Theodore Roosevelt [107]
I should like to be that?" It may be necessary to inform the later generation that Mr. Ward McAllister was by profession a decayed gentleman in New York City who achieved fame by compiling a list of the Four Hundred persons whom he condescended to regard as belonging to New York Society. Vice-President Fairbanks was an Indiana politician, tall and thin and oppressively taciturn, who seemed to be stricken dumb by the weight of an immemorial ancestry or by the sense of his own importance; and who was not less cold than dumb, so that irreverent jokers reported that persons might freeze to death in his presence if they came too near or stayed too long.
All this was only the froth on the stream of Roosevelt's experience in England. He took deep enjoyment in meeting the statesmen and the authors and the learned men there. The City of London bestowed the freedom of the city upon him. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford gave him their highest honorary degrees. At the London Guildhall he made a memorable address, in which he warned the British nation to see to it that the grievances of the Egyptian people were not allowed to fester. Critics at the moment chided this advice as an exhibition of bad taste; an intrusion, if not an impertinence, on the part of a foreigner. They did not know, however, that before speaking, Roosevelt submitted his remarks to high officers in the Government and had their approval; for apparently they were well pleased that this burning topic should be brought under discussion by means of Roosevelt's warning.
At Cambridge University he exhorted the students not to be satisfied with a life of sterile athleticism. "I never was an athlete," said he, "although I have always led an outdoor life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses . . . . The average man who is successful--the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success--is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
The culmination of his addresses abroad was his Romanes Lecture, delivered at the Convocation at Oxford University on June 7, 1910. Lord Curzon, the Chancellor, presided. Roosevelt took for his theme, "Biological Analogies in History," a subject which his lifelong interest in natural history and his considerable reading in scientific theory made appropriate. He afterwards said that in order not to commit shocking blunders he consulted freely his old friend Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the Museum of Natural History in New York City, but the substance and ideas were unquestionably his own.
Dr. Henry Goudy, "the public orator" at Cambridge, in a Presentation Speech, eulogized Roosevelt's manifold activities and achievements, declaring, among other things, that he had "acquired a title to be ranked with his great predecessor Abraham Lincoln--'of whom one conquered slavery, and the other corruption.'" Lord Curzon addressed him as, "peer of the most august kings, queller of wars, destroyer of monsters wherever found, yet the most human of mankind, deeming nothing indifferent to you, not even the blackest of the black."
This cluster of foreign addresses is not the least remarkable of Roosevelt's intellectual feats. No doubt among those who listened to him in each place there were carping critics, scholars who did not find his words scholarly enough, dilettanti made tepid by over-culture, intellectual cormorants made heavy by too much information, who found no novelty in what he said, and were insensible to the rush and freshness of his style. But in spite of these he did plant in each audience thoughts which they remembered, and he touched upon a range of interests which no other man then alive could have made to seem equally vital.
On June 18th Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt
All this was only the froth on the stream of Roosevelt's experience in England. He took deep enjoyment in meeting the statesmen and the authors and the learned men there. The City of London bestowed the freedom of the city upon him. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford gave him their highest honorary degrees. At the London Guildhall he made a memorable address, in which he warned the British nation to see to it that the grievances of the Egyptian people were not allowed to fester. Critics at the moment chided this advice as an exhibition of bad taste; an intrusion, if not an impertinence, on the part of a foreigner. They did not know, however, that before speaking, Roosevelt submitted his remarks to high officers in the Government and had their approval; for apparently they were well pleased that this burning topic should be brought under discussion by means of Roosevelt's warning.
At Cambridge University he exhorted the students not to be satisfied with a life of sterile athleticism. "I never was an athlete," said he, "although I have always led an outdoor life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses . . . . The average man who is successful--the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success--is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
The culmination of his addresses abroad was his Romanes Lecture, delivered at the Convocation at Oxford University on June 7, 1910. Lord Curzon, the Chancellor, presided. Roosevelt took for his theme, "Biological Analogies in History," a subject which his lifelong interest in natural history and his considerable reading in scientific theory made appropriate. He afterwards said that in order not to commit shocking blunders he consulted freely his old friend Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the Museum of Natural History in New York City, but the substance and ideas were unquestionably his own.
Dr. Henry Goudy, "the public orator" at Cambridge, in a Presentation Speech, eulogized Roosevelt's manifold activities and achievements, declaring, among other things, that he had "acquired a title to be ranked with his great predecessor Abraham Lincoln--'of whom one conquered slavery, and the other corruption.'" Lord Curzon addressed him as, "peer of the most august kings, queller of wars, destroyer of monsters wherever found, yet the most human of mankind, deeming nothing indifferent to you, not even the blackest of the black."
This cluster of foreign addresses is not the least remarkable of Roosevelt's intellectual feats. No doubt among those who listened to him in each place there were carping critics, scholars who did not find his words scholarly enough, dilettanti made tepid by over-culture, intellectual cormorants made heavy by too much information, who found no novelty in what he said, and were insensible to the rush and freshness of his style. But in spite of these he did plant in each audience thoughts which they remembered, and he touched upon a range of interests which no other man then alive could have made to seem equally vital.
On June 18th Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt