Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1909-03-12
gerous, because the association was 30
near to its close.

The polite or unconditional support
of a few Senators and Representatives
has been more to Mr.. Roosevelt's en-
barrassment than ease. The support of
a slightly smaller number of radicals,
whom each house has sent to Coventry,
has not enhanced Mr.. Roosevelt's pop
ularity with the general membership
of the National Legislature. His fame,
however, will rest upon things said to
Congress and to the people and on
things done for the people, without the
initiative of Congress, yet without
straining the Constitution, as he has
made 1t alive.
The high water mark of Mr.. Roose-
velt's executive success was reached In
the Peace of Portsmouth. His success
there was absolutely personal. He Sc
cured the conference and then secured
its agreement, after the delegates of
both empires were at their wits end.
His intervention between quarrelers.
which ended the coal strike, was an
extraordinary interference of doubt
fully wise strength, but it for a while
postponed still unsettled question
which, curiously enough, recur this very
day. Through Mr.. Hay, the President
re-established, as 1t were, The Hague
Tribunal, and, through Mr.. Root, he
made the Monroe Doctrine the interna-
tional common law Of this hemisphere.
His prosecution of great organizations,
Northern securities, Tobacco Trust,
Standard Oil, Beef Trust and the like,
abounds with instances, unequally sue
cessful, but unmistakably ~precedents.
His very recent composition of action.
outside of treaties, with China and ia
pan, and his more recent personal re-
straint of Hooligan legislatures, In Cal
ifornia, Oregon, Montana and Nevada,
stand out, as personal acts, along with
the prosecution of timber thieves, land
thieves and traffic plunderers on pages
that will not soon fade. The sending
around the earth of the greatest fleet
that ever circumnavigated the globe
magniies the mans genius for the
preservation of peace by the demon
stration of our ~capability for war.
None of these achievements depended
on Congress. All of them tend to the
lessening of the prestige of Congress
and every one of them will write the
name of Roosevelt high, probably for
centuries, in letters of light throughout
the world.
Mistakes? Many and often, but al
ways honestly characteristic and al
ways reparable. Temper? Yes, hot
and grim, but short lived and never
malevolent. Combative? Yes, but as
ready to take as to give blows, with
naught struck out in malice. Undig-
niied? Among friends, now and then,
but never in official moments or re-
been progressive, not of the sort which
Emerson said was the hobgoblin of
little minds. Decidedly. the most vivid
and vital, and virile and versatile genius
among the heads of states is this man.
The verdict of our posterity on him,
when attritions and aorimony and sore
ness shall have worn away, is already
forecast by the judgment of the other
nations. The universities, courts and
ehancellelies of the world await his
coming, aud are impatient with the
delay on them which his hunting trip
will impose.
The new Administration will main
tain with address what his achieved
with a club. 1t will conserve with a
smile what he accomplished with a
rush. 1t will encyst within sugar the
prescriptions which he did nothing to
sweeten in a mortar. 1t will preserve
what he precipitated. A change Of
man, without a change of measures,
and a change of methods without a
change of principles, will convince
many that old things have passed away
and that all things have become new.
That will not he so. The best of Roose-
veltism capsuled within Taftism will
endure. Pervasion and not perversion,
more of patience and less of punch,
will, we predict, be the rule; and, we
think, Mr.. Roosevelt was prophetically
aware of that and sure of that, when
he reasoned that a sedative, not too
soothing, would be better, in the years
to come, than an excitant in keeping
with his nature.
From tomorrow, as he gets out of
the way of schemers and of schemes,
his fame will mellow and increase. His
wholesome help to great causes will be
remembered, to displace his equally