Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [39]
Coincidentally, he met Kitchener two days later at Chequers, Lee’s Elizabethan manor in Buckinghamshire. The hero of Omdurman repelled him as a large, squinting loudmouth, “everlastingly posing as a strong man.” Just back from seven years in command of the Indian Army, Kitchener was as overbearing as he was opinionated. He said that the United States had made “a great mistake” in not building a sea-level canal in Panama. Roosevelt cited the advice of engineers to the contrary.
“All I would do in such a case,” Kitchener declared, “would be to say, ‘I order that a sea-level canal be dug, and I wish to hear nothing more about it.’ ”
“If you say so. But I wonder if you remember the conversation between Glendower and Hotspur, when Glendower says, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and Hotspur answers, ‘So can I, and so can any man, but will they come?’ ”
Lee’s other guests that weekend were easier to take. The most distinguished of them was Arthur James Balfour, who had been prime minister during Roosevelt’s first term as president, and was now leader of the Opposition. Balfour, like Kitchener, was a bachelor, but in all other respects the viscount’s opposite: languid, cerebral, delicate as any aesthete drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. The delicacy was deceptive. For thirty-five years Balfour had trodden softly on the bodies of men who underestimated him.
He was now sixty-one, with a good chance of becoming prime minister again, if the Liberals failed in their assault on the House of Lords. At first, Roosevelt was not inclined to show him much respect. Balfour, he thought, was responsible for much of the war talk he had heard in Europe, having recently announced that there was an international consensus that Great Britain was “predestined to succumb in some great contest,” with a country that sounded very like Germany. Was the Tory leader just another doomsayer like Lord Londonderry, and had British Conservatism become a negative force, recoiling from the new dynamics of the twentieth century?
Arthur Lee wanted to counteract such doubts by getting them into a strategic conversation. The problem was, Balfour was shy and needed to be warmed, like a cold honeycomb, before any sweetness began to flow.
That happened sooner than Lee expected. Balfour, the author of several works of philosophy, had admired Roosevelt for years as a fellow scholar in politics. He had been overwhelmed in 1908 to receive a two-thousand-word letter from Roosevelt in praise of his book Decadence. In it, the President of the United States had swallowed whole his basic premise—that a civilization could not advance unless its elite was made to comprehend technological revolutions—but had extended it into the field of biology, comparing the disappearance of South America’s post-Tertiary fauna to just such a failure to adapt to what was new and strange.
“So it is, of course, with nations,” Roosevelt had written.
In view of his own party’s failure to adapt to the rise of the Liberal species, Balfour had begun to wonder if the torch of Western leadership should not pass out of British hands into those of this prodigal American. Who was better qualified to become the first truly global statesman of the twentieth century, pulling together North America, Britain, and the whiter parts of the British Empire into one giant power bloc?
He had gone so far as to draft a proposal, entitled “The Possibility of an Anglo-Saxon Federation,” for Roosevelt and Edward VII to consider before they met. Perhaps the former president could be put at the head of such a superpower, balancing the Occident against the Orient, the Northern Hemisphere against the Southern, and, by virtue of overwhelming naval superiority, dictating universal peace.
“It would be a fitting conclusion to Roosevelt’s career,” Balfour wrote in a covering note to the King, “that he should go down in history as the prime author of the greatest confederation the world has