The Birmingham age-herald., 1902-10-03
rom the st. Louis Globe-Democrat.


 E.X ING EDWARD has never drearnt M for one moment of eonferrine Y A any honorary coloneley of a British regiment upon President Roose- welt, and if he were to do so the Presi- dent would be the very last person in the world to accept the proffered distinction. Indeed, there is only one thing more amusing than the announcement made by the London Chronicle of this English honor in store for the chief magistrate of the United States. namely, the asser- ton that "precedents" were being sought"
 It is hardly necessary to point out that there is no precedent in Europe for the conferring of any honorary colonelcy in a foreign army upon the president of a republic. No country is more lavish in the distribution of honorary colonelcies than Russia. Not only foreign rulers and princes of the blood, but also queens and princesses, and even royal babies in the cradle, boys as well as girls, in long clothes, are gazetted as titular com manders of this or that Muscovite regi- ment.
 But in spite of this neither the late nor the present Czar has ever dreamt for one moment of offering colonelcy to any of the presidents of the French re- public, although the latter Is so closely bound to Russia by an offensive and de- fensive alliance For presidents of the republic, who owe their position as chief magistrate of their respective nations to the votes of their fellow citizens. hold their office for a more or less brief term, at the close of which they retire into private lffe and sometimes into obscuri- ty. It would be obviously inconvenient to saddle a distinguished regiment with an honorary commander who would hold his colonelcy for life, but who might possibly. on retiring from the presidency of the republic, adopt a profession and a mode of life which would impair the prestige of the corps with which his name was connected, and possibly even end by furnishing the regimental escutch- con through financial disaster or scan dal in which he might become involved In one word, the president of a republic, on the completion of his term of office. becomes a private citizen, and the latter are not, according to old world ethics, qualified to hold positions as honorary colonels of foreign regiments.
 Moreover, If there is one European power more than any other that has been particularly chary about the grant of colonelcies to foreign rulers it has been England. It is only within the last decade that a compliment of this kind has ever haata fa rttlar Victoria inaugurating the practice, as far as England was concerned, by appoint ing her grandson, the Kaiser, to the hon. orary colonelcy of the First Royal Dra- goons. Shortly afterward she appointed the Czar, who had become her grandson by his marriage, to the honorary com mand of the Second Dragons, better known as the Royal Scots Grays Elm peror Francis Joseph is the honorary colonel of the First Dragoon guards, while the King of Portugal is the titular colonel of the oxfordshire Light Infantry regiment, a corps which greatly distin- guished itself in the defense of Portugal against the first Napoleon at the begin ming of the last century.
 This completes the list of foreign poten- tates holding oolonelcies of English regl- ments, and there is not the slightest pros pect of it's being increased by the addi- ton of the name of President Roosevelt, since he himself would be the very first to decline such a tactless compliment, even If it were paid by King Edward. The latter has many more convenient ways and more appropriate ones as well, of showing the very high regard which he