THE words of lamentation from the old Moorish ballad, which in boyhood we used to recite, must, I think, have risen to many lips when the world was told that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. But whatever the phrase the thought was instant and everywhere. Variously expressed, you heard it in the crowds about the bulletin boards, from the man in the street and the man on the railroads, from the farmer in the fields, the women in the shops, in the factories, and in the homes. The pulpit found in his life a text for sermons. The judge on the bench, the child at school, alike paused for a moment, conscious of a loss. The cry of sorrow came from men and women of all conditions, high and low, rich and poor, from the learned and the ignorant, from the multitude who had loved and followed him, and from those who had opposed and resisted him. The newspapers pushed aside the absorbing reports of the events of these fateful days and gave pages to the man who had died. Flashed beneath the ocean and through the air went the announcement of his death, and back came a world-wide response from courts and cabinets, from press and people, in other and far-distant lands. Through it all ran a golden thread of personal feeling which gleams so rarely in the somber formalism of public grief. Everywhere the people felt in their hearts that:
It would seem that here was a man, a private citizen, conspicuous by no office, with no glitter of power about him, no ability to reward or punish, gone from the earthly life, who must have been unusual even among the leaders of men, and who thus demands our serious consideration.
This is a thought to be borne in mind to-day. We meet to render honor to the dead, to the great American whom we mourn. But there is something more to be done. We must remember that when History, with steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of the past, comes to make up the final account, she will call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of the man or the event awaiting her verdict. Here and elsewhere the men and women who knew Theodore Roosevelt or who belong to his period will give public utterance to their emotions and to their judgments in regard to him. This will be part of the record to which the historian will turn when our living present has become the past, of which it is his duty to write. Thus is there a responsibility placed upon each one of us who will clearly realize that here, too, is a duty to posterity, whom we would fain guide to the truth as we see it, and to whose hands we commit our share in the history of our beloved country—that history so much of which was made under his leadership.
We can not approach Theodore Roosevelt along the beaten paths of eulogy or satisfy ourselves with the empty civilities of commonplace funereal tributes, for he did not make his life journey over main-traveled roads, nor was he ever commonplace. Cold and pompous formalities would be unsuited to him who was devoid of affectation, who was never self-conscious, and to whom posturing to draw the public gaze seemed not only repellent but vulgar. He had that entire simplicity of manners and modes of life which is the crowning result of the highest culture and the finest nature. Like Cromwell, he would always have said: “Paint me as I am.” In that spirit, in his spirit of devotion to truth’s simplicity, I shall try to speak of him to-day in the presence of the representatives of the great Government of which he was for seven years the head.
The rise of any man from humble or still more from sordid beginnings to the heights of success always and naturally appeals strongly to the imagination. It furnishes a vivid contrast which is as much admired as it is readily understood. It still retains the wonder which such success awakened in the days of hereditary lawgivers and high privileges of birth. Birth and fortune, however, mean much less now than two centuries ago. To climb from the place of a printer’s boy to the highest rank in science, politics, and diplomacy would be far easier to-day than in the eighteenth century, given a genius like Franklin to do it. Moreover the real marvel is in the soaring achievement itself, no matter what the origin of the man who comes by “the people’s unbought grace to rule his native land” and who on descending from the official pinnacle still leads and influences thousands upon thousands of his fellow men.
Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be born of a well-known, long-established family, with every facility for education and with an atmosphere of patriotism and disinterested service both to country and humanity all about him. In his father he had before him an example of lofty public spirit, from which it would have been difficult to depart. But if the work of his ancestors relieved him from the hard struggle which meets an unaided man at the outset, he also lacked the spur of necessity to prick the sides of his intent, in itself no small loss. As a balance to the opportunity which was his without labor, he had not only the later difficulties which come to him to whom fate has been kind at the start; he had also spread before him the temptations inseparable from such inherited advantages as fell to his lot—temptations to a life of sports and pleasure, to lettered ease, to an amateur’s career in one of the fine arts, perhaps to a money-making business, likewise an inheritance, none of them easily to be set aside in obedience to the stern rule that the larger and more facile the opportunity the greater and more insistent the responsibility. How he refused to tread the pleasant paths that opened to him on all sides and took the instant way which led over the rough road of toil and action his life discloses.
Dipsychus