sports he can hardly be called a typical American; the typical American cannot employ the champion pugilists, nor follow the Meadowbrook hounds, nor hunt elephants with a regiment of bearers. These are the sports of emperors and rajahs and the sporting sons of multimillionaires. Still Mr. Roosevelt took them up and journalized them in behalf of a strenuous athletic ideal for the nation. A powerful animal himself, he gloried, day in and day out, in the fundamental animal instincts and activities, reproductive and combative, the big family and the big stick, the "full baby carriage" and "hitting hard and hitting first;" and he preached them in season and out of season.

I will give two illustrations. On his return from slaughtering elephants in Africa, he stopped off in Berlin to tell the Germans about the world-movement. That was in 1910; and perhaps the Germans were then almost as well informed with regard to

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 the world-movement as Mr. Roosevelt. But in those days his exuberance was very great; for it had been two years since he had sent a message to Congress, and he found relief for his pent-up energies in bestowing advice all the way around the European circuit. Accordingly he solemnly warned the Germans that one of "the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge." At the same time he marked it as a reassuring sign of our modern period that there were then larger standing armies than ever before in the world. These words seemed to his German hearers so fitly spoken that they then and there made Mr. Roosevelt a doctor of philosophy. He lectured also at the Sorbonne, finding a text in a novel of Daudet's in which the author speaks of "the fear of maternity which haunts the young mother." The country in which that is generally true, cried Roosevelt to that country of declining birth-rate, is "rotten to the core." "No refinement of life," he continued, "can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race."

Roosevelt's mental exuberance may be suggestively measured in this fashion. Mark Twain, when he got under way, was a fairly voluble talker. But Mark Twain was silent and overwhelmed in the presence of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, then, had

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 a certain flow of ideas. But Kipling was silent and overwhelmed in the presence of Roosevelt. Again I quote Mr. Thayer:

Roosevelt quickened the pace of national life by his own mental and physical speed. His special contribution, however, was not the discovery but the direction of strenuousness. The captains of industry had been strenuous enough. He found a new object for physical and mental energy on the grand scale. More than any other man of his time he made political eminence a prize of the first order by his own unequivocal preference of public service and glory to private opulence and ease. The exigencies of his later political life associated him indeed with what a western humorist has described as the "high-low-brows;" he consorted with publicans and sinners; he broke bread with bosses and malefactors of great wealth; he played up the prize

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 fighters and the cowboys; he hurled epithets at Byzantine logothetes and college professors: so that one almost forgets that he began his career distinctly on the "high-brow" side as a "silk-stocking" reformer, supported by the vote of the "brownstone fronts," foremost of the pure-principled purposeful young "college men in politics" in an era of sordid greed and corruption. But in the days when he was assemblyman at Albany, police commissioner, and civil service reformer, men did not speak of him nor did he speak of himself as a "practical politician." In those days there was a certain bloom on the fruit that he reached for; and he did not disdain to speak of himself as a "practical idealist." In that rôle he delighted even fastidious disciples of Charles Eliot Norton's fastidious school; and he exercised a wonderfully tonic influence upon well-bred young men of his generation.

His first great service was to his own prosperous class, to young men of means in college, to the "intellectuals" generally. He did not preach against wealth. He held, like the philosopher Frank Crane, that "men who get $20,000 a year and up are the most valuable citizens of the nation." On the other hand, he maintained, like that journalistic sage, that the man who inherits a million and spends his days playing bridge and changing his trousers is "a cootie on the body politic." To fortune's favored sons he declared the responsibilities of wealth and he taught the right uses of leisure. In the vein of

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 Carlyle and Kipling he preached against an idle, pleasure-seeking life as not merely undesirable, but contemptible. He preached the gospel of work for every man that comes into the world, work to the uttermost of his capacity; responsibility for every advantage and every talent; ignominy and derision for the coward and the shirker and the soft-handed over-fastidious person who thinks public life too rough and dirty for his participation. Writing of machine politics in 1886, he said, rather fatalistically: "If steady work and much attention to detail are required, ordinary citizens, to whom participation in politics is merely a disagreeable duty, will always be beaten by the organized army of politicians to whom it is both duty, business, and pleasure, and who are knit together and to outsiders by their social relations." But in 1894 he put the bugle to his lips and summoned the more intelligent class of "ordinary citizens" to arms:

The enormous majority of our educated men have to make their own living. . . . Nevertheless, the man of business and the man of science, the doctor of divinity and the doctor of law, the architect, the engineer and the writer, all alike owe a positive duty to the community, the neglect of which they cannot excuse on any plea of their private affairs. They are bound to follow understandingly the course of public events; they are bound to try to estimate and form judgments upon public men; and they are bound to act intelligently and effectively in support of the principles which they deem

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 to be right and for the best interests of the country. . . . If our educated men as a whole become incapable of playing their full part in our life, if they cease doing their share of the rough, hard work which must be done, and grow to take a position of mere dilettanteism in our public affairs, they will speedily sink in relation to their fellows who really do the work of governing, until they stand toward them as a cultivated, ineffective man with a taste for bric-à-brac stands toward a great artist. When once a body of citizens becomes thoroughly out of touch and out of temper with the national life, its usefulness is gone, and its power of leaving its mark on the times is gone also.

I have italicized in this passage the characteristic three-fold appeal: the straightforward statement of duty, the craftily constructed contemptuous phrase for the dilettante, the quiet but significant reference to the rewards of virtue. In Roosevelt's heart there sang lifelong the refrain of Tennyson's ode on the Duke of Wellington. "The path of duty is the way to glory;" and he made it sing in the ears of his contemporaries until the blasé young man of the Yellow Nineties became unfashionable, yielding his place to the Man Who Does Things. This alteration of the national psychology was of profound importance. It marked the difference between a nation headed for decadence and a nation entering upon a renaissance; and Roosevelt's service in bringing it about can hardly be overvalued. Some appraisers of his merits say that his most notable

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 achievement was building the Panama Canal. I should say that his most notable achievement was creating for the nation the atmosphere in which valor and high seriousness live, by clearing the air of the poisonous emanations of "superior" people:

Preaching duty and meditating on glory, Roosevelt came up through the dull nineties as the apostle of "applied idealism;" and all good men spoke well of him. He seemed to be striking out a new and admirable type of public man: well bred but strenuous, ambitious but public-spirited, upright but practical and efficient—the idealist who gets things done which everyone agrees ought to be done. But few men guessed the height and depth of desire in this fighter of legislative crooks, this reformer of metropolitan police, this advocate of the merit system;

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 and no one knew what his ideas and temperament would do to the national life if he became its acknowledged leader. In 1898 came the Spanish War, then the governorship of New York, the vice-presidency in 1900, and a year later Roosevelt was in the saddle. These events swiftly disclosed the wider horizon of his mind and the scope of his ambition for himself and for America. The war with Spain brought him forward as the Seminole War brought forward Andrew Jackson; and his personality was immensely responsible for the effect of that "incident" upon the national character.

Mr. Roosevelt was an admirer of Thucydides, but he was a much less philosophical historian; for he says that the war with Spain was "inevitable," and leaves his readers to explain why. The small jingo class whose veins perennially throb with red blood and national honor fought, of course, to avenge the blowing-up of the Maine. The mass of the plain people with their perennial simple-hearted idealism' were persuaded that they were going in to set Cuba free, even after they discovered that they had also gone in to subjugate the Philippine Islands. Mr. J. A. Hobson, the English economist, says:

Not merely do the trusts and other manufacturing trades that restrict their output for the home market more urgently require foreign markets, but

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 they are also more anxious to secure protected markets, and this can only be achieved by extending the area of political rule. This is the essential significance of the recent change in American foreign policy as illustrated by the Spanish War, the Philippine annexation, the Panama policy, and the new application of the Monroe doctrine to the South American States. South America is needed as a preferential market for investment of trust "profits" and surplus trust products: if in time these States can be brought within a Zollverein under the suzerainty of the United States, the financial area of operations receives a notable accession.

There is an absence of rose-pink altruism from this last explanation which should commend it to The Chicago Tribune; but Roosevelt, though the Tribune's chief hero, would certainly have rejected it for an interpretation at once more personal and more political.

It is fairly plain that this war, which he had done his utmost to prepare for and to bring about, was first of all an opportunity for a man of his strenuous leisure class with fighting blood and fighting edge to win personal distinction. He himself speaks of his baptism of fire as his "crowded hour of glorious life;" and throughout his narrative of the exploits of his regiment—"My men were children of the dragon's blood"—he exhibits a delight in fighting that reminds one of the exuberant praise of "glorious battle" uttered early in the late war by the Colonel of the Death's Head Hussars. He

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 is as proud of personally bringing down his Spaniard as of slaying his first lion. He played his daring and picturesque part in a way to rehabilitate military glory in the national mind. But for the astonishing skill with which he wrung the last drop of dramatic interest from his troop of college men and cowboys the reverberations of the affair would soon have died away in the popular consciousness. He made the deeds of the Rough Riders a popular classic like Lexington and Bunker Hill. His little war did as much to kindle as Mr. Wilson's big war did to quench the military spirit; for Mr. Wilson went in with the grim determination of a chief of police, and Mr. Roosevelt with the infinite gusto of a big game hunter. His little war, as he himself declared, made him President.

In office, he did not sicken of power as did the Washingtonians of whom Henry Adams speaks. With the vast influence of his position he sought to mould the national mind and feelings into the likeness of his own. He sought to make the national mind virile, daring, imaginative, aggressive, and eager for distinction in the world. He preached to the nation as if it were a rich man of leisure with a splendid opening, made by his war, for the practice of the strenuous life. He set the example by magnifying his own office, concentrating power, teaching the public to look to the Federal Government as the controlling, dynamic, and creative center of American life. His measure for the regulation of

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 monopolies, his seizure of the canal zone, his irrigation acts, his reservation of public lands all exemplify in one way and another his aversion from the spirit of laissez-faire, his passion for identifying the state with the man who does things. In domestic affairs this policy generally estranged the "big interests" and won the support of the "plain people." In foreign affairs the big interests supported him, but the plain people were first dazzled, and then astonished, and then a little perplexed. The plain people do not understand foreign affairs.

President McKinley, by instinct and upbringing a domestically-minded statesman, had indeed begun to speak in a resigned way of manifest destiny with regard to our newly acquired island possessions. He could hardly do otherwise, for this was the midsummer time of the imperial enthusiasm of the "Anglo-Saxons." These were the days of Rhodesian dreamers; Kitchener was fighting in Egypt; Roberts was fighting in South Africa; and in 1899 Mr. Kipling struck up his famous chant: "Take up the white man's burden, send forth the best ye breed." And so McKinley gravely recognized our manifest destiny in the Far East. Yet John Hay says that he was called in by McKinley to discuss foreign affairs not more than once a month, but that as soon as Roosevelt was in office he was called upon every day. It was Roosevelt first who embraced manifest destiny with the joy of an enkindled political imagination. It was he that resolutely

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 sought to waken the expansive energies of the nation and to give it the fighting edge and the will to prevail in the impending conflicts of the powers. It was he that tirelessly went up and down the land declaring that the imperialistic tendencies developed by the Spanish War were tokens of national virility and that the responsibilities of the new foreign policy were glorious opportunities for men of the heroic mood imbued with the new Rooseveltian Americanism.

If we are to mark his place in the spiritual history of the times, we must clearly understand the temper which, at the turn of the century, he brought into our era of atrocious international conflicts. Nowhere, perhaps, did he declare more eloquently the gospel of militant imperialistic nationalism than in his address on The Strenuous Life, delivered before the Hamilton Club of Chicago in 1899:

The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man who has lost the great fighting virtues, the ignorant man and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires in their brains"—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties. . . . The army and navy are the sword and shield which the nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth. . . . The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen slothful ease and ignoble peace,

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 if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us, therefore, boldly face the life of strife. . . . Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation—for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavors, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

That the sentiments and principles here expressed sound very familiar to us today is not, I fancy, because most of us have been reading Roosevelt's addresses of the Spanish War period, but because we have been reading the utterances of the PanGermans whom Roosevelt himself in 1910 was adjuring not to lose the fighting edge and whom he was congratulating on the size of European military establishments as a sign of health and virility. Retrospectively considered, his solicitude for the fighting edge of the Germans reminds one of the matador in Blasco Ibáñez's Blood and Sand, who, it will be remembered, prays for a "good bull." With the essentials in the religion of the militarists of Germany, Roosevelt was utterly in sympathy. He believed that if you kept your fighting edge keen enough no one would seriously question your righteousness. The only significant difference in objects was that while they invoked the blessing of Jehovah upon Pan-Germany he invoked it upon Pan

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 America, meaning the United States and her dependencies, protectorates, and spheres of influence—and the Pan-America of his dream made Mittel-Europa look like a postage-stamp. The highest point of his working upon the national mind, the point at which his powerful personality most nearly succeeded in transforming the national character from its original bias, was that in which he made it half in love with military glory, half in love with empire-building, half in love with the sort of struggle which was preparing in Europe for the domination of the world.

The American leader of militant imperialistic nationalism fell at the end of his last great fight, a fight which, it may be soberly said, he had done his utmost both immediately and remotely to prepare for and to bring about. All his friends and many who were not his friends give him credit for the immediate preparation. But few of his friends claim or admit his profounder part in the preparation of the stage for the conflict, the will of the combatants, the conditions of the struggle, the prizes of victory. The preparation runs far back to the days when he began to preach the strenuous life in the flush of the Spanish War, to the days when he dangled before our eyes "those fair tropic islands," to the days when he boasted that he had taken

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 Panama and let Congress debate after the act. In the stunning clash of militant imperialistic nations, a clash which was the "inevitable" goal of his lifelong policy, as it is that of every imperialist, he towered above his fellow-citizens, constantly and heroically calling to arms. His countrymen rose, but not for his battle. They fought, but not for his victory. Time and events with remorseless irony made him the standard-bearer and rallying point for an American host dedicated to the destruction of his policy of militant imperialistic nationalism abroad and at home. He said "Belgium," he mentioned Germany's transgressions of law; and his countrymen cheered and buckled on their armor. But if, during the war, he had dared to exhort them, as in the earlier time, "to face the life of strife for the domination of the world," they were in a mood to have torn him in pieces. In that mood they fought and won their war. Highly as they valued his instrumental services, the principles on which they waged it and the objects which they sought drew them away from Roosevelt and towards Lincoln and Washington.

At the present time it is obvious to everyone that a faction of his old friends, incorrigibly born and bred in militant imperialistic nationalism, are making a fight over his body to wrest from the simple-hearted idealistic plain people the fruits of victory. Gloomy observers—too gloomy, I think—declare that the fruits are already gone. The exponents of

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 nationalistic egoism and selfishness will win some partial and temporary triumphs in this as in other countries. In the immediate future the memory of Roosevelt will be the most animating force among our American Junkers. There will be an attempt to repopularize just those Bismarckian characteristics of their hero which made him so utterly unlike Lincoln—his moral hardness, his two-fistedness, the symbolic big stick. But his commanding force as chief moulder of the national mind is over. He must take his rank somewhere among the kings and kaisers in competition with whom he made his place in the spiritual history of his times. He can never again greatly inspire the popular liberal movement in America. The World War has too profoundly discredited the masters of Weltpolitik in his epoch. It has too tragically illuminated the connections between the cataclysm and the statecraft and militaristic psychology behind it. He was a realist with no nonsense about him; but all the realists of the period are now under suspicion of being unrealistic in that they ignored the almost universal diffusion of "nonsense" or idealism among mankind. When Mr. Roosevelt fell out with "practical" men, he almost invariably strengthened his position with the plain people. It was when he offended their "nonsense"—as in his vindictive and ruthless onslaughts upon his successor and upon his great rival, and in his conduct of the Panama affair—that they began to doubt whether he had the magnanimity, the fair-

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 ness of mind, the love of civil ways requisite to guide them towards the fulfillment of their historic destiny. He developed a habit of speaking so scornfully of "over-civilization" and so praisefully of mere breeding and fighting as to raise the question that he himself raised about Cromwell, whether he had an adequate "theory of ends," and whether he did not become so fascinated with his means as frequently to forget his ends altogether.

Take the ever-burning matter of militarism. His apologists, like those of the Kaiser, all declare that he loved peace; and one can quote passages to prove it. I will quote a beautiful passage from his speech in Berlin in 1910: "We must remember that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being than ever was attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred—." I pause to ask whether any one thinks this remark about working on the lines of philanthropists and lovers of mankind is characteristic Rooseveltian doctrine. I now quote the rest of the passage: "But woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it. And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge." I stop again and ask whether any one thinks that is not characteristic Rooseveltian doctrine? Why does the second of

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 these sentences sound perfectly Rooseveltian and the first absolutely not? Because into the first he put a stroke of the pen; into the second the whole emphasis of his character. The first is his verbal sop to the idealist; the second is his impassioned message to his generation. By his use of rhetorical balance he gives a superficial appearance of the mental equivalent; but by his violent and infallible emphasis he becomes the greatest concocter of "weasel" paragraphs on record. In time his hearers learned to distinguish what he said from what he stood for, the part of his speech which was official rhetoric from the part that quivered with personal force.

He said, it is true, that "mere fervor for excellence in the abstract is a great mainspring for good work;" but in practice he night and day denounced in the most intolerant language those who exhibited mere fervor for excellence in the abstract, and even those who sought excellence by other ways than his. He professed love for the plain people; but the Progressive episode looks today, so far as he was concerned, like a momentary hot fit and political aberration of a confirmed Hamiltonian, regarding the plain people not so much socially as politically, not so much as individuals as a massive instrument for the uses of the state and the governing class. He said that he had a regard for peace but he made plain that he loved and valued war; and he denounced every one else who said a good word for peace, he reviled every type of pacifist so

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 mercilessly as to rouse suspicion as to whether he really cared a rap for the object of the pacifists. He expressed approval of arbitration; but he invariably followed up such expressions with an assertion that the only effective arbitrator is a man in shining armor. He avowed a desire for international order; but his imagination and his faith did not rise to a vision of other ways of attaining it than the ways of Alexander and Caesar—by the imperial dominion of armed power; and he denounced other modes of working for international order so bitterly as to raise a doubt as to his regard for the object. He admitted, like many of his followers, a faint and eleventh-hour respect for the abstract idea of a league of nations; but he led in raising such a thunder of opposition to the only league within sight and reach that he weakened the hands of the American framers, and he raised a question as to what he meant in the old days by his fiery declamation against those who "make the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good."

Mr. Roosevelt has attained satisfactions which he thought should console fallen empires: he has left heirs and a glorious memory. How much more glorious it might have been if in his great personality there had been planted a spark of magnanimity. If, after he had drunk of personal glory like a Scandinavian giant, he had lent his giant strength to a cause of the plain people not of his contriving nor under his leadership. If in addition to helping win

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 the war he had identified himself with the attainment of its one grand popular object. From performing this supreme service he was prevented by defects of temper which he condemned in Cromwell, a hero whom he admired and in some respects strikingly resembled. Cromwell's desire, he says,

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Mr. Brooks Adams apologizes for the inadequacy of his introduction to his brother's philosophical remains on the ground that the publishers hurried him, saying that if he did not get the book out within the year it would have lost its interest. Of course the readers who take up The Education of Henry Adams because it is the sensation of the hour will soon drop away, perhaps have already done so; but interest in the Adamses, so long quiescent, so piquantly reawakened at the end of the fourth eminent generation, is likely to hold more serious readers for some time to come. Henry Adams has thrown out challenges which the reviewer cannot lightly answer nor easily ignore. What shall be done with that profoundly pessimistic theory of the "degradation of energy'—a degradation alleged to be discoverable in the universe, in democracy, and even in that incorruptible stronghold of pure virtue, the Adams family? Every one who has sat blithely down to read The Education, much more to review it, must have discovered that it is only the last or the latest chapter of a "continued story."

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 It is a lure leading into a vast literary edifice, built by successive generations, which one must at least casually explore before one can conceive what was the heritage of Henry Adams, or can guess whether the family's energy suffered degradation when it produced him.

One who wishes to measure the decline from the source must begin with The Works of John Adams in ten volumes, edited by his grandson Charles Francis Adams I, and including a diary so fascinating and so important that one marvels that American students of letters are not occasionally sent to it rather than to Pepys or Evelyn. One should follow this up with the charming letters of John's wife, Abigail, also edited by Charles Francis I, in 1841—a classic which would be in the American Everyman if our publishers fostered American as carefully as they foster English traditions. For John Quincy Adams, we have his own Memoirs in twelve volumes, being portions of that famous diary of which he said: "There has perhaps not been another individual of the human race whose daily existence from early childhood to fourscore years has been noted down with his own hand so minutely as mine;" also a separate volume called Life in a New England Town, being his diary while a student in the office of Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport. One may perhaps pass Charles Francis I with his life by Charles Francis II. Then one descends to the fourth generation, and reads the Autobiography of

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 Charles Francis II, published in 1916, a notable book with interest not at all dependent upon reflected glory. Of Brooks Adams one must read at least The Emancipation of Massachusetts and the introduction to The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, and then one is tantalized on into The Law of Civilization and Decay, America's Economic Supremacy, and The Theory of Social Revolutions. Finally one approaches Henry's Education not quite unprepared and not over-looking the fact that, besides biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, he wrote what has been called "incomparably the best" history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, in nine volumes distinguished by lucid impartiality, and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, an interpretation of the twelfth century as impressive in height and span as the great cathedral which Adams takes as the symbol of his thought.

Historians, of course, are familiar with all these paths. I should like, however, to commend them a little to gentler and less learned readers. Taken not as material for history but as the story of four generations of great personalities, living always near the center of American life, the Adams annals surpass anything we have produced in fiction. One may plunge into them as into the Comédie Humaine of Balzac or Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and happily lose contact with the world, which, if we may believe Brooks Adams, ultimus Romanorum, is going so fatally to the dogs. Perhaps an Adams of

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 the present day must come forth from the study of his heredity, environment, and education with a conviction that he is an automaton, moved forward by the convergence of "lines of force," and that he is a poorer automaton than his grandfather. But for my part, I have emerged from these narratives much braced by contact with the stout, proud, purposeful Adams will, and with an impression that their latest pessimistic theories are poorly supported by their facts.

The Adams pessimism has a certain tonic quality due to its origin in the Adams sense for standards. The three Adonises, Charles Francis, Brooks, and Henry, have humiliated themselves all their lives by walking back and forth before the portraits of their statesmen ancestors and measuring their own altitude against that of "the friends of Washington." An Adams should always be in the grand style. So history presents them to the young imagination: Plutarchan heroes, august republicans, ever engaged in some public act or gesture such as Benjamin West liked to spread on his canvases—drafting the Declaration of Independence, presenting credentials to George III, signing the Monroe doctrine, fulminating in Congress against the annexation of Texas, or penning the famous dispatch to Lord Russell: "It would be superfluous to point out to your lordship that this is war." In a nation which has endured for a hundred and fifty years, it ought not to be easy to equal the elevation of character, or to attain the

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 heights of achievement reached by the most eminent men. There should be in every old national gallery certain figures unassailably great to rebuke the natural insolence of younger generations and silently to remind a young man that he must have a strong heart and almost wear it out before he can hope to deserve what these worthies have made the proudest of rewards, the thanks and the remembrance of the Republic.

For an Adams, who needs a bit of humility, it no doubt is wholesome to dwell on the superiority of his forefathers; but for the average man who needs a bit of encouragement, it is equally wholesome to reflect that John Adams represents a distinct "variation" of species. The family had been in America a hundred years before the grand style began to develop. In the words of Charles Francis I, "Three long successive generations and more than a century of time passed away, during which Gray's elegy in the country churchyard relates the whole substance of their history." If we can only understand the processes by which John was transformed from a small farmer's son to President of the United States, the evolution of the rest of the family will be as easy to follow as the transmission of wealth. Now, John's emergence is singularly devoid of miraculous aspects, and it is therefore of practical interest to the democrat.

John abandoned the pitchfork and varied his species by taking two steps which in those days

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 were calculated to put him in the governing class. He went to Harvard—a course which may still be imitated, but which in 1755, when the total population of the colonies only equalled that of one of our great cities, set a man far more distinctly in a class by himself than it does today, and marked him for a professional career. Second, after an insignificant interval of school teaching, he studied law in the office of Rufus Putnam, and thus entered a still smaller class, carefully restricted by limitation of the number of apprentices who could be taken in any office.

At the same time he began keeping a diary, a habit which it is now the custom to ridicule. What strikes one about John's diary in his years of adolescence is that he uses it as an instrument for marking his intellectual progress and getting himself in hand, neither of which is a morbid activity. He notes that he is of an amorous temperament and that his thoughts are liable to be "called off from law by a girl, a pipe, a poem, a love-letter, a Spectator, a play, etc., etc." But studia in mores abeunt; and year after year he is digging away tenaciously and purposefully at studies which communicate a masculine vigor to the mind; and he is reading, with instant application to his own future, authors that are still capable of putting a flame of ambition in a young man's vitals.

The breadth and humanity of the old-fashioned

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 program of reading for the bar may be suggested by one of his entries at the age of twenty-three:

He enjoins it upon himself to observe the arts of popularity in the tavern, town-meeting, the training field, and the meeting-house, though it must be added that none of his line mastered these arts. He frequents the courts, converses with successful men, records a public-spirited act of Franklin's, and surmises after an hour's talk at Mayor Gardener's that "the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers or good mystery-mongers but good men, good magistrates." After a bit of dawdling, he tells himself that "twenty-five years of the animal life is a great proportion to be spent to so little purpose." He vows to read twelve hours a day. He cries to himself: "Let love and vanity be extinguished, and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn. Let little objects be neglected and forgot, and great ones engross, arouse, and exalt my soul." Such temper issued from that

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 diet of lion's marrow, that energetic digestion of law and classical literature!

The only remarkable aspect of the variation effected in this generation was that such a man as John Adams should have found such a wife as Abigail Smith, a woman descended from the religious aristocrats of New England, and her husband's equal in heart and mind. Her descendants of the present day would say that predetermined lines of force—theological and legal—converged here to strengthen the social position of John and to insure the production of John Quincy; but that is not the way most men think of their wooing. Abigail had no formal schooling; yet, as "female" education went in those days, it mattered little. She was obviously the "product" of that family culture and social discipline which, at their best, render formal schooling almost superfluous. She had the gaiety of good breeding, the effusion of quick emotions, and that fundamental firmness of character which are developed by a consciousness that one was born in the right class. From books, from table-talk, from the men and women who frequented her home, not least from her lover, she had derived the views of the classical mid-eighteenth century, with just a premonitory flush of romantic enthusiasm; she had become familiar with public affairs; she had ac-

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 quired the tone and carriage, she had breathed in the great spirit, of such a woman as Cato would have a Roman wife and mother.

Emerson cherished the thought of writing an American Plutarch. In such a book we should have a picture of Abigail managing her husband's estate in Braintree while he is at the Congress in Philadelphia—through pestilence, siege, battles, and famineprices not venturing to ask a word of his return, lest she perturb a mind occupied with public business. We should have her reply at a later period to one who asked whether she would have consented to her husband's going to France, had she known that he was to be absent so long:

We should see her called from her farm to be the first American lady at the English Court. We should remark that she finds the best manners in England in the home of the Bishop of St. Asaph, old friend of her adored Franklin, where, by the way, she

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 meets those dangerous English radicals Priestley and Price. And with the warmth of fond native prejudice, we should adore her for writing home:

In the jargon of Brooks and Henry Adams, as I have remarked, irresistible "lines of force" converge for the education of the second generation. More humanly speaking, the ambition of John, the tenderness and pride of Abigail, unite above the cradle of John Quincy, and most intelligently conspire to give him what he later was to recognize as "an unparalleled education." "It should be your care and mine," John writes to his wife, "to elevate the minds of our children, and exalt their courage, to accelerate and animate their industry and activity." It is the fashion nowadays to assert, against the evidence of history, that great men in their critical hours are unconscious of their greatness; but these Adamses assuredly knew what they were about. With the fullest recognition that her boy's father and his friends are living classics, Abigail writes:

Glory, my son, in a country which has given birth to characters, both in the civil and military depart-

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 ments, which may vie with the wisdom and valor of antiquity. As an immediate descendant of one of these characters, may you be led to that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of country which will teach you to despise wealth, pomp, and equipage as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the internal excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity and virtue.

Of course John Quincy was to use the "external advantages" which his mother a little hastily urged him to despise. By working twelve hours a day at the law, John Adams had raised the family from the ground up to a point at which he could give to the educational processes of his son a tremendous expansion and acceleration. At an age when John had been helping his father on the farm, from eleven to fourteen, John Quincy, son of the peace commissioner, was studying in Paris or Leyden, or travelling in Russia as private secretary to the American Envoy. He acquired history, diplomacy, geography as he acquired his French—by what we call in the case of the last, "the natural method." It cannot be too much emphasized that in the second, third, and fourth generations the family and its connections were in position to provide a liberal education without resort to a university. Before John Quincy went to Harvard he had assisted in negotiating the treaty of peace between his country and Great Britain. The whole matter of external advantages may be summed up in a picture of the boy, at the age of eleven, returning from France in a

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 ship with the French Ambassador, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and his secretary M. Marbois, the three lying side by side on their cots and thus portrayed by the boy's proud father:

Charles Francis II, who knew his grandfather only in his old age, says that he was not of a "holiday temperament;" but the diary of John Quincy Adams's early life in Newburyport shows a fairly festive young Puritan, tempted, like his father before him, to frequent truancies from the law, reading Tom Jones and Rousseau's Confessions, shooting, playing the flute, visiting, frequently dancing till three, occasionally drinking till dawn, and regretting it for three days afterward. His social position was secure, his experience and attainments already notable, his career marked out, the reflected glamour of paternal glory gratifying; perhaps he asked himself why he should not rest on his oars while his contemporaries were catching up. Such considerations may occur to an Adams, but they do not remain with him. His ambition widens with

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