trick, and accordingly we imagine a room furnished with a large writing-table, some leather armchairs, a globe, and an 'Art Nouveau' lamp. There is a photograph of a bear, and a framed autograph of a sonnet, by J. J. Ingalls, called 'Opportunity.' The impression which you are to take away from this glance is naturally that the President of the United States enjoys no greater luxury than the ordinary business man, that decrees which change the face of the world are written at a commonplace table, from a substantial armchair. You may moralise as you choose upon the contrast, and if you are happily inspired the figure of the President himself, which is flashed upon the plate directly afterwards, will crown your thoughts appropriately.

"You know his features-the close-clipped brachycephalous head, close-clipped moustache, pince-nez, square and terribly rigid jaw; hair and moustache indeterminate in colour, eyes a clear blue, cheeks and neck ruddy.'

He is, in short, for there must be an end of quotation, a burly man, who prefers comfort and solidity to the refinements of art, and connects the plainness of his furniture, perhaps, with the republican virtues. From ten till half-past one every morning a procession passes through this room, a panorama of the national life,' composed of men who come from all classes, and represent all professions. They ask questions, give information, lay their plaints, seek advice, receive instructions, discuss policies, or merely crack their jokes and tell their stories. The President receives each, says something, and the man goes away, content, convinced, or at the least, in a better humour because he has seen the President, and some of his illusions have been dispelled. These conversations last but a minute or two; nevertheless, the matter is discussed thoroughly, and in almost every case some phrase is added which enlivens the interview and gives the visitor something to talk about when he gets home. Surely the President was unusually pleased to see him, or delighted to greet a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. 'What was your mother's name? Then you must be descended from Jonathan Edwards. . . . He was a great man, but he had no sense of humour.'

Italics, capital letters, all the resources of the printer's art are used to give effect to the explosions of the President's speech. Dr. Hale, who cannot, of course, reproduce the entire conversation, prints a number of different openings, as Mr. Roosevelt sees his visitor, advances upon him, and wrings his hand.

'Senator, I-am GLAD to see you! Senator, this is a-VERY great pleasure! Your daughters? I am, indeed, pleased to have this visit from you! How DARE you introduce yourself to me? A great pleasure-a VERY-GREAT pleasure indeed!'

But the remarkable point about these greetings is, not only that they are discriminating, but that with all their emphasis they are sincere. Contact with another human being seems to ignite some spark in the President, and the shout of laughter, the mitrailleuse discharge,' the hand-clasp, and thump upon the back represent simply the roar of the necessary explosion. When his visitor is kindled into animation and is conscious of a desire to return the blow, the business of the interview is transacted at lightning speed. Deputations forget their addresses and speak good American; old grievances dissolve; pedants are ashamed; no one can be confused, or subtle, or malicious beneath such a torrent of good humour. Whatever the business may be, the President at once insists that he has personal knowledge of it, that he has driven a train, or run a fire-engine, or lived on a ranche, and is, therefore, fallible and human; moreover, such passions have a part in the sum of civic virtue. While he talks he stands or walks about the room, throws himself on a sofa, or perches on the corner of his table; but now and then you see him write a note, or sign his name, and at intervals a secretary slips in quietly, takes the paper, and disappears. It is tempting, but perhaps inaccurate, to imagine that the great man is thus silently manipulating a thousand strings as he talks, and that the process of government is going on beneath the surface all the time. However this may be, there is no doubt that the interminable conversation fulfils other purposes besides the obvious one of allowing people to state their case to the President in person, and to receive his answer. Every man has in him something that the President does not know, and would like to possess; his talk is often but a rapid search for a fact or a point of view. He takes up a new man with a new interest like a machine grabbing a new piece of metal to shape it to the requirement in precisely so many seconds.' One of the results of this habit is that the President has an amazing number of facts in his brain, which have come there with their own little circle of associations round them, such as you get from talking to the actor, rather than from reading his narrative. His talk, if you listen to it for half an hour, lights with astonishing precision upon a great number of topics, most of them as far apart from each other as sport and ethics, literature and politics, law and food. Each

subject,' writes Dr. Hale, 'gets full attention when it is up; there is never any hurrying away from it, but there is no loitering over it.' Such sentences, of course, are meant solely as a tribute to Mr. Roosevelt's excellent qualities, his power, vitality, and industry, but they come to produce an effect, upon the mind of a stranger, that is little less than distressing. The notion which this book conveys so vividly, of an alert machine, efficient in all its parts, from the simplest to the most private, is impressive, but it also strikes a foreigner with a sense of suffocation, with a feeling almost as of a gigantic hand laid upon the windpipe. Business of course must be conducted with the speed of a machine, but when the whole range of human speculation is made food for such mechanical measuresthere is never any hurrying away from it, but there is no loitering over it '-we ask ourselves what state of civilisation can make such lives desirable, or anything but depressing to the beholder. The answer, as Dr. Hale gives it, is that America is a democratic country, and that the President is worshipped by his compatriots as the type of their national virtues. It is, indeed, clear from many touches, from the symbolism of plain furniture and boisterous welcome, that we are to lay stress upon a particular side of the President's character, that we are to connect it with something of far greater importance than the temperament of a single man. The scene which takes place daily in the President's study when scores of unknown people shake him by the hand and are greeted as fellow men, makes an American' proud of his fellow countrymen,' impresses him with a sense of the essential worth of American civilisation,' and leads him to assert that no one has ever seen anywhere on earth a scene of such democratic setting, and manner of enactment, significant of such far-reaching results.' Few people perhaps will be inclined to deny the good sense of such simplicity in outward ornament and ceremony, but the peculiar distinction of President Roosevelt is that he has carried it into more serious matters than any of his predecessors. He asserts that he is President by virtue of his ability, but that the office, by itself, in no way separates him from other men; his claim, indeed, is that the greater your ability the more power you have to sympathise with your fellows, and it is the main advantage of a high position that it gives you an extraordinary opportunity for such intercourse. No one, judging from Dr. Hale's book, can doubt that the astonishing thing about this daily pilgrimage through Mr. Roosevelt's study lies not at all in any melodramatic contrast between government

and leather armchairs, Presidents and farmers, but in the immediate sympathy which at once, so to speak, melts the two men together. There is no need to recapitulate the different types who come to him and at once get into touch with him; it is more interesting to discover what quality this is which most people possess in some degree, and Mr. Roosevelt possesses in perfection. The broad explanation is perhaps that which Dr. Hale gives. Life and the world in every one of innumerable phases, the multitudinous deeds of men, their thoughts and ways, attract him with indescribable fascination.' It is his power of sympathy that distinguishes him from other remarkable men; it is this power, if we may judge from Dr. Hale, that stirs American hearts, and makes them recognise in their President the true flower of democracy. Not only does he sympathise perpetually and vigorously, but he sympathises with the common feelings of men, and is as indifferent to the shades of mind or spirit as he is indifferent to degrees of rank or wealth. His natural democracy carries him even further; there are some qualities which, because they can belong only to a few, have no attraction for him. The academic, he says, must give way to the wise and the practical; he does not care for the worlds of poetry or romance'; he 'respects sentiment,' but himself indulges only in the sentiments that are common to most men; niceties of speculation annoy him; ethical refinements make little appeal to him, ' dreams do not nest in his heart.' But it is unnecessary to point out that even in the most democratic of countries there must be some who dream, who meditate, who enjoy rare and lovely emotions, nor need we insist that to disregard such men is to admit the taint of aristocracy. We need but remark that even the President will not suffer everybody. But the true interest of these limitations is that they serve to define the nature of his sympathy, and show that it is for the simplest form of life, for experiences that are common to all, for humanity in general and not for individuals. He is intoxicated by a crowd; he might do homage to the glow in a dog's eye; the fact that in each of the people who come before him there burns something of the flame, that they are carrying forward the vast onset of life, that he can further it, increase its volume, excites him, and touches him to the quick. His sympathy is with the normal development of this spark; marriage, birth, the upbringing of children, the steady tramp of life through dusty paths to the grave. He is, therefore, understood and loved by the enormous numbers who are occupied with these matters, and they yield to

the temptation, to which Dr. Hale also falls a victim, of glorifying the man who is so like themselves, who, by his eminence, authorises their contentment.

After all,' breaks out Dr. Hale, in a rhapsody of paradox, common humanity is very wonderful and very noble. . . . To represent absolutely the average man . . . would be to be great beyond all other greatness. . . to be the possessor of the greatest thoughts that live in the world' to surpass any isolated seer or poet whatsoever.'

6

That is the theme of the book, and it is a familiar doctrine, for it is not only convenient, but it makes a curious appeal to the emotions, so that one who denies it is judged to be both mistaken and morally corrupt-a cynic, and a person of cold imagination.

But however harshly you may judge the embodiment of such a theory-and, to speak honestly, there is nothing lovable in Dr. Hale's presentment of him-you cannot deny him the tribute which a moth perhaps pays to a lighted lamp. It is a coarse flame, fed on the unstrained oil, but at the same time there is a certain rude joy in creeping close to the fire, and in feeling your limbs grow warm and your brain become passive. The American people, however, find a peculiar and a different comfort in such a sensation, if we are to continue the metaphor, or, to change it, in such a reconciliation. People, forced as they are to do without the luxuries of tradition, must find in themselves a raw material and exalt it above the finished form. People, again, set in the midst of vast lands beneath the shadow of forests and seas have need to worship their own force and resent any belittlement of it. In President Roosevelt, who governs and is the peer of kings, they feel at once a muscular strength which is infinitely reassuring to them, and a huge indiscriminate power, equally distributed over the whole of him, which makes him the reconciliation of innumerable qualities, the starting-point of all their energies. Every virtue is possible, no other way of life surpasses theirs, when there is one who recognises in his own person and in the persons of others the sufficiency of their native gifts for all aims that a human being need pursue. They welcome him as the accurate type of their soul, flung off by nature in an impetuous mood, and claim for it that it is made after the original pattern, and fashioned out of pure clay.

the

VIRGINIA STEPHEN.