The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-11-12
IS PRES. ROOSEVELT
 TRULY GREAT? The Verdict of the Plain People on That
 Question. APPROVE HIS POLICIES The Preservation of Our National Resources
 Desired.
HIS POLICIES

For the last year or two a great many people have been finding intel lectual interest and spiritual profit in discussing the question whether Presi- dent Roosevelt is a great man or not. Some rank him with Washington and Lincoln. Some find it difficult to think of anybody quite 80 insignificant as he is One writer discovers convincing proof of his supreme greatness in the fact that the common people have all ready begun to exercise their mythop- oele faculty upon him. He has become in his lifetime what only few men, and those the very topniost of all the race, become as rule in the course of few centuries Of a few thousand years after they are dead. He is a legendary hero while he still walks among the pitfalls and quagmires of this vale of tears. And because he is invested with the legendary merits of the heroic dead he Is invulnerable to the assaults of living enemies In the heat and fury of llfes ftful fever he sleeps we'll Neither foreign levies nor domestic treason can do him harm. What is the secret of his greatness, as- suming for the sake of the argument that he is really great?
 We rather fancy for one thing that the brow-heaten, harried and plunder- ed "plain people, whom Lincoln had 50 much to say about and whom the | New York Sun So despises, look upon him as a champion. They feel in their l hearts that he is man sent from Goo to right their wrongs. But they have also instinctlvely and only half-con- sciously q deeper and more unself1sf feeling about him. They appreherid somewhat vaguely perhaps, that hi! thoughts and purpose partake of the leternities, that he has hold on the ever. lasting righteousness of the Almighty and speaks with prophetic insight o the secrets of the future. His policie: are vast, comprehensive. They are con servative in that high sense which per. ltains to the interests of inillenniums in. stead of decades. What Ameriear statesman before Roosevelt ever grasp ed the truth, and taught 1t, about the basic material conditions of enduring l national life2 Others prattle. about tn, rights of property the interests o capital, and so on, questions which il their way are, of course, important but Roosevelt talks about the rights o the endless future and the interests 0 generations which shall succeed eacl other on this continent until the arch angel sounds the trump of uhiversa doom.
 The present greatness of America i based upon our natural resources. Ev
 erybody admits it. Everybody glories i lit. No fourth of July orator never fat
 ed to flap his wings, or tongue, in jubi lant assertion of the fact. Roosevel
 alone has ever though to ask wha
 our greatness will be based upon whe
 our natural resources are gone.
 what bright realm of departed sou will our lumber industry continue
 disembodied existence when we hay
 no more trees? Mir. Clifford Pincho
 who knows more about such matter
 than everybody else, computes in u
 outlook that in some thirty years mo-
 at the present rate of consumption a
 the merchantable timber in the count
 will have followed the forests of Wi
 consin and Michigan to the hapr
 hunting grounds What then of o'
 sawmills, our lumber shipments, ol
 wooden houses, our vast heaps of slal
 sent up in smoke because they are n