CHAPTER IX There are men who love out-of-doors, who yet never open a book, and other men who love books, but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible. Nevertheless among those men whom I have known, the love of books and the love of out-doors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising out-doors to sneer at books. Usually the keenest appreciation of what is seen in nature is to be found in those who have also profited by the hoarded and recorded wisdom of their fellow men. Love of outdoor life, love of simple and hardy pastimes, can be gratified by men and women who do not possess large means, and who work hard, and so can love of good books, not of good bindings and of first editions, excellent enough in their way, but sheer luxuries. I mean, love of reading books, owning them, if possible, of course, but if that is not possible, getting them from a circulating library. Sagamore Hill takes its name from the old Sagamore Mohannes, who, as chief of his little tribe, signed away his rights to the land two-and-a-half centuries ago. The house stands right on top of the hill, separated by fields and belts of woodland from all other houses, and it looks out over the bay and the sound. We see the sun go down beyond long reaches of land and water. Many birds dwell in the trees round the house or in the pastures and the woods nearby, and of course in winter gulls, loons, and wild fowl frequent the waters of the bay and the sound. We love all the seasons, the snows and bare woods of winter, the rush of growing things and the blossom spray of spring, the yellow grain, the ripening fruits and tasseled corn, and the deep, leafy shades that are heralded by the green dance of summer, and the sharp fall winds that tear the brilliant banners with which the trees greet the dying year. The sound is always lovely. In the summer nights we watch it from the piazza and see the lights of the tall fall river boats as they steam steadily by. Now and then we spend a day on it, the two of us, together, in the light rowing skiff, or perhaps with one of the boys to pull an extra pair of oars, we land for lunch at noon under wind-beaten oaks, on the edge of a low bluff, or among the wild plumb bushes on a spit of white sand, while the sails of the coasting schooners gleam in the sunlight, and the tolling of the bell buoy comes landward across the waters. Long Island is not as rich in flowers as the valley of the Hudson, yet there are many. Early in April there is one hillside near us which glows like a tender flame with the white of the blood-root. About the same time we find the shy Mayflower, the trailing Arbutus, and although we rarely pick wildflowers, one member of the household always plucks a little bunch of Mayflowers to send to a friend working in Panama, who soul-hungers for the northern spring. Then there are shade-blow and delicate anemones, about the time of the cherry blossoms. The brief glory of the apple orchards follow, and then the thronging dogwoods fill the forest with their radiance, and so flowers follow flowers until the springtime splendor closes with the laurel and the evanescent, honey-sweet locust bloom. The late summer flowers follow, like flaunting lilies, and cardinal flowers, and marshmallows, and pale peach rosemary, and the golden rod and the asters, when the afternoon shortens and we again begin to think of fires in the wide fireplaces. Most of the birds in our neighborhood are the ordinary home friends of the house and the barn, the woodlot and the pasture, but now and then the species make queer shifts. The cheery quail, alas, are rarely found near us now, and we no longer hear the whipper wills at night. But some birds visit us now which formerly did not. When I was a boy neither the black-throated green warbler nor the purple finch nested around us, nor were bobbling found in our fields. The black-throated green warbler is now one of our commonest summer warblers. There are plenty of purple finches, and best of all the bobbling's are far from infraquent. I had written about these new visitors to John Burroughs, and once when he came out to see me I was able to show them to him. When I was president we owned a little house in western Virginia, a delightful house, to us at least, although only a shell of rough boards. We used sometimes to go there in the fall, perhaps at Thanksgiving, and on these occasions we would have quail and rabbits of our own shooting, and once in a while a wild turkey. We also went there in the spring. Of course many of the birds were different from our Long Island friends. There were mockingbirds, the most attractive of all birds, and blue gross-beaks, and cardinals and summer redbirds, instead of scarlet tannagers, and those wonderful singers the beowicks rends, and Carolina rends. All these I was able to show John Burroughs when he came to visit us, although, by the way, he did not appreciate as much as we did one set of inmates of the cottage, the flying squirrels. We loved having the flying squirrels, father and mother, and half-grown young, in their nest among the rafters, and at night we slept so soundly that we did not in the least mind the wild gambles of the little fellows through the rooms, even when, as sometimes happened, they would swoop down to the bed and scuttle across it. On April I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep, and I took John Burroughs with me. I wished to show him the big game of the park, the wild creatures that had become so astonishingly tame and tolerant of human presence. In the Yellowstone the animals seem always to behave as one wishes them to. It is always possible to see the sheep and deer and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer than the smaller beasts. In April we found the elk weak after the short commons and hard living of winter. Once without much difficulty I regularly rounded up a big band of them so that John Burroughs could look at them. I do not think, however, that he cared to see them as much as I did. The birds interested him more, especially a tiny owl the size of a robin, which we saw perched on the top of a tree in mid-afternoon entirely uninfluenced by the sun and making a queer noise like a cork being pulled from a bottle. I was rather ashamed to find out how much better his eyes were than mine in seeing the birds and grasping their differences. When wolf hunting in Texas, and when bear hunting in Louisiana and Mississippi, I was not only enthralled by the sport, but also by the strange new birds and other creatures and the trees and flowers I had not known before. By the way, there was one feast at the White House which stands above all others in my memory, even above the time when I lured Joel Chandler Harris thither for a night, a deed in which to triumph, as all who knew that invenerately shy recluse will testify. This was the bear hunter's dinner. I had been treated so kindly by my friends on these hunts, and they were such fine fellows, men whom I was so proud to think of as Americans, that I set my heart on having them at a hunter's dinner at the White House. One December I succeeded. There were twenty or thirty of them, all told, as good hunters, as daring riders, as first-class citizens as could be found anywhere. No finer set of guests ever sat at mead in the White House, and among other game on the table was a black bear, itself contributed by one of these same guests. When I first visited California it was my good fortune to see the big trees, the sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite with John Muir. Of course, of all people in the world, he was the one with whom it was best worthwhile to thus see the Yosemite. He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see, at their best, the majesty and charm of the Sierras. But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go. John Muir met me with a couple of backers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three-days trip. The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia Grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit Thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again with a burst of wonderful music at dawn. I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or birdsongs, and knew little about them. The Hermit Thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs, everything. The only birds he noticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-oosles, always a particular favorite of mine, too. The second night we camped in a snowstorm on the edge of the canyon walls under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fur, and next day we went down into the wonderland of the valley itself. I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs. Like most Americans interested in birds and books, I know a good deal about English birds as they appear in books. I know the lark of Shakespeare and Shelley and the Ettrick Shepherd. I know the nightingale of Milton and Keats. I know word-worths cuckoo. I know Mavis and Merle singing in the merry green wood of the old ballads. I know Jenny Wren and Cock Robin of the nursery books. Therefore I had always much desire to hear the birds in real life, and the opportunity offered in June 1910 when I spent two or three weeks in England. As I could snatch but a few hours from a very exciting round of pleasures and duties, it was necessary for me to be with some companion who could identify both song and singer. In Sir Edward Gray, a keen lover of outdoor life in all its phases, and a delightful companion who knows the songs and ways of English birds as very few do know them, I found the best possible guide. We left London on the morning of June 9th, twenty-four hours before I sailed from Southampton. Getting off the train at Bazzing Stoke, we drove to the pretty smiling valley of the Itchin. Here we tramped for three or four hours, then again drove, this time to the edge of the new forest, where we first took tea at an inn, and then tramped through the forest to an inn on its other side at Brockenhurst. At the conclusion of our walk my companion made a list of the birds we had seen, putting an asterisk opposite those which we had heard sing. There were forty-one of the former and twenty-three of the latter as follows. Birds which they both saw and heard. Thrush, blackbird, lark, yellowhammer, robin, ren, gold-crested ren, goldfinch, chawfinch, greenfinch, dunnock, blackcap, golden warbler, willow warbler, chif-chaff, wood warbler, reed-bunting, sedge warbler, turtledove, cuckoo, nightjar, and swallow. Birds which they only saw. Pied wag-tail, sparrow, hedge-ack-center, missile-thrush, starling, rook, jack-daw, tree-creeper, coot, water-hen, little-grab, dab-chick, tufted duck, wood-pigeon, stock-dove, witt, tit, or coal-tit, martin, swift, pheasant, and partridge. The valley of the itchen is typically the England that we know from novel and story and essay. It is very beautiful in every way, with a rich, civilized, fertile beauty, the rapid brook twisting among its reed-beds, the rich green of trees and grass, the stately woods, the gardens and fields, the exceedingly picturesque cottages, the great handsome houses standing in their parks. Birds were plentiful. I know but few places in America where one would see such an abundance of individuals, and I was struck by seeing such large birds as coots, water-hens, grebs, tufted ducks, pigeons, and pee-wits. In places in America as thickly settled as the valley of the itchen, I should not expect to see any like number of birds of this size, but I hope that the efforts of the Audubon Societies and kindred organizations will gradually make themselves felt, until it becomes a point of honor, not only with the American man, but with the American small boy, to shield and protect all forms of harmless wildlife. True sportsmen should take the lead in such a movement, for if there is to be any shooting there must be something to shoot. The prime necessity is to keep and not kill out even the birds which in a legitimate numbers may be shot. The new forest is a wild, uninhabited stretch of heath and woodland. Many of the trees gnarled and aged, and its very wildness, the lack of cultivation, the ruggedness, made it strongly attractive in my eyes, and suggested my own country. The birds, of course, were much less plentiful than beside the itchen. The bird that most impressed me on my walk was the black bird. I had already heard nightingales in abundance near Lake Cuomo, and had also listened to larks, but I had never heard either the blackbird, the song-thrush, or the black-cap warbler. And while I knew that all three were good singers, I did not know what really beautiful singers they were. Blackbirds were very abundant, and they played a prominent part in the chorus which we heard throughout the day on every hand, though perhaps loud as the following morning at dawn. In its habits and manners the blackbird strikingly resembles our American robin, and indeed looks exactly like a robin with a yellow bill and cobalt plumage. It hops everywhere over the lawns, just as our robin does, and it lives in nests in the gardens in the same fashion. Its song has a general resemblance to that of our robin, but many of the notes are far more musical, more like those of our wood-thrush. Indeed there were individuals among those we heard, certain of whose notes seemed to me almost to equal in point of melody the chimes of the wood-thrush, and the highest possible praise for any songbird is to liken its song to that of the wood-thrush or hermit-thrush. I certainly do not think that the blackbird has received full justice in the books. I knew that he was a singer, but I really had no idea how fine a singer he was. I suppose one of his troubles has been his name, just as with our own cat-bird. When he appears in the ballads as the Merle, bracketed with his cousin the Mavis, the song-thrush, it is far easier to recognize him as the master-singer that he is. It is a fine thing for England to have such an asset of the countryside, a bird so common, so much in evidence, so fearless, and such a really beautiful singer. The thrush is a fine singer, too, a better singer than our American robin, but to my mind not at the best quite as good as the blackbird at his best, although often I found difficulty in telling the song of one from the song of the other, especially if I only heard two or three notes. The larks were, of course, exceedingly attractive. It was fascinating to see them spring from the grass, circle upwards, steadily singing and soaring for several minutes, and then return to the point once they had started. As my companion pointed out, they exactly fulfilled words' worth description. They soared, but did not roam. It is quite impossible wholly to differentiate a bird's voice from its habits and surroundings. Although in the lark's song there are occasional musical notes, the song as a whole is not very musical, but it is so joyous, buoyant, and unbroken, and uttered under such conditions as fully to entitle the bird to the place he occupies, with both poet and prose writer. The most musical singer we heard was the blackcap warbler. To my ear its song seemed more musical than that of the nightingale. It was astonishingly powerful for so small a bird. In volume and continuity it does not come up to the songs of the thrushes and of certain other birds, but in quality, as an isolated bit of melody, it can hardly be surpassed. Among the minor singers the robin was noticeable. We all know this pretty little bird from the books, and I was prepared to find him as friendly and attractive as he proved to be, but I had not realized how well he sang. It is not a loud song, but very musical and attractive, and the bird is said to sing practically all through the year. The song of the wren interested me much, because it was not in the least like that of our house wren, but on the contrary, like that of our winter wren. But the song did not seem to me to be as brilliantly musical as that of the tiny singer of the Northwoods. The sedge warbler sang in the thick reeds a mocking ventriloquial lay, which reminded me at times of the less pronounced parts of our yellow-breasted chat song. The cuckoo's cry was singularly attractive and musical, far more so than the rolling, many times repeated, note of our rain-crow. We did not reach the inn at Brockenhurst until about nine o'clock, just at nightfall, and a few minutes before that we heard a nightjar. It did not sound in the least like either our whipper-wheel or our night-hawk, uttering a long, continued call of one or two syllables repeated over and over. The chaw-finch was very much in evidence, continually chanting its unimportant little ditty. I was pleased to see the bold, masterful missile-thrush, the storm-cock as it is often called, but this bird breathes and sings in the early spring when the weather is still tempestuous and had long been silent when we saw it. The starlings, rooks, and jack-daws did not sing, and their calls were attractive merely as the calls of our gackles are attractive, and the other birds that we heard sing, though they played their part in the general chorus, were performers of no special note, like our tree-creepers, pine-warblers, and chipping sparrows. The great spring chorus had already begun to subside, but the woods and fields were still vocal, with beautiful bird music. The country was very lovely, the inn as comfortable as possible, and the bath and supper very enjoyable after our tramp, and all together I passed no pleasanter twenty-four hours during my entire European trip. CHAPTER IX. TEN DAYS LATER At Sagamore Hill I was among my own birds, and was much interested as I listened to and looked at them, and remembering the notes and actions of the birds I had seen in England. On the evening of the first day I sat in my rocking chair on the broad veranda, looking across the sound towards the glory of the sunset. The thickly-grasped hillside soaked down in front of me to a belt of forest, from which rose the golden leisurely chiming of the wood-thrushes, chanting their vespers. Through the still air came the warble of verio and tannager, and after nightfall we heard the flight song of an oven-bird from the same belt of timber. Overhead an oriel sang in the weeping elm, now and then breaking his song to scold like an overgrown wren. Song sparrows and cat-birds sang in the shrubbery, and one robin had built its nest over the front and one over the back door, and there was a chippy's nest in the wisteria vined by the stoop. During the next twenty-four hours I saw and heard, either right around the house or while walking down to bathe through the woods the following forty-two birds, light green heron, night heron, red-tailed hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, king-fisher, flicker, hummingbird, swift, meadowlark, red-winged black bird, sharp-tailed finch, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, bush sparrow, purple finch, Baltimore oriel, cowbunting, robin, wood thrush, thrasher, cat-bird, scarlet tannager, red-eyed verio, yellow warbler, black-throated green warbler, kingbird, wood pee-wee, crow, blue-jay, cedar bird, Maryland yellow-throat, chickadee, black-and-white creeper, barn swallow, white-breasted swallow, oven bird, thistle finch, vesper finch, indigo bunting, tow-hee, grasshopper sparrow, and scree-chow. The birds were still in full song. For on Long Island there is little abatement in the chorus until about the second week of July. When the blossoming of the chestnut trees patches the woodland with frothy greenish-yellow, alas the blight has now destroyed the chestnut trees and robbed our woods of one of their distinctive beauties. Our most beautiful singers are the wood thrushes. They sing not only in the early morning but throughout the long, hot, June afternoons. Sometimes they sing in the trees immediately around the house, and if the air is still we can always hear them from among the tall trees at the foot of the hill. The thrashers sing in the hedgerows beyond the garden, the cat birds everywhere. The cat birds have such an attractive song that it is extremely irritating to know that at any moment they may interrupt it to mew and squeal. The bold, cheery music of the robins always seems typical of the bold, cheery birds themselves. The Baltimore Orioles nest in the young elms around the house, and the orchard Orioles in the apple trees near the garden and outbuildings. The earliest sounds of spring is the cheerful, simple, homely song of the song sparrow, and in March we also hear the piercing cadence of the meadowlark, to us one of the most attractive of all bird calls. Of late years now and then we hear the rollicking, bubbling melody of the bubble link in the pasture's back of the barn, and when the full chorus of these and of many other of the singers of spring is dying down, there are some true hot weather songsters such as the brightly hewed indigo buntings and thistle finches. Among the finches one of the most musical and plaintive songs is that of the bush sparrow. I do not know why the books call it field sparrow, for it does not dwell in the open fields like the Vesper finch, the savannah sparrow, and grasshopper sparrow, but among the cedars and bayberry bushes and young locusts in the same places where the prairie warblur is found. Nor is it only the true songs that delight us. We love to hear the flicker's call, and we readily pardon any one of their number, which is occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof. In our ears the red-winged blackbirds have a very attractive note. We love the screaming of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls of the night heron that rest in the tall water maples by one of the wood ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the salt marsh. It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any bird note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations. This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the birdsongs of one country with those of another. A man who is worth anything can no more be entirely impartial in speaking of the birdsongs, with which from his earliest childhood he has been familiar, than he can be entirely impartial in speaking of his own family. At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things, birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles, and children, and hard work, and the joy of life. We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings. The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer. As in every house there are things that appeal to the householder because of their associations, but which would not mean much to others. Naturally, any man who has been president and filled other positions accumulates such things, with scant regard to his own personal merits. Perhaps our most cherished possessions are Remington Bronze, the Bronco Buster, given me by my men when the regiment was mustered out, and a big Tiffany silver vase given to Mrs. Roosevelt by the enlisted men of the battleship Louisiana after we returned from a cruise on her to Panama. It was a real surprise gift presented to her in the White House on behalf of the whole crew, by four as strapping man of war's men as ever swung a turret or pointed a twelve-inch gun. The enlisted men of the Army I already knew well. Of course I knew well the officers of both Army and Navy. But the enlisted men of the Navy I only grew to know well when I was president. On the Louisiana Mrs. Roosevelt and I once dined at the Chief Petty Officer's mess, and on another battleship, the Missouri, when I was in company with Admiral Evans and Captain Cowles, and again on the Silph and on the Mayflower we also dined as guests of the crew. When we finished our trip on the Louisiana I made a short speech to the assembled crew, and at its close one of the Petty Officers, the very picture of what a man of war's man should look like, proposed three cheers for me in terms that struck me as curiously illustrative of America at her best. He said, now then men, three cheers for Theodore Roosevelt, the typical American citizen. That was the way in which they thought of the American President, and a very good way, too. It was an expression that would have come naturally only to men in whom the American principles of government and life were ingrained, just as they were ingrained in the men of my regiment. I need scarcely add, but I will add for the benefit of those who do not know, that this attitude of self-respecting identification of interest and purpose is not only compatible with, but can only exist when there is fine and real discipline, as thorough and genuine as the discipline that has always obtained in the most formidable fighting fleets and armies. The discipline and the mutual respect are complementary, not antagonistic. During the presidency, all of us, but especially the children, became close friends with many of the sailor men. The forebearers of the vase to Mrs. Roosevelt were promptly hailed as delightful big brothers by our two smallest boys, who at once took them to see the sights of Washington in the Landow, the President's land hoe, as with sea-faring humor our guests immediately styled it. Once after we were in private life again Mrs. Roosevelt was in a railway station and had some difficulty with her ticket. A fine-looking, quiet man stepped up and asked if he could be of help. He remarked that he had been one of the Mayflower's crew and knew us well, and in answer to a question explained that he had left the Navy in order to study dentistry, and added a delicious touch, that while thus preparing himself to be a dentist, he was earning the necessary money to go on with his studies by practicing the profession of a prize-fighter being a good man in the ring. There are various bronzes in the house, St. Godin's Puritan, a token from my staff officers when I was governor, Proctor's Cougar, the gift of the tennis cabinet, who also gave us a beautiful silver bowl, which is always lovingly pronounced to rhyme with owl, because that was the pronunciation used at the time of the giving by the valued friend who acted as spokesman for his fellow members, and who was himself the only non-American member of the said cabinet. There is a horseman by Mac Moniz and a big bronze vase by chemists, an adaption or development of the pottery vases of the Southwestern Indians. Mixed with all these gifts from various sources, ranging from a brazen Buddha sent me from the Dalai Lama, and a wonderful salter from the Emperor Menelik to a priceless ancient samurai sword coming from Japan in remembrance of the peace of Portsmouth, and a beautifully inlaid miniature suit of Japanese armor given me by a favorite hero of mine, Admiral Togo, when he visited Sagamore Hill. There are things from European friends, a mosaic picture of Pope Leo XIII in his garden, a huge, very handsome addition of the Nibbolungan lead, a striking miniature of John Hampton from Windsor Castle, additions of Dante and the campaigns of Eugenio von Savoy, another of my heroes, a dead hero this time, a Viking cup, the state sword of a Uganda king, the gold box in which the freedom of the city of London was given me, a beautiful head of Abraham Lincoln given me by the French authorities after my speech at the Sarban, and many other things from sources as diverse as the Sultan of Turkey and the Dowager Empress of China. Then there are things from home friends, a polo bear skin from Perry, a Sioux buffalo robe with, on it, painted by some long dead Sioux artist the picture story of Custer's fight, a bronze portrait plaque of Joel Chandler Harris, the candlestick used in sealing the Treaty of Portsmouth, sent me by Captain Cameron Winslow, a shoe worn by Dan Patch when he paced a mile in a minute and fifty-nine seconds, sent me by his owner. There is a picture of a bull moose by Carl Rungius, which seems to me as spirited in animal painting as I have ever seen. In the north room with its tables and mantelpiece and desks and chests made of woods sent from the Philippines by army friends or by other friends for other reasons, with its bison and wapiti heads, there are three paintings by Marcus Simmons, where light and shadow meet, the porcelain towers and the seats of the mighty. He is dead now, and he had scant recognition while he lived, yet surely he was a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful still. There is one of Lundgren's pictures of the western plains, and a picture of the Grand Canyon, and one by a Scandinavian artist who could see the fierce picturesqueness of Workaday-Pittsburgh and sketches of the White House by Sargent and by Hopkinson Smith. The books are everywhere. There are as many in the north room and in the parlor. Is drawing room a more appropriate name in the parlor? As in the library, the gun room at the top of the house, which incidentally has the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other rooms, and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just because they have not much relevance to one another, this being one of the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode. But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms, too. I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered. Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person and some of another, and each person should be aware of the book-lovers' besetting sin of what Mr. Edgar Allen Poe calls the mad pride of intellectuality, taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books. Of course, there are books which a man or woman uses as instruments of a profession, law books, medical books, cookery books, and the like. I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly books at all.  I am speaking of books that are meant to be read. Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of being interesting. If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it gives scant benefit to the reader. Of course, any reader ought to cultivate his or her taste so that good books will appeal to it and that trash won't. But after this point has once been reached, the needs of each reader must be met in a fashion that will appeal to those needs. Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a byproduct of the pleasure. That is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them. And the profit came in as part of the enjoyment. Of course, each individual is apt to have some special tastes in which he cannot expect that any but a few friends will share. Now, I am very proud of my big game library. I suppose there must be many big game libraries in continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive than mine. But I have not happened to come across any such library in this country. Some of the originals go back to the 16th century, and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation of Gaston Phoebus and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian. It is only very occasionally that I meet anyone who cares for any of these books. On the other hand, I expect to find many friends who will turn naturally to some of the old or the new books of poetry or romance or history to which we have the household habitually turn. Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector's library. Each book was procured because someone of the family wished to read it. We can never afford to take over much thought for the outsides of books. We were too much interested in their insides. Now and then I am asked as to what books a statesman should read. And my answer is poetry and novels, including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy, and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. Given in Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Hames Kringla, Foissar, Joinville and Villarduan, Parkman in Mahon, Momsen and Ronca. Why there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlisle and Emerson and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland's Growth of the Moral Instinct, or Acton's Essays and Lownsbury's Studies. Here again, I am not trying to class books together or measure one by another or enumerate one in a thousand of those worth reading. But just to indicate that any man or woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or other of serious thought, scientific or historical, or philosophical or economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers. I do not for a minute mean that the statesmen ought not to read a great many different books of this character, just as everyone else should read them. But in the final event, the statesmen and the publicist and the reformer and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of what is good and old things, all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul. And they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry. The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogs which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the one hundred best books or the five foot library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books, and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five foot library of particular books, which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times. And there is no such thing as a five foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years. Milton is best for one mood and Pope for another. Because a man likes Whitman or Browning or Lowell, he should not feel himself debarred from Tennyson or Kipling or Corner or Hina or the Bard of D'imbovica. Tolstoy's novels are good at one time and those of Schenkevich at another, and he is fortunate who can relish Salombo and Tom Brown and the two admirals and Quentin Doward and Artemis Ward and the Ingol B. Legends and Pickwick and Vanity Fair. Why there are hundreds of books like these, each one of which, if really read, really assimilated by the person to whom it happens to appeal, will enable that person quite unconsciously to furnish himself with much ammunition which he will find of use in the battle of life. A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time. But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of them are sealed to some men, and some are sealed to others, and some stir the soul at some given point of a man's life and yet convey no message at other times. The reader, the book lover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be. He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like. Yet at the same time he must avoid the most unpleasant of all the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere individual and perhaps unfortunate idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride. I happen to be devoted to Macbeth, whereas I very seldom read Hamlet, though I like parts of it. Now I am humbly and sincerely conscious that this is a demerit in me and not in Hamlet, and yet it would not do me any good to pretend that I like Hamlet as much as Macbeth when, as a matter of fact, I don't. I am very fond of simple epics and of ballad poetry from the Nibelungen lead and the Roland song through Chevy Chase and Patrick Spenz and Twa Corbis to Scott's poems and Longfellow's Saga of King Olaf and O' There. On the other hand, I don't care to read dramas as a rule. I cannot read them with enjoyment unless they appeal to me very strongly. They must almost be Escalus or Euripides, Gartha or Malier in order that I may not feel after finishing them a sense of virtuous pride in having achieved a task. Now I would be the first to deny that even the most delightful old English ballad should be put on a par with any one of scores of dramatic works by authors whom I have not mentioned. I know that each of these dramatists has written what is of more worth than the ballad. Only I enjoy the ballad, and I don't enjoy the drama. And therefore the ballad is better for me, and this fact is not altered by the other fact that my own shortcomings are to blame in the matter. I still read a number of Scott's novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austin, I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul. But other book lovers who are very close kin to me and whose taste I know to be better than mine read Miss Austin all the time.  Aside from the masters of literature, there are all kinds of books which one person will find delightful, and which he certainly ought not to surrender just because nobody else is able to find as much in the beloved volume. There is, on our bookshelves, a little pre-Victorian novel or tale called The Semi-Attached Couple. It is told with much humor. It is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk, and to me it is altogether delightful. But outside the members of my own family I have never met a human being who had even heard of it. And I don't suppose I ever shall meet one. I often enjoy a story by some living author so much that I write to tell him so, or to tell her so. And at least half the time I regret my action because it encourages the writer to believe that the public shares my views, and he then finds that the public doesn't. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jennifer Nelson. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Chapter 9. Outdoors and Indoors, Part 3. Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Stagmore Hill. But children are better than books. Stagmore Hill is one of three neighboring houses in which small cousins spent very happy years of childhood. In the three houses there were at one time sixteen of these small cousins, all told, and once we arranged them in order of size and took their photograph. There are many kinds of success in life worth having. It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful businessman, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor, or a rider, or a president, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison. It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone, but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching. And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end, why the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a byproduct of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing. There is a bit of homely philosophy quoted by Squire Bill Widener of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in life. Do what you can with what you've got, where you are. The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country. When our own children were little, we were for several winters in Washington, and each Sunday afternoon the whole family spent in Rock Creek Park, which was then very real country indeed. I would drag one of the children's wagons, and when the very smallest pairs of feet grew tired of trudging bravely after us, or of racing on rapturous side trips after flowers and other treasures, the owners would clamber into the wagon. One of these wagons, by the way, a gorgeous red one, had Express painted on it in gilt letters, and was known to the younger children as the Spress Wagon. They evidently associated the color with the term. Once, while we were at Sagamore, something happened to the Cherished Spress Wagon to the distress of the children, and especially of the child who owned it. Their mother and I were just starting for a drive in the buggy, and we promised the bereaved owner that we would visit a store we knew in East Norwich, a village a few miles away, and bring back another Spress Wagon. When we reached the store, we found to our dismay that the wagon which we had seen had been sold. We could not bear to return without the promised gift, for we knew that the brains of small persons are much puzzled when their elders seem to break promises. Fortunately, we saw in the store a delightful little bright red chair and bright red table, and these we brought home and handed solemnly over to the expectant recipient, explaining that as there unfortunately was not a Spress Wagon, we had brought him back a Spress Chair and a Spress Table. It worked beautifully. The Spress Chair and Table were received with such rapture that we had to get duplicates for the other small member of the family who was the particular crony of the proprietor of the new treasures. When their mother and I returned from a row, we would often see the children waiting for us, running like sand spiders along the beach. They always liked to swim in company with a grown-up of buoyant temperament and inventive mind, and the float offered limitless opportunities for enjoyment while bathing. All dutiful parents know the game of stagecoach. Each child is given a name, such as the whip, the nigh-leader, the off-wheeler, the old lady passenger, and under penalty of paying a forfeit must get up and turn round when the grown-up, who is improvising a thrilling story, mentions that particular object, and when the word stagecoach is mentioned, everybody has to get up and turn round. Well, we used to play stagecoach on the float while in swimming, and instead of tamely getting up and turning round, the child whose turn it was had to plunge overboard. When I mentioned stagecoach, the water fairly foamed with vigorously kicking little legs, and then there was always a moment of interest while I counted, so as to be sure that the number of heads that came up corresponded with the number of children who had gone down.  Moreover, much less serious sickness is unpleasant enough at the time. Looking back, however, there are elements of comedy in certain of the less serious cases. I well remember one such instance which occurred when we were living in Washington, in a small house, with barely enough room for everybody when all the chinks were filled. Measles descended on the household. In the effort to keep the children that were well and those that were sick apart, their mother and I had to camp out in improvised fashion. When the eldest small boy was getting well and had recovered his spirits, I slept on a sofa beside his bed, the sofa being so short that my feet projected over anyhow. One afternoon the small boy was given a toy organ by a sympathetic friend. Next morning early I was waked to find the small boy very vivacious and requesting a story. Having drowsily told the story, I said, Now fathers told you a story, so you amuse yourself and let your father go to sleep, to which the small boy responded most virtuously. Yes, father will go to sleep and I'll play the organ, which he did, at a distance of two feet from my head. Later his sister, who had just come down with the measles, was put into the same room. The small boy was convalescing and was engaged in playing on the floor with some tin ships, together with two or three pasteboard monitors and rams of my own manufacturer. He was giving a vivid rendering of Farragut at Mobile Bay from memories of how I had told the story. My pasteboard rams and monitors were fascinating, if a naval architect may be allowed to praise his own work, and as property they were equally divided between the little girl and the small boy. The little girl looked on with alert suspicion from the bed, for she was not yet convalescent enough to be allowed down on the floor. The small boy was busily reciting the phases of the fight, which now approached its climax, and the little girl evidently suspected that her monitor was destined to play the part of victim. Little boy. And then they steamed banging into the monitor. Little girl.  Little boy, without heating and hurrying toward the climax. And the torpedo went at the monitor. Little girl. My monitor is not to sink. Little boy, dramatically. And bang, the monitor sank. Little girl. It didn't do any such thing. My monitor always goes to bed at seven, and it's now quarter past. My monitor was in bed and couldn't sink. When I was assistant secretary of the navy, Leonard Wood, and I used often to combine forces and take both families of children out to walk, and occasionally some of their playmates. Leonard Wood's son, I found, attributed the paternity of all of those not of his own family to me. Once we were taking the children across Rock Creek on a fallen tree. I was standing on the middle of the log, trying to prevent any of the children from falling off, and while making a clutch at one peculiarly active and heedless child, I fell off myself. As I emerged from the water, I heard the little wood boy calling frantically to the general, oh, oh, the father of all the children fell into the Greek, which made me feel like an uncommonly moist patriarch. Of course, the children took much interest in the trophies I occasionally brought back from my hunts. When I started from my regiment in ninety-eight, the stress of leaving home, which was naturally not pleasant, was somewhat lightened by the next to the youngest boy, whose ideas of what was about to happen were hazy, clasping me round the legs with a beaming smile and saying, and is my father going to the war, and will he bring me back a bear? When some five months later I returned, of course in my uniform, this little boy was much puzzled as to my identity, although he greeted me affably with, good afternoon, Colonel. Half an hour later somebody asked him, where's father? To which he responded, I don't know, but the Colonel is taking a bath. Of course the children anthropomorphized, if that is the proper term, their friends of the animal world. Among these friends at one period was the baker's horse, and on a very rainy day I heard the little girl, who was looking out of the window, say, with a melancholy shake of her head, oh, there's poor craft's horse, all sop and wet. While I was in the White House the youngest boy became inhabit too of a small and rather noisome animal shop, and the good-natured owner would occasionally let him take pets home to play with. On one occasion I was holding a conversation with one of the leaders in Congress, Uncle Pete Hepburn, about the railroad rate bill. The children were strictly trained not to interrupt business, but on this particular occasion the little boy's feelings overcame him. He had been loaned a king's snake, which as all nature lovers know is not only a useful but a beautiful snake, very friendly to human beings, and he came rushing home to show the treasure. He was holding it inside his coat, and it contrived to wiggle partly down the sleeve. Uncle Pete Hepburn naturally did not understand the full import of what the little boy was saying to me as he endeavored to wriggle out of his jacket, and kindly started to help him, and then jumped back with alacrity as the small boy and the snake both popped out of the jacket. There could be no healthier and pleasanter place in which to bring up children than in that nook of old-time America around Sagamore Hill. Certainly I never knew small people to have a better time or a better training for their work in afterlife than the three families of cousins at Sagamore Hill. It was real country, and speaking from the somewhat detached point of view of the masculine parent, I should say there was just the proper mixture of freedom and control in the management of the children. They were never allowed to be disobedient or to shirk lessons or work, and they were encouraged to have all the fun possible. They often went barefoot, especially during the many hours passed in various enthralling pursuits along and in the waters of the bay. They swam, they tramped, they boated, they coasted and skated in winter. They were intimate friends with the cows, chickens, pigs, and other livestock. They had in succession two ponies, General Grant, and when the General's legs became such that he lay down too often and too unexpectedly in the road a calico pony named Algonquot, who is still living a life of honorable leisure in the stable and in the pasture where he has to be picketed because otherwise he chases the cows. So date Pony Grant used to draw the cart in which the children went driving when they were very small, the driver being their old nurse Mamie, who had held their mother in her arms when she was born, and who was knit to them by a tie as close as any tie of blood. I doubt whether I ever saw Mamie really offended with them except once, when out of pure but misunderstood affection they named a pig after her. They loved Pony Grant. Once I saw the then little boy of three hugging Pony Grant's forelegs, as he leaned over his broad straw hat tilted on end and Pony Grant meditatively munched the brim, whereupon the small boy looked up with a wail of anguish, evidently thinking the pony had decided to treat him like a radish. The children had pets of their own too, of course. Among them guinea pigs were the standbys. Their highly unemotional nature fits them for companionship with adoring but over-enthusiastic young masters and mistresses. Then there were flying squirrels and kangaroo rats, gentle and trustful, and a badger whose temper was short but whose nature was fundamentally friendly. The badger's name was Josiah, the particular little boy whose property he was used to carry him about, clasped firmly around what would have been his ways if he had had any. In as much as went on the ground the badger would play energetic games of tag with the little boy and nip his bare legs. I suggested that it would be uncommonly disagreeable if he took advantage of being held in the little boy's arms to bite his face. But this suggestion was repelled with scorn as an unworthy assault on the character of Josiah. He bites legs sometimes, but he never bites faces, said the little boy. We also had a young black bear whom the children christened Jonathan Edwards partly out of compliment to their mother, who was descended from the great Puritan Divine, and partly because the bear possessed a temper in which gloom and strength were combined in what the children regarded as Calvinistic proportions. As for the dogs, of course, there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them a large yellow animal of several good breeds, and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named Susan by his small owners in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow. The fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the dogs and the one with the strongest character was Sailor Boy, a Chesapeake Bay dog. He had a masterful temper and a strong sense of both dignity and duty. He would never let the other dogs fight, and he himself never fought unless circumstances imperatively demanded it. But he was a murderous animal when he did fight. He was not only exceedingly fond of the water, as was to be expected, but passionately devoted to gunpowder in every form, for he loved firearms and fairly reveled in the Fourth of July celebrations. The latter being rather hazardous occasions, as the children strongly objected to any safe and sane element being injected into them, and had the normal number of closed-shaves with rockets, Roman candles, and firecrackers. One of the standbys for enjoyment, especially in rainy weather, was the old barn. This had been built nearly a century previously, and was as delightful as only the pleasantest kind of old barn can be. It stood at the meeting spot of three fences. A favorite amusement used to be an obstacle race when the barn was full of hay. The contestants were timed and were started successively from outside the door. They rushed inside, clambered over, or burrowed through the hay, as suited them best, dropped out of a place where a loose board had come off, got over, through, or under the three fences, and raced back to the starting point. When they were little, their respected fathers were expected also to take part in the obstacle race, and when with the advance of years the fathers finally refused to be contestants, there was a general feeling of pain regret among the children at such a decline in the sporting spirit. Another famous place for handicap races was Cooper's Bluff, a gigantic sand bank rising from the edge of the bay, a mile from the house. If the tide was high, there was an added thrill, for some of the contestants were sure to run into the water. As soon as the little boys learned to swim, they were allowed to go off by themselves in rowboats and camp out for the night along the sound. Sometimes I would go along so as to take the smaller children. Once a schooner was wrecked on a point half a dozen miles away. She held together well for a season or two after having been cleared of everything down to the timbers, and this gave us the chance to make camping-out trips in which the girls could also be included, for we put them to sleep in the wreck, while the boys slept on the shore. Squaw picnics the children called them. My children when young went to the public school near us, the Little Cove school, as it is called. For nearly thirty years we have given the Christmas tree to the school. Before the gifts are distributed, I am expected to make an address, which is always mercifully short, my own children having impressed upon me with frank sincerity the attitude of other children to addresses of this kind on such occasions. There are, of course, performances by the children themselves, while all of us parents look admiringly on, each sympathizing with his or her particular offspring in the somewhat wooden recital of Darius Green in his flying machine, or the mountain in the squirrel had a quarrel. But the tree and the gifts make up for all shortcomings. We had a sleigh for winter, but if when there was much snow the whole family desired to go somewhere we would put the body of the farm wagon on runners and all bundling together. We always liked snow at Christmas time, and the sleigh ride down to the church on Christmas Eve. One of the hymns always sung at this Christmas Eve festival begins. It's Christmas Eve on the river, it's Christmas Eve on the bay. All good natives of the village firmly believe that this hymn was written here, and with direct reference to Oyster Bay. Although if such were the case the word river would have to be taken in a hyperbolic sense as the nearest approach to a river is the village pond. I used to share this belief myself until my faith was shaken by a Denver lady who wrote that she had sung that hymn when a child in Michigan, and that at the present time her little Denver babies also loved it, although in their case the river was not represented by even a village pond. When we were in Washington the children usually went with their mother to the Episcopal Church, while I went to the Dutch Reformed. But if any child misbehaved itself it was sometimes sent next Sunday to church with me, on the theory that my companionship would have a sedative effect, which it did as I and the child walked along with rather constrained politeness, each eyeing the other with watchful readiness for the unexpected. On one occasion when the child's conduct fell just short of warranting such extreme measures, his mother as they were on the point of entering church concluded a homily by a quotation which showed a certain haziness of memory concerning the marriage and baptismal services. No, little boy, if this conduct continues I shall think that you neither love, honor, nor obey me. However, the culprit was much impressed with a sense of shortcoming as to the obligations he had undertaken, so the result was a satisfactory as if the quotation had been from the right service. As for the education of the children, there was of course much of it that represented downright hard work and drudgery. There was also much training that came as a byproduct and was perhaps almost as valuable, not as a substitute but as an addition. After their supper the children, when little, would come trotting up to their mother's room to be read to, and it was always a surprise to me to notice the extremely varied reading which interested them. From Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, Mary Alicia Owens Voodoo Tales, and Joel Chandler Harris's Aaron in the Wild Woods, to Lycities and King John. If their mother was absent I would try to act as vice mother, a poor substitute, I fear, superintending the supper and reading loud afterwards. The children did not wish me to read the books they desired their mother to read, and I usually took some such book as Hear Ward, The Wake, or Guy Manoring, or The Last of the Mohicans, or else some story about a man-eating tiger or a man-eating lion from one of the hunting books in my library. These latter stories were always favorites, and as the authors told them in the first person, my interested auditors grew to know them by the name of the eye stories, and regarded them as adventures, all of which happened to the same individual. When Celis, the African hunter, visited us, I had to get him to tell the younger children two or three of the stories with which they were already familiar from my reading, and as Celis is a most graphic narrator, and always enters thoroughly into the feeling not only of himself, but of the opposing lion or buffalo, my own rendering of the incidents was cast entirely into the shade. Besides profiting by the more canonical books on education, we profited by certain essays and articles of a less orthodox type. I wish to express my warmest gratitude for such books, not of avowedly didactic purpose, as Laura Richard's books, Josephine Dodge Daskham's Madness of Philip, Palmer Cox's Queer People, The Melodies of Father Goose and Mother Wild Goose, Flandrow's Mrs. White's, Myra Kelly's Stories of Her Little East Side Pupils, and Mickelson's Madigan's. It is well to take duties and life generally seriously. It is also well to remember that a sense of humor is a healthy anti-scorbutic to that pretentious seriousness which defeats its own purpose. Occasionally, bits of self-education proved of unexpected help to the children in later years. Like other children, they were apt to take to bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed. One of the boys just before his sixteenth birthday went moose hunting with the family doctor and close personal friend of the entire family, Alexander Lambert. Once, night overtook them before they camped, and they had to lie down just where they were. Next morning, Dr. Lambert rather enviously congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep, to which the boy responded, Well, Doctor, you see it isn't very long since I used to take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night. As the children grew up, Sagamore Hill remained delightful for them. There were picnics and writing parties, there were dances in the North Room, sometimes fancy dress dances, and open air plays on the Green Tennis Court of one of the cousin's houses. The children are no longer children now. Most of them are men and women working out their own fates in the big world. Some in our own land, others across the great oceans, or where their southern cross blazes in the tropic nights. Some of them have children of their own. Some are working at one thing, some at another. In cable ships, in business offices, in factories, in newspaper offices, building steel bridges, bossing gravel trains, and steam shovels, or laying tracks, and superintending freight traffic. They have had their share of accidents and escapes. As I write, word comes from a far off land that one of them, whom Seth Bullock used to call Kim because he was the friend of all mankind, while bossing a dangerous but necessary steel structural job has had two ribs and two back teeth broken in his back at work. They have known and they will know joy and sorrow, triumph and temporary defeat. But I believe they are all the better off because of their happy and healthy childhood. It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home. No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph, but there is no other success that in any shape or way approaches that which is open to most of the many, many men and women who have the right ideals. These are the men and women who see that it is the intimate and homely things that count most. They are the men and women who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and only to those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty. End of Chapter 9 Recording by Jennifer Nelson, Hemet, California. Chapter 10 Part 1 of Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Chapter 10, The Presidency, Making an Old Party Progressive, Part 1. On September 6th, 1901, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist in the city of Buffalo. I went to Buffalo at once. The President's condition seemed to be improving and after a day or two we were told that he was practically out of danger. I then joined my family, who were in the Adirondacks, near the foot of Mount Tahalus. A day or two afterwards we took a long tramp through the forest and in the afternoon I climbed Mount Tahalus. After reaching the top I had descended a few hundred feet to a shelf of land where there was a little lake, when I saw a guide coming out of the woods on our trail from below. I felt at once that he had bad news and sure enough he handed me a telegram saying that the President's condition was much worse and that I must come to Buffalo immediately. It was late in the afternoon and darkness had fallen by the time I reached the clubhouse where we were staying. It was some time afterwards before I could get a wagon to drive me to the nearest railway station, North Creek, some forty or fifty miles distant. The roads were the ordinary wilderness roads and the night was dark, but we changed horses two or three times. When I say we, I mean the driver and I, as there was no one else with us, and reached the station just at dawn to learn from Mr. Loeb, who had a special train waiting, that the President was dead. That evening I took the oath of office in the house of Ansley Wilcox at Buffalo. On three previous occasions the Vice President had succeeded to the presidency on the death of the President. In each case there had been a reversal of party policy and a nearly immediate and nearly complete change in the personnel of the higher offices, especially the Cabinet. I had never felt that this was wise from any standpoint. If a man is fit to be President, he will speedily so impress himself in the office that the policies pursued will be his anyhow, and he will not have to bother as to whether he is changing them or not. While as regards the offices under him, the important thing for him is that his subordinate shall make a success in handling their several departments. The subordinate is sure to desire to make a success of his department for his own sake, and if he is a fit man whose views on public policy are sound, and whose abilities entitle him to his position, he will do excellently under almost any chief with the same purposes. I at once announced that I would continue unchanged McKinley's policies for the honor and prosperity of the country, and I asked all the members of the Cabinet to stay. There were no changes made among them save as changes were made among their successors whom I myself appointed. I continued Mr. McKinley's policies, changing and developing them and adding new policies only as the questions before the public changed, and as the needs of the public developed. Some of my friends shook their heads over this, telling me that the men I retained would not be loyal to me, and that I would seem as if I were a pale copy of McKinley. I told them that I was not nervous on this score, and that if the men I retained were loyal to their work, they would not be giving me the loyalty for which I most cared, and that if the men I retained were loyal to their work, they would be giving me the loyalty for which I most cared, and that if they were not, I would change them anyhow, and that as for being a pale copy of McKinley, I was not primarily concerned with either following or not following in his footsteps, but in facing the new problems that arose, and that if I were competent I would find ample opportunity to show my competence by my deeds, without worrying myself as to how to convince people of the fact. For the reasons I have already given in my chapter on the governorship of New York, the Republican Party, which in the days of Abraham Lincoln was founded as the radical progressive party of the nation, had been obliged during the last decade of the nineteenth century to uphold the interests of popular government against a foolish and ill-judged mock radicalism. It remained the nationalist, as against the particularist, or state's rights party, and in so far remained absolutely sound, for little permanent good can be done by any party, which worships the state's rights fetish, or which fails to regard the state, like the county or the municipality, as merely a convenient unit for local self-government, while in all national matters of importance to the whole people, the nation is to be supreme over state, county, and town alike. But the state's rights fetish, although still effectively used at certain times by both courts and Congress to block needed national legislation, directed against the huge corporations or in the interests of working men, was not a prime issue at the time of which I speak. In 1896, 1898, and 1900, the campaigns were waged on two great moral issues. One, the imperative need of a sound and honest currency. Two, the need, after 1898, of meeting in manful and straightforward fashion the extra-territorial problems arising from the Spanish War. On these great moral issues the Republican Party was right, and the men who were opposed to it, and who claimed to be the radicals, and their allies among the sentimentalists, were utterly and hopelessly wrong. This had, regrettably, but perhaps inevitably, tended to throw the party into the hands, not merely of the conservatives, but of the reactionaries, of men who, sometimes for personal and improper reasons, but more often with entire sincerity and uprightness of purpose, distrusted anything that was progressive and dreaded radicalism. These men, still from force of habit, applauded what Lincoln had done in the way of radical dealing with the abuses of his day, but they did not apply the spirit in which Lincoln worked to the abuses of their own day. Both houses of Congress were controlled by these men. Their leaders in the Senate were Messers Aldrich and Hale. The Speaker of the House when I became President was Mr. Henderson, but in a little over a year he was succeeded by Mr. Cannon, who, although widely differing from Senator Aldrich in matters of detail, represented the same type of public sentiment. There were many points on which I agreed with Mr. Cannon and Mr. Aldrich, and some points on which I agreed with Mr. Hale. I made a resolute effort to get on with all three, and with their followers, and I have no question that they made an equally resolute effort to get on with me. We succeeded in working together, although with increasing friction, for some years. I pushing forward and they hanging back. Gradually, however, I was forced to abandon the effort to persuade them to come my way, and then I achieved results only by appealing over the heads of the Senate and House leaders to the people, who were the Masters of both of us. I continued in this way to get results until almost the close of my term, and the Republican party became once more the progressive and indeed the fairly radical progressive party of the nation. When my successor was chosen, however, the leaders of the House and Senate, or most of them, felt that it was safe to come to a break with me, and the last or short session of Congress, held between the election of my successor and his inauguration four months later, saw a series of contests between the majorities in the two Houses of Congress and the President, myself, quite as bitter as if they and I had belonged to opposite political parties. However, I held my own. I was not able to push through the legislation I desired during these four months, but I was able to prevent them doing anything I did not desire, or undoing anything I had already succeeded in getting done. There were, of course, many senators and members of the lower House, with whom, up to the very last, I continued to work in hardy accord, and with a growing understanding. I have not the space to enumerate, as I would like to, these men. For many years Senator Lodge had been my close personal and political friend, with whom I discussed all public questions that arose, usually with agreement, and our intimately close relations were, of course, unchanged by my entry into the White House. He was, of all our public men, the man who had made the closest and wisest study of our foreign relations, and more clearly than almost any other man, he understood the vital fact that the efficiency of our Navy conditioned our national efficiency in foreign affairs. Anything relating to our international relations, from Panama and the Navy to the Alaskan boundary question, the Al-Gasiris negotiations, or the piece of Portsmouth, I was certain to discuss with Senator Lodge, and also with certain other members of Congress, such as Senator Turner of Washington, and Representative Hitt of Illinois. Anything relating to labor legislation and to measures for controlling big mis-ness, or efficiently regulating the giant railway systems, I was certain to discuss with Senator Dolliver, or Congressman Hepburn, or Congressman Cooper. With men like Senator Beverage, Congressman, afterwards Senator Dixon, and Congressman Murdoch, I was apt to discuss pretty nearly everything relating to either our internal or our external affairs. There were many, many others. The present President of the Senate, Senator Clark of Arkansas, was as fearless and high-minded a representative of the people of the United States as I ever dealt with. He was one of the men who combined loyalty to his own state with an equally keen loyalty to the people of the United States. He was politically opposed to me, but when the interests of the country were at stake, he was incapable of considering party differences, and this was especially his attitude in international matters, including certain treaties which most of his party colleagues with narrow lack of patriotism and complete subordination of national to factional interest opposed. I have never anywhere met finer, more faithful, more disinterested, and more loyal public servants than Senator OH Platt, a Republican from Connecticut, and Senator Cockrell, a Democrat from Missouri. They were already old men when I came to the presidency, and doubtless there were points on which I seemed them to be extreme and radical, but eventually they found that our motives and beliefs were the same, and they did all in their power to help any movement that was for the interests of our people as a whole. I had met them while I was civil service commissioner and assistant secretary of the Navy. All I had ever to do with either was to convince them that a given measure I championed was right, and he then at once did all that he could to have it put into effect. If I could not convince them why that was my fault or my misfortune, but if I could convince them, I never had to think again as to whether they would or would not support me. There were many other men of Mark in both houses with whom I could work on some points, whereas on others we had to differ. There was one powerful leader, a burly, forceful man of admirable traits, who had however been trained in the post-bellum school of business and politics, so that his attitude to work towards life, quite unconsciously, reminded me a little of Artemis Ward's view of the Tower of London. If I like it, I'll buy it. There was a big governmental job in which this leader was much interested, and in reference to which he always wished me to consult a man whom he trusted, whom I will call pit Rodney. One day I answered him, the trouble with Rodney is that he misestimates his relations to Cosmos, to which he responded Cosmos, Cosmos, never heard of him. You stick to Rodney, he's your man, outside of the public servants there were multitudes of men in newspaper offices, in magazine offices, in business or the professions or on farms or in shops, who actively supported the policies for which I stood and did work of genuine leadership which was quite as effective as any work done by men in public office. Without the active support of these men, I would have been powerless. In particular, the leading newspaper correspondents at Washington were as a whole a singularly able, trustworthy, and public-spirited body of men and the most useful of all agents in the fight for efficient and decent government. As for the men under me in executive office, I could not overstate the debt of gratitude I owe them. From the heads of the departments, the cabinet officers down, the most striking feature of the administration was the devoted, zealous, and efficient work that was done, as soon as it became understood that the one bond of interest among all of us was the desire to make the government, the most effective instrument in advancing the interest of the people as a whole, the interests of the average men and women of the United States and of their children. I do not think I overstate the case when I say that most of the men who did the best work under me felt that ours was a partnership and that we all stood on the same level of purpose and service and that it mattered not what position any one of us held so long as in that position he gave the very best that was in him. We worked very hard, but I made a point of getting a couple of hours off each day for equally vigorous play. The men with whom I then played, whom we laughingly grew to call the tennis cabinet, have been mentioned in a previous chapter of this book in connection with the gift they gave me at the last breakfast which they took at the White House. There were many others in the public service under me with whom I happened not to play, but who did their share of our common work just as effectively as it was done by us who did play. Of course nothing could have been done in my administration if it had not been for the zeal, intelligence, and the and moreover each of them as he grew especially fit for his job used to suggest to me the right thought to have and the right order to give concerning that job. It is of course hard for me to speak with cold and his passionate partiality of these men who were as close to me as were the men of my regiment. But the outside observers best fitted to pass judgment about them felt as I did. At the end of my administration Mr. Brice, the British ambassador told me that in a long life during which he had studied intimately the government of many different countries he had never in any country seen a more eager high-minded and efficient set of public servants men more useful and more creditable to their country than the men then doing the work of the American government in Washington and in the field. I repeat this statement with the permission of Mr. Brice. At about the same time or a little before in the spring of 1908 there appeared in the English fortnight the review an article evidently by a competent eyewitness setting forth more in detail the same views to which the British ambassador thus privately gave expression. It was in part as follows. Mr. Roosevelt has gathered around him a body of public servants who are nowhere surpassed. I question whether they are anywhere equaled for efficiency self-sacrifice and an absolute devotion to their country's interests. Many of them are poor men without private means who have voluntarily abandoned high professional ambitions and turned their backs on the rewards of business to serve their country on salaries that are not merely inadequate but indecently so. There is not one of them who is not constantly assailed by offers of positions in the world of commerce, finance, and the law that would satisfy every material ambition with which he began life. There is not one of them who could not if he chose earn outside Washington from 10 to 20 times the income on which he economizes as a state official. But these men are as indifferent to money and to the power that money brings as to the allurements of Newport in New York or to merely personal distinctions or to the commercialized ideals which the great bulk of their fellow countrymen accept without question. They are content and more than content to sink themselves in the national service without a thought of private advancement and often at a heavy sacrifice of worldly honors and to toil on sustained by their own native impulse to make of patriotism an efficient instrument of public betterment. The American public rarely appreciate the high quality of the work done by some of our diplomats. Work usually unnoticed and unrewarded which redounds to the interest of the honor of all of us. The most useful man in the entire diplomatic service during my presidency and for many years before was Henry White and I say this having in mind the high quality of work done by such admirable ambassadors and ministers as Bacon, Meyer, Strauss, O'Brien, Rockhill and Eagan to name only a few among many. When I left the presidency White was ambassador to France. Shortly afterwards he was removed by Mr. Taft for reasons unconnected with the good of the service. The most important factor in getting the right spirit in my administration next to the insistence upon courage, honesty and a genuine democracy of desire to serve the plain people was my insistence upon the theory that the executive power was limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution or imposed by the Congress under its constitutional powers. My view was that every executive officer and above all every executive officer in high position was a steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people and not to content himself with a negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin. I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it. My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws. Under this interpretation of executive power I did and caused to be done many things not previously done by the President and the heads of the departments. I did not usurp power but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power. In other words I acted for the public welfare. I acted for the common well-being of all our people whenever and in whatever manner was necessary unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition. I did not care a wrap for the mere form and show of power. I cared immediately for the use that could be made of the substance. The Senate at one time objected to my communicating with them in printing preferring the expensive foolish and laborious practice of writing out the messages by hand. It was not possible to return the outworn archaism of handwriting but we endeavored to have printing made as pretty as possible. Whether I communicated with the Congress in writing or by word of mouth and whether the writing was by a machine or a pen were equally and absolutely unimportant matters. The importance lay in what I said and in the heed paid to what I said. So as to my meeting and consulting Senators, congressmen, politicians, financiers, and labor man, I consulted all who wish to see me and if I wish to see anyone I sent for him and where the consultation took place was a matter of supreme unimportance. I consulted every man with the sincere hope that I could profit by and follow his advice. I consulted every member of Congress who wished to be consulted hoping to be able to come to an agreement of action with him and I always finally acted as my conscience and common sense bad me at. About appointments I was obliged by the Constitution to consult the Senate and the long established custom of the Senate meant that in practice this consultation was with individual Senators and even with big politicians who stood behind the Senators. I was only one half the appointing power I nominated but the Senate confirmed. In practice by what was called the courtesy of the Senate the Senate normally refused to confirm any appointment if the Senator from the State objected to it. In exceptional cases where I could arouse public attention I could force through the appointment in spite of the opposition of the Senators. In all ordinary cases this was impossible. On the other hand the Senator could of course do nothing for any man unless I chose to nominate him. In consequence the Constitution itself forced the President and the Senators from each State to come to a working agreement on the appointments in and from that State. My course was to insist on absolute fitness including honesty as a prerequisite to every appointment and to remove only for good cause and where there was such cause to refuse even to discuss with the Senator in interest the unfit servant's retention. Subject to these considerations I normally accepted each Senators recommendations for offices of a routine kind such as most post offices and the like but insisted on myself choosing the men for the more important positions. I was willing to take any good man for Postmaster but in the case of a Judge or District Attorney or Canal Commissioner or Ambassador I was apt to insist either on a given man or else on any man with a given class of qualifications. If the Senator deceived me I took care that he had no opportunity to repeat the deception. I can perhaps best illustrate my theory of action by two specific examples. In New York Governor O'Dell and Senator Platt sometimes worked in agreement and sometimes were at Swords Points and both wished to be consulted. To a friendly Congressman who was also their friend I wrote as follows on July 22nd 1903. I want to work with Platt. I want to work with O'Dell. I want to support both and take the advice of both. But of course ultimately I must be the Judge as to acting on the advice given. When, as in the case of the Judgeship, I am convinced that the advice of both is wrong I shall act as I did when I point at hold. When I could find a friend of O'Dell's like Cooley who is thoroughly fit for the position I desire to fill it gives me the greatest pleasure to appoint him. When Platt proposes to me a man like Hamilton Fish it is equally a pleasure to appoint him. This was written in connection with events which led up to my refusing to accept Senator Platt's or Governor O'Dell's suggestions as to a Federal Judgeship and a Federal District Attorneyship and insisting on the appointment first of Judge Howe and later of District Attorney Simpson because in each case I felt that the work to be done was of so high an order that I could not take an ordinary man. End of chapter 10 part 1 Chapter 10 part 2 of autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Amanda Heineman Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 10 The Presidency Making an Old Party Progressive Part 2 The other case was that of Senator Fulton of Oregon Through Francis Henney I was prosecuting men who were implicated in a vast network of conspiracy against the law in connection with the theft of public land in Oregon. I had been acting on Senator Fulton's recommendations for office in the usual manner. Henney had been insisting that Fulton was in league with the men who were prosecuting and that he had recommended unfit men. Fulton had been protesting against my following Henney's advice particularly as regards appointing Judge Wolverton as United States Judge. Finally, Henney laid before me a report which convinced me of the truth of his statements. I then wrote to Fulton as follows on November 20, 1905. My dear Senator Fulton, I enclose you here with a copy of the report made to me by Mr. Henney. I have seen the originals of the letters from Ewan Senator Mitchell quoted therein. I do not at this time desire to discuss the report itself which of course I must submit to the Attorney General. But I have been obliged to reach the painful conclusion that your own letters as they are encoded tend to show that you recommended for the position of District Attorney B, when you had good reason to believe that he had himself been guilty of fraudulent conduct. That you recommended C for the same position simply because it was for B's interest that he should be so recommended. And as there is reason to believe because he had agreed to divide the fees with B if he were appointed. And that you finally recommended the reappointment of H with the knowledge that if H were appointed he would abstain from prosecuting B for criminal misconduct. This being why B advocated H's claims for reappointment. If you care to make any statement in the matter I shall of course be glad to hear it. As the District Judge of Oregon I shall appoint Judge Wolferton. In the letter I of course gave in full the names indicated above by initials. Senator Fulton gave no explanation. I therefore ceased to consult him about appointments under the Department of Justice and the Interior, the two departments in which the crookedness had occurred. There was no question of crookedness in the other offices in the state and they could be handled in the ordinary manner. Legal proceedings were undertaken against his colleague in the Senate and one of his colleagues in the lower house and the former was convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary. In a number of instances the legality of executive acts of my administration was brought before the courts. They were uniformly sustained. For example, prior to 1907 statutes relating to the disposition of coal lands had been construed as fixing the flat price at $10 to $20 per acre. The result was that valuable coal lands were sold for wholly inadequate prices chiefly to big corporations. By executive order the coal lands were withdrawn and not open for entry until proper classification was placed there on by government agents. There was a great clamor that I was usurping legislative power. But the acts were not assailed in court until we brought suits to set aside entries made by persons and associations to obtain larger areas than the statutes authorized. This position was opposed on the ground that the restrictions imposed were illegal, that the executive orders were illegal. The Supreme Court sustained the government. In the same way our attitude in the water power question was sustained. The Supreme Court holding that the federal government had the rights we claimed over streams that are or may be declared navigable by Congress. Again, when Oklahoma became a state we were obliged to use the executive power to protect Indian rights and property for there had been an enormous amount of fraud in the obtaining of Indian lands by white men. Here we were denounced as usurping power over a state as well as usurping power that did not belong to the executive. The Supreme Court sustained our action. In connection with the Indians by the way it was again and again necessary to assert the position of the president as steward of the whole people. I had a capital Indian commissioner Francis E. Loop. I found that I could rely on his judgment not to get me into fights that were unnecessary and therefore I always backed him to the limit when he told me that a fight was necessary. On one occasion for example Congress passed a bill to sell to settlers about half a million acres of Indian land in Oklahoma at one and a half dollars an acre. I refused to sign it and turned the matter over to Loop. The bill was accordingly withdrawn amended so as to safeguard the welfare of the Indians and the minimum price raised to five dollars an acre. Then I signed the bill. We sold that land under sealed bids and realized for the Kiowa Comanche and Apache Indians more than four million dollars, three millions and a quarter more than they would have obtained if I had signed the bill in its original form. In another case where there had been a division among the Sok and Fox Indians part of the tribe were moving to Iowa the Iowa delegation in Congress backed by two islands who were members of my cabinet passed a bill awarding a sum of nearly a half million dollars to the Iowa seceders. They had not consulted the Indian Bureau. Loop protested against the bill and I vetoed it. A subsequent bill was passed on the lines laid down by the Indian Bureau referring the whole controversy to the courts and the Supreme Court in the end justified our position by deciding against the Iowa seceders and awarding the money to the Oklahoma state homes. As to all action of this kind there have long been two schools of political thought upheld with equal sincerity. The division has not normally been a long political but temperamental lines. The course I followed of regarding the executive is subject only to the people and under the Constitution bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render the service was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Other honorable and well-meaning presidents such as James Buchanan took the opposite and as it seems to mean narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people and could do nothing no matter how necessary it be to act unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action. Most able loggers who are past middle age take this view and so do large numbers of well-meaning respectable citizens. My successor in office took this the Buchanan view of the President's powers and duties. For example, under my administration we found that one of the favorite methods adopted by the men desirous of stealing the public domain was to carry the decision of the Secretary of the Interior into court. By vigorously opposing such action and only by so doing we were able to carry out the policy of properly protecting the public domain. My successor not only took the opposite view but recommended to Congress the passage of a bill which would have given the courts direct appellate power over the Secretary of the Interior in these land matters. This bill was reported favorably by Mr. Mondale, Chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, a congressman who took the lead in every measure to prevent the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of the national domain for the use of home seekers. Fortunately, Congress declined to pass the bill. Its passage would have been a veritable calamity. I acted on the theory that the President could at any time in his discretion withdraw from entry. Any of the public lands of the United States can reserve the same for forestry, for water power sites, for irrigation and other public purposes. Without such action it would have been impossible to stop the activity of the land thieves. No one ventured to test its legality by lawsuit. My successor, however, himself questioned it and referred the matter to Congress. Again, Congress showed its wisdom by passing a law which gave the President the power which he had long exercised and of which my successor had shorn himself. Perhaps the sharp difference between what may be called the Lincoln Jackson and the Buchanan Taft schools in their views of the power and duties of the President may be best illustrated by comparing the attitude of my successor toward his Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Ballinger, when the latter was accused of gross misconduct in office with my attitude towards my Chiefs of Department and other subordinate officers. More than once while I was President my officials were attacked by Congress generally because these officials did their duty well and fearlessly. In every such case I stood by the official and refused to recognize the right of Congress to interfere with me accepting my impeachment or in other constitutional manner. On the other hand wherever I found the officer unfit for his position I promptly removed him even although the most influential men in Congress fought for his retention. The Jackson Lincoln view is that a President who is fit to do good work should be able to form his own judgment as to his own subordinates and above all of the subordinate standing highest and in closest and most intimate touch with him. My Secretaries and their subordinates were responsible to me and I accepted the responsibility for all their deeds. As long as they were satisfactory to me I stood by them against every critic or assailant within or without Congress and as for getting Congress to make my mind up for me about them the thought would have been inconceivable to me. My successor took the opposite or Buchanan view when he permitted and requested Congress to pass judgment on the charges made against Mr. Ballinger as an executive officer. These charges were made to the President the President had the facts before him and could get at them at any time and he alone had power to act if the charges were true. However he permitted and requested Congress to investigate Mr. Ballinger. The party minority of the committee that investigated him and one member of the majority declared that the charges were well founded and that Mr. Ballinger should be removed. The other members of the majority declared the charges ill founded. The President abode by the view of the majority. Of course believers in the Jackson Lincoln theory of the Presidency would not be content with this town meeting majority and minority method of determining by another branch of the government what it seems the special duty of the President himself to determine for himself in dealing with his own subordinate in his own department. There are many worthy people who reprobate the Buchanan method as a matter of history but who in actual life reprobates still more strongly the Jackson Lincoln method when it is put into practice. These persons conscientiously believe that the President should solve every doubt in favor of inaction as against action that he should construe strictly and narrowly the constitutional grant of powers both to the national government and to the President within the national government. In addition however to the men who conscientiously believe in this course from high although as I hold misguided motives there are many men who affect to believe in it merely because it enables them to attack and to try to hamper for partisan or personal reasons and executive whom they dislike. There are other men in whom especially when they are themselves in office practical adherence to the Buchanan principle represents not well thought out devotion to an unwise course but simple weakness of character and desire to avoid trouble and responsibility. Unfortunately in practice it makes little difference which class of ideas actuates the President who by his action sets a cramping precedent whether he is high minded and wrongheaded or merely in firm of purpose whether he means well feebly or is bound by a mischievous misconception of the powers and duties of the national government or the president. The effect of his actions is the same. The president's duty is to act so that he himself and his subordinate shall be able to do efficient work for the people and this efficient work he and they cannot do if Congress is permitted to undertake the task of making up his mind for him as to how he shall perform what is clearly his sole duty. One of the ways in which by independent action of the executive we were able to accomplish an immense amount of work for the public was through volunteer unpaid commissions appointed by the President. It was possible to get the work done by these volunteer commissions only because of the enthusiasm for the public service which starting in the higher offices at Washington made itself felt throughout the government departments. As I have said I never knew harder and more disinterested work done by any people than was done by the men and women of all ranks in the government service. The contrast was really extraordinary between their live interest in their work and the traditional clerical apathy which has so often been the distinguishing note of governmental work in Washington. The public service performed by these volunteer commissions carried on without a sense of pay to the men themselves and wholly without cost to the government was done by men the great majority of whom were already in the government service and already charged with responsibilities amounting each to a full man's job. The first of these commissions was the commission on the organization of government scientific work whose chairman was Charles D. Walcott. Appointed March 13th 1903 its duty was to report directly to the President upon the organization present condition and needs of the executive work wholly or partially scientific in character and upon the steps which should be taken if any to prevent the duplication of such work to coordinate its various branches to increase its efficiency and economy and to promote its usefulness to the nation at large. This commission spent four months in an examination which covered the work of about 30 of the larger scientific and executive bureaus of the government and prepared a report which furnished the basis for numerous improvements in the government service. Another commission appointed June 2nd 1905 was that on department methods Charles H. Keep Chairman whose task was to find out what changes are needed to place the conduct of the executive business of the government in all its branches on the most economical and effective basis in the light of the best modern business practice. The letter appointing this commission laid down nine principles of effective governmental work. The most striking of which was the existence of any method, standard, custom, or practice is no reason for its continuance when a better is offered. This commission composed like that just described of men already charged with important work performed its functions wholly without cost to the government. It was assisted by a body of about 70 experts in the government departments chosen for their special qualifications to carry forward a study of the best methods in business and organized into assistant committees under the leadership of Overton W. Pry, secretary of the commission. These assistant committees, all of whose members were still carrying on their regular work made their reports during the last half of 1906. The committee informed itself fully regarding the business methods of practically every individual branch of the business of the government and affected a market improvement in general efficiency throughout the service. The conduct of the routine business of the government had never been thoroughly overhauled before and this examination of it resulted in the promulgation of a set of working principles for the transaction of public business which are as sound today as they were when the committee finished its work. The somewhat elaborate and costly investigations of government business methods since made have served merely to confirm the findings of the committee on departmental methods which were achieved without costing the government a dollar. The actual savings in the conduct of the business of the government through the better methods thus introduced amounted yearly to many hundreds of thousands of dollars but a far more important gain was due to the remarkable success of the commission in establishing a new point of view in public servants toward their work. The need for improvement in the governmental methods of transacting business may be illustrated by an actual case. An officer in charge of an Indian agency made a requisition in the autumn for a stove costing seven dollars certifying at the same time that it was needed to keep the infirmary warm during the winter because the old stove was worn out. Thereupon the customary papers went through the customary routine without unusual delay at any point. The transaction moved like a glacier with dignity to its appointed end and the stove reached the infirmary in good order in time for the Indian agent to acknowledge its arrival in these words. The stove is here so is spring. The civil service commission under men like John McIllney and Garfield rendered service without which the government could have been conducted with neither efficiency nor honesty. The politicians were not the only persons that fought. Almost as much improper pressure for appointments is due to mere misplaced sympathy and to the spiritless inefficiency which seeks a government office as a haven for the incompetent. An amusing feature of office seeking is that each man desiring an office is apt to look down on all others with the same object as forming an objectionable class with which he has nothing in common. At the time of the eruption of Mount Paylay when among others the American council was killed a man who had long been seeking an appointment promptly applied for the vacancy. He was a good man of persistent nature who felt I had been somewhat blind to his merits. The morning after the catastrophe he wrote saying that as the council was dead he would like his place and that I could surely give it to him because even the office seekers could not have yet applied for it. The method of public service involved in the appointment and the work of the two commissions just described was applied also in the establishment of four other commissions each of which performed its task without salary or expense for its members and wholly without cost to the government. The other four commissions were commission on public lands commission on inland waterways commission on country life and commission on national conservation. All of these commissions were suggested to me by Gifford Pinchot who served upon them all. The work of the last four will be touched upon in connection with the chapter on conservation. These commissions by their reports and findings directly interfered with many placeholders who were doing inefficient work and their reports and the action taken thereon by the administration strengthened the hands of those administrative officers who in the various departments and especially in the secret service were proceeding against land thieves and other corrupt wrongdoers. Moreover, the mere fact that they did efficient work for the public along lines new to veteran and cynical politicians of the old type created vehement hostility to them. Senators like Mr. Hale and congressmen like Mr. Taney were especially bitter against these commissions and towards the end of my term they were followed by the majority of their fellows in both houses who had gradually been sundered from me by the open or covert hostility of the financial or Wall Street leaders and of the newspaper editors and politicians who did their bidding in the interest of privilege. These senators and congressmen asserted that they had a right to forbid the president profiting by the unpaid advice of disinterested experts. Of course, I declined to admit the existence of any such right and continued the commissions. My successor acknowledged the right, upheld the view of the politicians in question and abandoned the commissions to the lasting detriment of the people as a whole. One thing is worth pointing out during the seven and a half years of my administration where greatly and usefully extended the sphere of governmental action and yet we reduced the burden of the taxpayers for we reduced the interest bearing debt by more than 90 million dollars. To achieve a market increase in efficiency and at the same time an increase in economy is not an easy feat but we performed it. End of chapter 10 part 2 Recording by Amanda Hindman Glenn