T I had nowhere to walk except south. The expectations were great, were utterly vague, utterly contradictory; I had not the place, I had not the power or the position to satisfy them in the smallest degree; and yet I did not feel at liberty to draw off and refuse to do what I regarded as the plain duty of a citizen. As for the attacks on me, the wave of popular disappointment, I literally do not care a rap. I am sorry to disappoint good, foolish people; but I am sorry for their sake, not mine. I was really uneasy and concerned about the overpraise, the over-admiration and the impossible expectations; but I do not mind in the least when they go to the opposite extreme; and neither the praise nor the blame makes one particle of difference in my course. I have worked hard; and now I have revelled in staying quietly here in my own home, with those I care for most in the world and with my own books, and the things with which I have associations. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, this would not have been so; I would have felt that it spelled failure to have me forced out of the contest while it was still my business to fight. But now I have fought. I am entirely ready to take up any task which I ought to; but if no task comes, why I feel I have done enough to warrant my enjoying the rest without the haunting sense of having failed to strive my best while it was still the day of action. The value of Lord Charnwood's essay, however, is not in the information which it contains. Those who are familiar with Roosevelt's career, either from personal acquaintance or from reading what has been written by him or about him, will find nothing especially new as to its events or incidents in Lord Charnwood's pages. Indeed, knowledge by the reader of the public acts and words of Roosevelt is assumed. Lord Charnwood does not pretend to write a book of knowledge, but literally a book of opinion. It is a critical study. Sometimes the open or implied criticism will shock those who have come under the influence of Roosevelt's personal magnetism. Those who want enthusiastic praise or eulogy will not like the book, at least at first. It will seem to them as lukewarm as a judge's charge to a jury. It is evident that Lord Charnwood has wished to be judicial, and in this desire to avoid the adulation which Roosevelt himself complained of in the letter to Lady Delamere, it must be confessed that he sometimes seems to lean backward. In this respect the book is not so warm, and perhaps it may be added without injustice, not so spontaneous, as the "Life of Lincoln." The explanation is, I think, that Lord Charnwood, although he never knew Roosevelt, has himself fallen under the spell of his extraordinary personality and, consciously or subconsciously, tries to protect himself against the weakness of idolatry—a weakness of which the devoted adherents of Roosevelt have sometimes, not wholly without justification, been accused. For example, Lord Charnwood, writing in England, says of Roosevelt: "Certainly in this island, where statesmanship has long been associated with scholarly attainments, no statesman for centuries has had his width of intellectual range." But as if this were dangerously superlative praise, he adds: "But this is not to say that he had a deeply reflective mind." The latter statement is doubtless true if by reflective mind Lord Charnwood means such a mind as that possessed by Lord Bacon or David Hume or John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham. After all, the great value of Lord Charnwood's book to those American readers who have come to believe that Roosevelt, take him all in all, is the greatest single product of American culture and American statesmanship, is that, coming from an Englishman who at one time had "feelings of intense indignation against Roosevelt," it confirms their belief that as history rolls on he will be one of the few great towering figures in the panorama. For not even the most unswerving and devoted friend of Roosevelt, not even those who lived and worked with him, or suffered and rejoiced with him, can ask for a finer understanding of his spirit than this calm and selfrestrained Englishman, who never knew him, discloses in the final pages of his book: I am of course well aware of the crudity and fleeting worth of this study. But when I undertook it I made one demand-namely, that I should be amply briefed with the worst that had been said of Roosevelt. That demand has been fulfilled faithfully, and I have faithfully tried to use the material before me. I need hardly add that I have met a number of people with personal impressions, favorable or unfavorable, to give of him. I have indicated where his faults seem to me to have lain, and if I have not laid more stress upon them it is because I believe that to dwell more on these light and often laughable matters would be to draw things in false perspective. Men have fought as stoutly as he, and more wisely-seldom so consistently for the right. That is the main thing. The grosser charges that have been flung against him in no instance demand one word. Of the more intellectual and refined sort of criticism of him, I feel, to speak frankly, the prevailing inhumanity, the failure to understand those simple qualities which go to the hearts of common people, and of which the full possession is greatness, whether genius accompanies it or not. He In the affairs of nations he had been a successful pacificator; this was possible to him because he was quick in sympathy and personally capable of generous friendship. had tried no less to be a reconciler in social and industrial strife; here too his power arose out of his ready understanding of individuals and his promptitude to recognize worth in men and women of whatever kind. I will not again recur to political controversy. If we have much to learn from him as a statesman, the foundation of it rests on this: That he lived no restricted life of mere statecraft, any more than of mere scholarship or mere sport, but that he took life whole, as it offered itself, and that, in like manner, he respected worth when it met him and welcomed friends as God sent them, careless of differences between nations or between classes, between gentle and simple, between the like and the unlike to himself. I began this book by avowing a hero-worship of long standing. I do not mean by hero-worship any disposition to found a cult of the hero, to use his name as a rallying cry for party, or to shape one's own life in any spirit of discipleship to him. There is only one honest and useful discipleship possible to men. Great men are only worthily honored if the honor we pay them provokes us, the weakest or stupidest, to stand resolutely erect. To this estimate I should like to add a paragraph from a letter which I have just received from an influential and widely known banker of New Orleans with whom I had been talking on a recent delightful visit to that Franco-American city about the qualities of Roosevelt's Americanism: As for Roosevelt himself, after consistently voting against him repeatedly and after thoroughly misunderstanding him during most of his public career, I had the opportunity of listening to him at a big war meeting in Madison Square Garden not many months before he went on his long journey, and I was almost instantly converted. And now that it is too late, by reading everything about him that I can lay my hands on, I realize that when Theodore Roosevelt went to his final home, America and the world lost a real man. It is the portrait of a real man that Lord Charnwood gives us. He does not flatter. He does not excuse. Like Sargent, he paints his subject as he sees and feels him, not blotting out his defects nor overloading his qualities with too much color. But when the portrait is done it is that of a living figure, that stands resolutely erect, through whose expressive although not always regular or perfect features shines a noble human spirit. I BY CLARA PLATT MEADOWCROFT HAVE heard my mother, as long as I remember, Tell of upper chambers, where beauty never dies; Chambers lying starward; and from there returning, Visions of dim terraces lingered in her eyes. "Whatever you may need is in the upper chambers; Once in a fever I felt my mother lift me Once, all alone, I felt the fever burning; Afterward, older, I climbed to magic chambers; I could look downward and see the world below me, It was so still there. My mother had taught me, (Down through that silence she has sent me word.) Shadows hung over all; but she had told me, PARAGRAPHS FROM A POLITICIAN'S EUROPEAN NOTE-BOOK HE Dilemma of France. T BY FREDERICK M. DAVENPORT MEMBER OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK So much depends upon France, upon her developing policy and motive in Europe. She is in no easy position. She has greatly suffered. At Versailles she asked England and the United States to join in guaranteeing her future safety, by force, if necessary. The American people are evidently not ready in advance to guarantee anything in Europe by force. France maintains that she sat in twenty-six conferences with the Allies in the effort to work out a reparations policy for Germany, and got nowhere. To be sure, Clemenceau was irascible and revengeful, the Thad Stevens of Europe. But France holds that she had to be firm. Nobody else would be. She developed her own plan. She fixed German reparations at first at thirty-two and one-half billions of dollars. Everybody agrees now that that was impossible. The best estimates of the wealth of Germany before the war indicate a national aggregate of seventy-five billions. The war cost her probably twenty billions, and charges and pay ments since have taken perhaps five what Germany should or could pay. And so England and the United States are directly or indirectly suggesting to France that an international commission determine the problem, but France appears not to be willing. She moves into the Ruhr. She humbles the German industrialists. She cripples the great revenge arsenal of the Krupps. She stirs to passive resistance both the national German Government and the workers in the Ruhr. Production falls to perhaps fifteen per cent of the average. Passion rises. Hunger stalks. The unrest spreads to other centers of Germany. The Cuno Government can find no solution and falls. The Stresemann Government proposes private productive guaranties and an end to governmental påssive resistance at least. Nothing happens so far. Neither the Stresemann nor the Poincaré Government seems to agree upon a plan that will hold both Governments in power. The best that seems to be promised behind the scenes is an understanding between the French industrialists and the German industrialists to make use of the resources of the Ruhr for the benefit t me w of themselves and of French reparations. It seems incredible that this will satisfy or pacify the seventy millions of the German people, especially if their sovereignty in the Ruhr appears to be only a paper sovereignty, and involves physical and financial exploitation of German workers. This appears to be the Stinnes plan, but it would seem that nothing short of immediate starvation would make it tolerable to the German Ruhr or the German people. In the meantime France grows in military stature and in the rulership of Europe, appearing at present to be in an impregnable position. Her military air force has grown to be four times that of England. An army now of between seven hundred and fifty thousand and a million is credited to de France, with the control of the army in Poland of four hundred thousand by the French staff, and the penetration of Turkey, Rumania, Belgium, and other of the small countries of Europe, to say nothing of Morocco, by the French military influence and organization, the growing cost of such armament and aid constituting an increasing liability to France and to Europe. ace. le inst The France has no unemployment. Everybody is busy either in the army or on the walls of reconstruction. One cloud on the horizon which gives pause to optimism has been the value of the franc. A year ago the franc was worth eleven or twelve American cents; recently it has been worth between five and six. It reflects exchanges, but it reflects also perhaps underlying fears, although the currency situation has improved somewhat because the French seem to be honestly trying to decrease the number of francs, and because also of the hope of better things growing out of the technical ending of passive resistance in the Ruhr. England has withdrawn from the position of a backer of France to that of critic and arbiter. She questions France's right in the Ruhr under the treaty, and there are distinctly two sides to this question, although I think that in America we have cared perhaps too little about the legality of it and have been satisfied to have France go into the Ruhr and humble the arrogance of the German industrialists who are taking the place of the Hohenzollerns upon the backs of the German people. England disputes the economic and political soundness of the policy of France in the Ruhr, and it yet remains to be seen if she is not entirely right about it. At present she is powerless except to exhaust diplomacy. Even labor in England is behind the Government in its attitude. toward France, but I do not find it in the temper of the English people to go to war with France. The reservoir of recent sympathetic comradeship with France is still too full. Watchful waiting, for the English Government. France is solitary, and seems in danger of being drawn on to rule Europe with an iron hand. She is in danger of having Europe for her own private preserve of economic and political ruin. If the present policy If the present policy and situation continue, England for a while will mortally miss her customers in Europe, but soon she might adjust her trade to other parts of the world. Conceivably she can wait. It would scem likely to be a very long time and a very acute crisis before she could be led to unite with Russia and Germany against France and the friends of France. Russo-German control of the Continent would have its drawbacks. But France has all the time a more intricate problem and a growing burden. She can carry her lesser military alliances only at mounting costs. If competitive armaments and economi: rivalries are the chief causes of wer, are not the land and air policies of France calculated to aid and abet the first cause, and is not her policy of favoritisms in eastern Europe calculated to discourage normal international economic agreements and freer trade relations? As long as she naturally fears a restored, prosperous, and armed Germany, and there are no international association and no great ally to help her, are the French people or the French Government likely to see the precipice towards which England and many persons in all countries believe that France is moving? Is it a safe policy to try to keep seventy millions of Germans who have once had a taste of union and strength in a condition of division, weakness, and misery? France already has humbled the will of Germany in the Ruhr, and it may be that this is a necessary preliminary to a European solution. Certainly it is quite to the liking of those of us who believe that it is about time the politico-industrialist rulers of Germany learned that there has been a wicked war and that Germany has lost. France has brought the Stresemann Government to its knees; but has anything really substantial been accomplished in the direction of securing the reparations which France so imperatively needs? In the seemingly impending disintegration of the German state, in its division into fragments partly as the result of French pressure, does not the hope of all reparations seem likely to vanish? And may not France be under compulsion to choose the second horn of her dilemma and impose prolonged weakness and division upon Germany instead of reparations? Can she have reparations at the same time with German weakness and division? And if she obtains present security through a Germany of separatist states, must she not at great expense continue to sit on the lid and possess security through super-military power? And if she is driven to this alternative, can she endure it economically? Will there not come also a day of reckoning with the recurring spirit of nationality in Germany and with Germany's probable ally, Russia? And when that day comes, will France, having pursued this course, be likely to have at her side the armies of the British Empire and America? May she not have estranged them beyond recall? We are all debtors to her military genius in the recent great struggle. Must she and we depend upon this form of genius in a later crisis? Is there permanent safety for France in mere military security, anyway? Is France pursuing a policy which will permanently keep the German people outside the pale of good faith and good will and prevent their moral restoration to freedom and democracy? The very human Ambassador Jusserand is reported to have said: "Oh, if Germany would only say she is sorry, what a difference it would make!" Is the Poincaré Government following a policy which will prevent peace by reconciliation? As These are questions which the genuine friends of France are asking throughout the world. They are not answered by the flag-waving of the flamboyant friends of France. They are asked in no censorious spirit. France has deeply suffered, and suffered vicariously for the world. things are on the Continent of Europe, without adequate support from any quarter, she is being driven along the path of mere military security. In the eyes of the peasantry of France, the wolf is always at the border. But a policy of super-militarism, which is necessarily a terrible strain upon the resources of a country and which may go to the head of some future French Government, is certainly not to be contemplated with equanimity as the best way out for France or for the world. What Can be Done About It? I do not pretend to know. There are some things that evidently are not sufficient. The Hague Conferences to revise the rules of war were wellintentioned and helpful in their day, but they appear futile now. Everybody knows now that nobody will obey any rules of war that stand in the way of success. And yet the Hague Conferences have been the harbingers of sympathetic association and a better day. The League of Nations was not acceptable and is not acceptable now, it seems to me, to anything like a major ity of the American people; and the great nations who are in it evidently regard it lightly. The smaller nations have made something of it, and some good things have come out of it. It is probably worth maintaining for the present as a second laboratory of sympathetic association. The American people would have none of it in 1920, for one reason because they believed force was implicit in the constitution of the League, if it became really workable on a wide scale. Now there is certainly no sanction behind the League except a moral sanction. And the World Court and the proposed entrance of America into itsound and helpful in itself and in its possibilities of developing an international body of rules and principles of great value to the peace of the world; but, so far as I know, its friends would hardly claim for it power to meet the existing situation on the Continent of Europe as that situation must soon be met. Our Stake in Europe. At Belleau Wood, the point which General Pershing called the Gettysburg of the Great War, there is a great white American cemetery. Somewhere on that field, covered with shellplowed earth or hurriedly buried in some out-of-the-way corner, are still many missing American boys. Every week or so a new body is found, identified, and the mother sent for in the United States to be present at the burial of her son. Was it seventy-five thousand American dead altogether? And two hundred thousand more incapacitated upon whom we spend five hundred millions a year in curative care and rehabilitation? We got in late, but, oh, how France needed us! I found myself wondering, as I went over that field, how the Germans, for the second time almost in sight of Paris, must have felt when they were suddenly confronted by those straight-shooting American marines, with their fresh vigor and enormous individual initiative. What Can America Do? Very little at present. Next to nothing. Congress, representing correctly the temper of the American people, is averse to joining in the guaranty by force of the security of France, and is opposed to the cancellation of the indebtedness of France. We are in a position to get ourselves internationally spanked if we now protest too much about Europe and tell France what to do about it. We are not ready to use force, and we do not think it wise to buy off a bad situation in Europe through a cancellation of debts. And France is recalcitrant about the reduction of land armament "What Can America Do?" asks Senator Davenport. That -she showed that at the Washington Conference. At present she is successful enough in her own right so that she neither needs nor welcomes our advice. And so where are we? Waiting more or less hopefully for the Continent of Europe to develop common sense before it slips over the edge of the precipice. If common sense arrives in time, the way may open for us to lend a hand. As things are, we shall have to wait until the chance comes before we can do anything. In the meantime it will do no harm to speculate a little, will it? An Eventual Pro-American Plan. Are we not becoming too prone in this country to speak of England as a sordid trader or of France as clearly imperialist in design? We evidently inherit a tendency to be either proFrench or pro-English from the closing days of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is not necessary nor becoming, because to be pro-American is far more wholesome and idealistic. There is no foreign policy more free from selfishness than ours. It is about time we began building our own programme for world peace. The mass of the people in America do not wish war. Do the masses of the people in Europe prefer war, even after the terrible catastrophe through which they have recently passed? Sometimes you are inclined to think they do, when you witness the impulsive reaction of the Italians to the taking of Corfu. But no great modern people probably, which had time to reflect and whose institutions permitted of reflection, would go to war unnecessarily. Suppose we should make the proposal to England, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan that we were ready to say to them that we would not attack them for a period of perhaps fifty yearslong enough to try the experiment-if they would say the same thing to us. No force back of it, no league, just the moral integrity of these countries. And suppose we should make it a part of the agreement that if any one of us should go to war hereafter against any other of us, it should be as the result of determination by the people themselves of each country, either directly or through their representative institutions. And suppose we should agree as an evidence of good faith, as we startled the world by doing at the Washington Conference, that we would join them in slowly decreasing our armament on land and sea and in the air. Whatever these countries which I have mentioned might do, it would seem that the rest of the world must follow. If the Government of France, for example, should demur, and the other countries went into this simple form of association, would it be long before the people of France would create a Government which would choose to come in? Some such agreement or association as this seems necessary to help France in Europe, perhaps to save France from herself and to preserve civilization. Strangely enough, the substance of such a plan, which I have heard discussed in Europe, fits comfortably into Christian practice and principle. It contemplates a peace of reconciliation. Of course everybody knows that Christ was not a pacifist, that he knew how to hit out from the shoulder when it was necessary. But he did not bristle with conflict as so many of our very, very pro-French partisans do. Of course we know it is still necessary in this world to trust the Lord and keep our powder dry, but has not the time gone by to lay so much emphasis on the powder? I have heard it urged against such a plan of good will that it is too Christian. But has it not frequently been said since the war, in answer to the charge that Christianity did not prevent the war, that Christianity has never yet been tried in international affairs, and that, unless it is tried very soon, there will be an end to civilization? Such a plan is naturally suggested by its advocates tentatively. It has the merit of approaching the problem afresh, as the Pacific problem was approached, through the medium of conference and concession and conciliation. And it is the only sort of association of nations which stands much chance in American public opinion. The American people, as I understand them, are willing to fight in selfdefense at any time. They are even willing, in a great emergency of freedem, to go anywhere in the world to fight. But, if I understand them, they are not willing to go into any association of nations which as a regular article of its creed has force, even implicitly, at its center, and involves, therefore, an agreement to send American armies abroad. They would rather suffer isolation, patrol the shores of the United States, proceed under a slower tempo of national progress, conserve American ideals and resources, in the hope that the rest of the world may come to its senses before it is too late. ate T HE 320-acre Wheeler National Monument is tucked away near the crest of the La Garita Mountains within the million-acre Rio Grande National Forest. Both the Monument and the magnificent forest belong to the people of the United States. Travelers who ride horseback over the fifteen miles of scenic forest trail from Creede, Colorado, are fully repaid upon reaching the Monument. It is probably the most barbaric bit of real estate Uncle Sam owns. Perhaps nowhere in the world are there more curious rock forms, for here wind, water, and frost have outdone one another in producing shapes odd and eerie. The rock from which the fretted forms are weathered is of volcanic origin. Successive prehistoric lava flows produced rock strata of varying hardness. These strata, weathering unevenly, yield weird shapes. The fantastic Chicken Roost, topping the ramparts near the lower portion of the Monument, suggests pagan temples all awry. A walk through it. |