Theodore Roosevelt Part 16

The derision of the minority was countered by the majority with equal vigor, but the majority did not always feel, in spite of its truculent manner, confident of the outcome.

By what now seems shameless theft, the Credentials Committee approved the seating of two Taft delegates from California, in spite of the fact that the proper officials of that State had certified that its twenty-six delegates were all for Roosevelt, and had been elected by a majority of 76,000 votes. Chairman Root put the question to the Convention, however, and those two discredited delegates were admitted for Taft by a vote of 542 to 529. This indicates how close the Convention then stood, when a change of seven votes would have given Roosevelt a majority of one and have added to his list the two California delegates who were counted out. Had such a change taken place, those who watched the Convention believed there would have been a "landslide" to Roosevelt. But the Republican Committee's sorely tested rules held. After that, the Rooseveltians saw no gleam of hope.

On Sat.u.r.day, June 22d, the list of delegates to the Convention having been drawn up as the Republican Machine intended, Mr. Taft was nominated by a vote of 561; Roosevelt received 107, La Follette 41, c.u.mmins 17, Hughes 2; 344 delegates did not vote.

The last were all Roosevelt men, but they had been requested by Roosevelt to refuse to vote. Through Mr. Henry J. Allen, of Kansas, he sent this message:

'The Convention has now declined to purge the roll of the fraudulent delegates placed thereon by the defunct National Committee, and the majority which thus endorsed fraud was made a majority only because it included the fraudulent delegates themselves, who all sat as judges on one another's cases. If these fraudulent votes had not thus been cast and counted the Convention would have been purged of their presence. This action makes the Convention in no proper sense any longer a Republican Convention representing the real Republican Party. Therefore, I hope the men elected as Roosevelt delegates will now decline to vote on any matter before the Convention. I do not release any delegate from his honorable obligation to vote for me if he votes at all, but under the actual conditions I hope that he will not vote at all. The Convention as now composed has no claim to represent the voters of the Republican Party. It represents nothing but successful fraud in overriding the will of the rank and file of the party. Any man nominated by the Convention as now const.i.tuted would be merely the beneficiary of this successful fraud; it would be deeply discreditable to any man to accept the Convention's nomination under these circ.u.mstances; and any man thus accepting it would have no claim to the support of any Republican on party grounds, and would have forfeited the right to ask the support of any honest man of any party on moral grounds.'

Mr. Allen concluded with these words of his own:

'We do not bolt. We merely insist that you, not we, are making the record. And we refuse to be bound by it. We have pleaded with you ten days. We have fought with you five days for a square deal. We fight no more, we plead no longer. We shall sit in protest and the people who sent us here shall judge us.

'Gentlemen, you accuse us of being radical. Let me tell you that no radical in the ranks of radicalism ever did so radical a thing as to come to a National Convention of the great Republican Party and secure through fraud the nomination of a man whom they knew could not be elected.'*

* Fifteenth Republican National Convention (New York, 1912), 333, 335.

Every night during that momentous week the Roosevelt delegates met in the Congress Hotel, talked over the day's proceedings, gave vent to their indignation, confirmed each other's resolution, and took a decision as to their future action. The powerful Hiram Johnson, Governor of California, led them, and through his eloquence he persuaded all but 107 of them to stand by Roosevelt whether he were nominated by the Convention or not.

And this they did. For when the vote for the nomination was taken at the Convention only 107 of the Roosevelt men cast their ballots. They favored Roosevelt, but they were not prepared to quit the Republican Party. During the roll-call the Roosevelt delegates from Ma.s.sachusetts refused to vote. Thereupon, Mr.

Root, the Chairman, ruled that they must vote, to which Frederick Fosd.i.c.k replied, when his name was read again, "Present, and not voting. I defy the Convention to make me vote for any man"; and seventeen other Roosevelt delegates refrained. Mr. Root then called up the alternates of these abstainers and three of them recorded their votes for Taft, but there was such a demonstration against this ruling that Mr. Root thought better of it and proceeded in it no farther. Many of his Republican a.s.sociates at the time thought this action high-handed and unjustified, and many more agree in this opinion today.

Except for this grave error, Mr. Root's rulings were strictly according to the precedents and directions of the Republican National Committee, and we may believe that even he saw the sardonic humor of his unvarying application of them at the expense of the Rooseveltians. Before the first day's session was over, the process was popularly called the "steam roller." Late in the week, a delegate rose to a point of order, and on being recognized by the Chairman, he shouted that he wished to call the attention of the Chairman to the fact that the steam roller was exceeding its speed limit, at which Mr. Root replied, "The Chairman rules that the gentleman's point of order is well taken." And everybody laughed. There was one dramatic moment which, as Dean Lewis remarks, has had no counterpart in a National Convention. When the Machine had succeeded, in spite of protests and evidence, in stealing the two delegates from California, the friends of Mr. Taft gave triumphant cheers. Then the Roosevelt men rose up as one man and sent forth a mighty cheer which astonished their opponents. It was a cheer in which were mingled indignation and scorn, and, above all, relief.

Strictly interpreted, it meant that those men who had sat for four days and seen their wishes thwarted, by what they regarded as fraud, and had held on in the belief that this fraud could not continue to the end, that a sense of fairness would return and rule the Regulars, now realized that Fraud would concede nothing and that their Cause was lost. And they felt a great load lifted.

No obligation bound them any longer to the Republican Party which had renounced honesty in its principles and fair play in its practice. Henceforth they could go out and take any step they chose to promote their Progressive doctrines. *

* Lewis, 363.

Shortly after the Convention adjourned, having, by these methods, nominated Mr. Taft and James S. Sherman for President and Vice-President, the Rooseveltians held a great meeting in Orchestra Hall. Governor Johnson presided and apparently a majority of the Rooseveltians wished, then and there, to organize a new party and to nominate Roosevelt as its candidate. Several men made brief but earnest addresses. Then Roosevelt himself spoke, and although he lacked nothing of his usual vehemence, he seemed to be controlled by a sense of the solemnity of their purpose. He told them that it was no more a question of Progressivism, which he ardently believed in, but a question of fundamental honesty and right, which everybody ought to believe in and uphold. He advised them to go to their homes, to discuss the crisis with their friends; to gain what adherence and support they could, and to return in two months and formally organize their party and nominate their candidate for President. And he added: "If you wish me to make the fight, I will make it, even if only one State should support me. The only condition I impose is that you shall feel entirely free, when you come together, to subst.i.tute any other man in my place, if you deem it better for the movement, and in such case, I will give him my heartiest support."

And so the defeated majority of the Republicans at Chicago, Republicans no longer, broke up. There were many earnest hand-shakings, many pledges to meet again in August, and to take up the great work. Those who intended to stay by the Republican Party, not less than those who cast their lot with the Progressives, bade farewell, with deep emotion, to the Leader whom they had wished to see at the head of the Republican Party.

Chief among these was Governor Hadley, of Missouri, who at one moment, during the Convention, seemed likely to be brought forward by the Regulars as a compromise candidate. Some of the Progressives resented his defection from them; not so Roosevelt, who said: "He will not be with us, but we must not blame him."

Six weeks later, the Progressives returned to Chicago. Again, Roosevelt had his headquarters at the Congress Hotel. Again, the delegates, among whom were several women, met at the Coliseum.

Crowds of enthusiastic supporters and larger crowds of curiosity- seekers swarmed into the vast building. On Monday, August 5, the first session of the Progressive Party's Convention was held.

Senator Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, made the opening address, in which he defined the principles of their party and the objects it hoped to obtain. Throughout the proceedings there was much enthusiasm, but no battle. It was rather the gathering of several thousand very earnest men and women bent on consecrating themselves to a new Cause, which they believed to be the paramount Cause for the political, economic, and social welfare of. their country. Nearly all of them were Idealists, eager to secure the victory of some special reform. And, no doubt, an impartial observer might have detected among them traces of that "lunatic fringe," which Roosevelt himself had long ago humorously remarked clung to the skirts of every reform. But the whole body, judged without prejudice, probably contained the largest number of disinterested, public-spirited, and devoted persons, who had ever met for a national and political object since the group which formed the Republican Party in 1854.

The professional politician who usually preponderates in such Conventions, and, in the last, had usurped control both of the proceedings and decisions, had little place here. The chief topic of discussion turned on the admission of negro delegates from the South. Roosevelt believed that an attempt to create a negro Progressive Party, as such, would alienate the Southern whites and would certainly sharpen their hostility towards the blacks.

Therefore, he advised that the negro delegates ought to be approved by the White Progressives in their several districts. In other words, the Progressive Party in the South should be a white party with such colored members as the whites found acceptable.

On Monday and Tuesday the work done in the Convention was much less important than that done by the Committee on Resolutions and by the Committee on Credentials. On Wednesday the Convention heard and adopted the Platform and then nominated Roosevelt by acclamation. Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, Chicago, seconded the nomination, praising Roosevelt as "one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to modern movement." "The program," she said, "will need a leader of invincible courage, of open mind, of democratic sympathies--one endowed with power to interpret the common man, and to identify himself with the common lot." Governor Hiram Johnson, from California, was nominated for Vice-President. Over the platform, to which the candidates were escorted, hung Kipling's stanza:

"For there is neither East nor West, Border nor breed nor birth, When two strong men stand face to face, Though they come from the ends of the earth."

Portraits of Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Lincoln, Jackson, and Hamilton, a sufficiently inclusive group of patriots, looked down upon them. After Roosevelt and Johnson addressed the audience, the trombones sounded "Old Hundred" and the great meeting closed to the words--

"Praise G.o.d from whom all blessings flow."

The Progressive Platform contained many planks which have since been made laws by the Democratic Party, which read the signs of the times more quickly than did the Republicans. Especially many of the suggestions relating to Labor, the improvement of the currency, the control of corporate wealth, and oversight over public hygiene, should be commended. In general, it promised to bring the Government nearer to the people by giving the people a more and more direct right over the Government. It declared for a rational tariff and the creation of a non-partisan Tariff Commission of experts, and it denounced alike the Republicans for the Payne-Aldrich Bill, which dishonestly revised upwards, and the Democrats, who wished to abolish protection altogether. It urged proper military and naval preparation and the building of two battles.h.i.+ps a year--a plank which we can imagine Roosevelt wrote in with peculiar satisfaction. It advocated direct primaries; the conservation of natural resources; woman suffrage.

So rapidly has the country progressed in seven years that most of the recommendations have already been adopted, and are among the common places which n.o.body disputes any longer. But the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall of Judicial Decisions were the points, as I remarked above, over which the country debated most hotly. The Recall, in particular, created a widespread alarm, and just as Roosevelt's demand for it in his Columbus speech prevented, as I believe, his nomination by the Republican Convention in June, so it deprived the Progressives at the election in November of scores of thousands of votes. The people of the United States--every person who owned a bit of property, a stock or a bond, or who had ten dollars or more in the savings bank--looked upon it almost with consternation. For they knew that they were living in a time of flux, when old standards were melting away like snow images in the sun, when new ideals, untried and based on the negation of some of the oldest principles in our civilization, were being pushed forward. They instinctively rallied to uphold Law, the slow product of centuries of growth, the sheet anchor of Society in a time of change. Where could we look for solidity, or permanence, if judicial decisions could be recalled at the caprice of the mob--the hysterical, the uninstructed, the fickle mob? The opinion of one trained and honest judge outweighs the whims of ten thousand of the social dregs.

The Recall of Judicial Decisions, therefore, caused many of Roosevelt's friends, and even Republicans who would otherwise have supported him, to balk. They not only rejected the proposal itself, but they feared that he, by making it, indicated that he had lost his judgment and was being swept into the vortex of revolution. Judges and courts and respect for law, like lighthouses on granite foundations, must be kept safe from the fluctuations of tides and the crash of tempests.

The campaign which followed is chiefly remarkable for Roosevelt's amazing activity. He felt that the success of the Progressive Party at the polls depended upon him as its Leader. The desire for personal success in any contest into which he plunged would have been a great incentive, but this was a cause which dwarfed any personal considerations of his. Senator Joseph M. Dixon, of Montana, managed the campaign; Roosevelt himself gave it a dynamic impulse which never flagged. He went to the Pacific Coast, speaking at every important centre on the way, and returning through the Southern States to New York City. In September he swept through New England, and he was making a final tour through the Middle West, when, on October 14th, just as he was leaving his hotel to make a speech in the Auditorium in Milwaukee, a lunatic named John Schranck shot him with a revolver. The bullet entered his body about an inch below the right nipple and would probably have been fatal but for an eye gla.s.s-case and a roll of ma.n.u.script he had in his pocket. Before the a.s.sa.s.sin could shoot again, his hand was caught and deflected by the Colonel's secretary. "Don't hurt the poor creature,"

Roosevelt said, when Schranck was overpowered and brought before him. Not knowing the extent of his wound, and waiting only long enough to return to his hotel room and change his white s.h.i.+rt, as the bosom of the one he had on was soaked with blood, and disregarding the entreaties of his companions to stay quiet, he went to the Auditorium and spoke for more than an hour. Only towards the end did the audience perceive that he showed signs of fatigue. This extraordinary performance was most foolhardy, and some of his carping critics said that, as usual, Roosevelt wanted to be theatrical. But there was no such purpose in him. He felt to the depths of his soul that neither his safety nor that of any other individual counted in comparison with the triumph of the Cause he was fighting for.

After a brief examination the surgeons stated that he had better be removed to the Mercy Hospital in Chicago. They put him on his special car and by an incredible negligence they sent him off to make the night journey without any surgical attendant. On reaching the Mercy Hospital, Dr. Ryan made a further examination and reported that there seemed to be no immediate danger, although he could not be sure whether the Colonel would live or not. Roosevelt, who was advertised to make a great speech in Louisville, Kentucky, that evening, summoned Senator Beveridge and sent him off with the ma.n.u.script of the address to take his place. Mrs. Roosevelt reached Chicago by the first train possible, and stayed with him while he underwent, impatiently, nearly a fortnight's convalescence. Then, much sooner than the surgeons thought wise, although his wound had healed with remarkable speed, he returned to Oyster Bay, and on October 30th he closed his campaign by addressing sixteen thousand persons in the Madison Square Garden. He spoke with unwonted calm and judicial poise; and so earnestly that the conviction which he felt carried conviction to many who heard him. "I am glad beyond measure," he said, "that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent, pledged to fight, while life lasts, the great fight for righteousness and for brotherhood and for the welfare of mankind."

President Taft and the members of his Cabinet took little or no active part in the campaign. Indeed, the Republicans seemed unable to arouse enthusiasm. They relied upon their past victories and the robust campaign fund, which the Interests gladly furnished. The Democratic candidate was Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, who had been professor at Princeton University, and then its president. As Governor, he had commended himself by fighting the Machine, and by advocating radical measures. As candidate, he a.s.serted his independence by declaring that "a party platform is not a program." He spoke effectively, and both he and his party had the self-complacency that comes to persons who believe that they are sure to win. And how could their victory be in doubt since the united Democrats had for opponents the divided Republicans? When Colonel Roosevelt was shot, Governor Wilson magnanimously announced that he would make no more speeches. Roosevelt objected to this, believing that a chance accident to him, personally, ought not to stop any one from criticising him politically. "What ever could with truth and propriety have been said against me and my cause before I was shot, can," he urged, "with equal truth and equal propriety, be said against me now, and it should so be said; and the things that cannot be said now are merely the things that ought not to have been said before. This is not a contest about any man; it is a contest concerning principles."

At the election on November 5th, Wilson was elected by 6,286,000 votes out of 15,310,000 votes, thus being a minority President by two million and a half votes. Roosevelt received 4,126,000 and Taft 3,483,000 votes. The combined vote of what had been the Republican Party amounted to 7,609,000 votes, or 1,323,000 more than those received by Mr. Wilson. When it came to the Electoral College, the result was even more significant. Wilson had 435, Roosevelt 88, and Taft, thanks to Vermont and Utah, secured 8 votes. Roosevelt carried Pennsylvania the rock-bound Republican State, Missouri which was usually Democratic, South Dakota, Was.h.i.+ngton, Michigan, and eleven out of the thirteen votes of California. These figures, a.n.a.lyzed calmly, after the issues and pa.s.sions have cooled into history, indicate two things. First, the amazing personal popularity of Roosevelt, who, against the opposition of the Republican Machine and all its ramifications, had so easily defeated President Taft, the candidate of that Machine. And secondly, it proved that Roosevelt, and not Taft, really represented a large majority of what had been the Republican Party. Therefore, it was the Taft faction which, in spite of the plain evidence given at the choice of the delegates, and at the Convention itself--evidence which the Machine tried to ignore and suppress--it was the Taft faction and not Roosevelt which split the Republican Party in 1912.

Had it allowed the preference of the majority to express itself by the nomination of Roosevelt, there is every reason to believe that he would have been elected. For we must remember that the Democratic Platform was hardly less progressive than that of the Progressives themselves. Counting the Wilson and the Roosevelt vote together, we find 10,412,000 votes were cast for Progressive principles against 3,483,000 votes for the reactionary Conservatives. And yet the gray wolves of the Republican Party, and its Old Guard, and its Machine, proclaimed to the country that its obsolescent doctrines represented the desires and the ideals of the United States in 1912!

Although the campaign, as conducted by the Republicans, seemed listless, it did not lack venom. Being a family fight between the Taft men and the Roosevelt men, it had the bitterness which family quarrels develop. Mr. Taft and most of his Secretaries had known the methods of Mr. Roosevelt and his Ministers. They could counter, therefore, charges of incompetence and indifference by recalling the inconsistencies, or worse, of Roosevelt's regime.

When the Progressives charged the Taft Administration with being easy on the Big Interests, Attorney-General Wickersham resorted to a simple sum in arithmetic in order to contradict them, showing that whereas Roosevelt began forty-four Anti-Trust suits, and concluded only four important cases during his seven and a half years in office, under Taft sixty-six new suits were begun and many of the old ones were successfully concluded. Some great cases, like that of the Standard Oil and of the Railroad Rates, had been settled, which equaled in importance any that Roosevelt had taken up. In the course of debate on the stump, each side made virulent accusations against the other, and things were said which were not true then and have long since been regretted by the sayers. That happens in all political contests.

Roosevelt himself, being the incarnation, if not indeed the cause, of the Progressive Party, had to endure an incessant volley of personal attack. They charged him with inordinate ambition. We heard how Mr. William Barnes, Jr., the would-be savior of the country, implied that Roosevelt must be defeated in order to prevent the establishment of monarchy in the United States. Probably Mr. Barnes, in his moments of reflection, admitted to himself that he did not really mean that, but many campaign orators and editors repeated the insinuation and besought free-born Americans not to elect a candidate who would a.s.sume the t.i.tle of King Theodore. Many of his critics could account for his leaving the Republican Party and heading another, only on the theory that he was moved by a desire for revenge. If he could not rule he would ruin. The old allegation that he must be crazy was of course revived.

After the election, the Republican Regulars, who had stubbornly refused, to read the handwriting on the wall during the previous four years, heaped new abuse upon him. They said that he had betrayed the Party. They said that he had shown himself an ingrate towards Taft, whose achievements in the Presidency awoke his envy. And more recently, many persons who have loathed the Administration of President Wilson, blame Roosevelt for having brought down this curse upon the country.

These various opinions and charges seem to me to be mistaken; and in the foregoing chapters, if I have truly divined Theodore Roosevelt's character, every reader should see that his action in entering the field for the Republican nomination in 1912, and then in founding the Progressive Party, was the perfectly natural culmination of his career. Some one said that he went off at a tangent in 1912. Some one else has said better that this tangent was a straight line leading back to 1882, when he sat in the New York a.s.sembly. Remember that the love of Justice was from boyhood his leading principle. Remember that, after he succeeded in having a law pa.s.sed relieving the miserably poor cigar-makers from the hideous conditions under which they had to work, a judge declared the law unconst.i.tutional, thereby proving to Roosevelt that the courts, which should be the citadels of justice, might and did, in this case, care more for the financial interests of landowners than for the health, life, and soul of human beings.

That example of injustice was branded on his heart, and he resolved to combat the judicial league with in humanity, wherever he met it. So Abraham Lincoln, when, at the age of twenty-two he first saw a slave auction in New Orleans, said, in indignant horror, to his companion, John Hanks: "If I ever get a chance to hit that thing [meaning slavery] I'll hit it hard." Exactly thirty years later, Abraham Lincoln, as President, was. .h.i.tting that thing--slavery--so hard that it perished. Roosevelt's experience as a.s.semblyman, as Civil Service Commissioner, as Police Commissioner, as Governor, and as President, had confirmed his belief that the decisions of the courts often stood between the People and Justice.

Especially in his war on the Interests was he angered at finding corporate abuses, and even criminal methods, comfortably protected by an upholstery of favoring laws. With that tact and willingness to compromise on non-essentials in order to gain his essential object, which mark him as a statesman, he used the Republican Party, naturally the party of the plutocrats who controlled the Interests, just as long as he could. Then, when the Republican Machine rose against him, he quitted it and founded the Progressive Party, to be the instrument for carrying on and completing the great reforms he had at heart. Here was no desertion, no betrayal; here was, first of all, common sense; if the road no longer leads towards your goal, you leave it and take an other. No one believed more sincerely than Roosevelt did, in fealty to party. In 1884 he would not bolt, because he hoped that the good which the Republican principles would accomplish would more than offset the harm which the nomination of Blaine would inflict. But in 1912, the Republicans cynically rejected his cause which he had tried to make the Republican cause, and then, as in 1884, he held that the cause was more important than the individual, and he followed this idea loyally, lead where it might.

In trying thus to state Roosevelt's position fairly, I do not mean to imply that I should agree with his conclusions in regard to the Recall of the Judicial Decisions; and the experiments which have already been made with the Referendum and Initiative and Direct Primaries are so unsatisfactory that Roosevelt himself would probably have recognized that the doubts, which many of us felt when he first proposed those measures, have been justified.

But I wish to emphasize my admiration for the large consistency of his career, and my conviction that, with out his crowning action in 1912, he would have failed to be the moral force which he was. If ambition, if envy, if a selfish desire to rule, had been the motives which guided him, he would have lain low in 1912; for all his friends and the managers of the Republican Party a.s.sured him that if he would stand aside then, he would be unanimously nominated by the Republicans in 1916. But he could not be tempted.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE BRAZILIAN ORDEAL

"They will be throwing rotten apples at me soon," Theodore had said to his sister, on the day when New York went frantic in placing him among the G.o.ds. His treatment, after he championed Progressivism, showed him to be clairvoyant. Not only did his political opponents belabor him--that was quite natural--but his friends, having failed to persuade him not to take the fatal leap, let him see plainly that, while he still had their affection, they had lost their respect for his judgment. He himself bore the defeat of 1912 with the same valiant cheerfulness with which he took every disappointment and thwarting. But he was not stolid, much less indifferent. " It is all very well to talk with the Crusading spirit," he said after the election, "and of the duty to spend and be spent; and I feel it absolutely as regards myself; but I hate to see my Crusading lieutenants suffer for the cause." He was thinking of the eager young men, including some of his kinsmen, who had gone into the campaign because they believed in him.

His close friends did not follow him, but they still loved him.

And it was a sign of his open-mindedness that he would listen to their opinions and even consult them, although he knew that they entirely rejected his Progressivism. General Luke E. Wright, who remained a devoted friend but did not become a Progressive, used to explain what the others called the Colonel's aberration, as being really a very subtle piece of wisdom. Experienced ranchmen, he would say, when their herds stampede in a sudden alarm, spur their horses through the rus.h.i.+ng cattle, fire their revolvers into the air, and gradually, by making the herds suppose that men and beasts are all together in their wild dash, work their way to the front. Then they cleverly make the leaders swing round, and after a long stampede the herd comes panting back to the place it started from. This, General Wright said, is what Roosevelt was doing with the mult.i.tudes of Radicals who seemed to be headed for perdition.

Just as he had absented himself in Africa for a year, after retiring from the Presidency, so Roosevelt decided to make one more trip for hunting and exploration. As he could not go to the North Pole, he said, because that would be poaching on Peary's field, he selected South America. He had long wished to visit the Southern Continent, and invitations to speak at Rio Janeiro and at Buenos Aires gave him an excuse for setting out. As before, he started with the distinct purpose of collecting animal and botanical specimens; this time for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which provided two trained naturalists to accompany him. His son Kermit, toughened by the previous adventure, went also.

Having paid his visits and seen the civilized parts of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, he ascended the Paraguay River and then struck across the plateau which divides its watershed from that of the tributaries of the Amazon; for he proposed to make his way through an unexplored region in Central Brazil and reach the outposts of civilization on the Great River. Dr. Osborn had dissuaded him from going through a tract where the climate was known to be most pernicious. The Brazilian Government had informed him that, by the route he had chosen, he would meet a large river--the Rio da Duvido, the River of Doubt--by which he could descend to the Amazon. Roosevelt's account of this exploration, given in his "The Brazilian Wilderness," belongs among the masterpieces of explorers' records.

There were some twenty persons, including a dozen or fifteen native rowers and pack-bearers, in his party. They had canoes and dugouts, supplies of food for about forty days, and a carefully chosen outfit. With high hopes they put their craft into the water and moved downstream. But on the fourth day they found rapids ahead, and from that time on they were constantly obliged to land and carry their dugouts and stores round a cataract. The peril of being swept over the falls was always imminent, and as the trail which const.i.tuted their portages had to be cut through the matted forest, their labors were increased. In the first eleven days, they progressed only sixty miles. No one knew the distance they would have to traverse nor how long the river would be broken by falls and cataracts before it came down into the plain of the Amazon. Some of their canoes were smashed on the rocks; two of the natives were drowned. They watched their provisions shrink. Contrary to their expectations, the forest had almost no animals. If they could shoot a monkey or a monster lizard, they rejoiced at having a little fresh meat. Tropical insects--of which the pium seems to have been the worst--bit them day and night and caused inflammation and even infection.

Man-eating fish lived in the river, making it dangerous for the men when they tried to cool their inflamed bodies by a swim. Most of the party had malaria, and could be kept going only by large doses of quinine. Roosevelt, while in the water, wounded his leg on a rock, inflammation set in, and prevented him from walking, so that he had to be carried across the portages. The physical strength of the party, sapped by sickness and fatigue, was visibly waning. Still the cataracts continued to impede their progress and to add terribly to their toil. The supply of food had shrunk so much that the rations were restricted and amounted to little more than enough to keep the men able to go forward slowly. Then fever attacked Roosevelt, and they had to wait for a few days because he was too weak to be moved. He besought them to leave him and hurry along to safety, because every day they delayed consumed their diminis.h.i.+ng store of food, and they might all die of starvation. They refused to leave him, however, and he secretly determined to shoot himself unless a change for the better in his condition came soon. It came; they moved forward.

At last, they left the rapids behind them and could drift and paddle on the un.o.bstructed river. Roosevelt lay in the bottom of a dugout, shaded by a bit of canvas put up over his head, and too weak from sickness, he told me, even to splash water on his face, for he was almost fainting from the muggy heat and the tropical suns.h.i.+ne.