part of the world! Modern inventions have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and made them better acquainted. Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced. Swift ships and fast trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before, and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by market and crop reports. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the fathers. Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day in all Christendom. The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations. Market prices of products and of securities are hourly known in every commercial mart, and the investments of the people extend beyond their own national boundaries into the remot est parts of the earth. Vast transactions are conducted, and international exchanges are made, by the tick of the cable. Every event of interest is immediately bulletined. The quick gathering and transmission of news, like rapid transit, are of recent origin, and are only made possible by the genius of the inventor and the courage of the investor. It took a special messenger of the Government, with every facility known at the time for rapid travel, nineteen days to go from the city of Washington to New Orleans with a message to General Jackson that the war with England had ceased and a treaty of peace had been signed. How different now!

We reached General Miles in Porto Rico by cable, and he was able, through the military telegraph, to stop his army on the firing line with the message that the United States and Spain had signed a protocol suspending hostilities. We knew almost instantly of the first shots fired at Santiago, and the subsequent surrender of the Spanish forces was known at Washington within less than an hour of its consummation. The first ship of Cervera's fleet had hardly emerged from that historic harbor when the fact was flashed to our capital, and the swift destruction that followed was announced immediately through the wonderful medium of telegraphy. So accustomed are we to safe and easy communication with distant lands that its temporary interruption, even in ordinary times, results in loss and inconvenience. We shall never forget the days of

anxious waiting and awful suspense when no information was permitted to be sent from Peking, and the diplomatic representatives of the nations in China, cut off from all communication, inside and outside of the walled capital, were surrounded by an angry and misguided mob that threatened their lives; nor the joy that thrilled the world when a single message from the Government of the United States brought, through our minister, the first news of the safety of the besieged diplomats.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe; now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and all seas. God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion is there for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for the settlement of international disputes.

My fellow-citizens: Trade statistics indicate that this country is in a state of unexampled prosperity. The figures are almost appalling. They show that we are utilizing our fields and forests and mines, and that we are furnishing profitable employment to the millions of workingmen throughout the United States, bringing comfort and happiness to their homes, and making it possible to lay by savings for old age and disability. That all the people are participating in this great prosperity is seen in every American community, and shown by the enormous and unprecedented deposits in our savings-banks. Our duty is the care and security of these deposits, and their safe investment demands the highest integrity and the best business capacity of those in charge of these depositories of the people's earnings.

We have a vast and intricate business, built up through years of toil and struggle, in which every part of the country has its stake, which will not permit of either neglect or of undue selfishness. No narrow, sordid policy will subserve it. The greatest skill and wisdom on the part of manufacturers and producers will be required to hold and increase it. Our industrial enterprises, which have grown to such great proportions, affect the homes and occupations of the people and the welfare of the country. Our capacity to produce has developed so enormously, and our products have so multiplied, that the problem of more markets requires our urgent and immediate attention. Only a broad and enlightened policy

will keep what we have. No other policy will get more. In these times of marvelous business energy and gain we ought to be looking to the future, strengthening the weak places in our industrial and commercial systems, that we may be ready for any storm or strain.

By sensible trade arrangements which will not interrupt our home production, we shall extend the outlets for our increasing surplus. A system which provides a mutual exchange of commodi. ties is manifestly essential to the continued and healthful growth of our export trade. We must not repose in fancied security that we can forever sell everything and buy little or nothing. If such a thing were possible, it would not be best for us or for those with whom we deal. We should take from our customers such of their products as we can use without harm to our industries and labor. Reciprocity is the natural outgrowth of our wonderful industrial development under the domestic policy now firmly estab lished. What we produce beyond our domestic consumption must have a vent abroad. cess must be relieved through a foreign outlet, and we should sell everywhere we can and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions, and thereby make a greater demand for home labor.

The ex

The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good-will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.

If perchance some of our tariffs are no longer needed for revenue or to encourage and protect our industries at home, why should they not be employed to extend and promote our markets abroad? Then, too, we have inadequate steamship service. New lines of steamers have already been put in commission between the Pacific coast ports of the United States and those on the western coasts of Mexico and Central and South America. These should be followed up with direct steamship lines between the eastern coast of the United States and South American ports. One of the needs of the times is direct commercial lines from our vast fields of production to the fields of consumption that we have but barely touched.

Next in advantage to having the thing to sell

is to have the convenience to carry it to the buyer. We must encourage our merchant marine. We must have more ships. They must be under the American flag, built and manned and owned by Americans. These will not only be profitable in a commercial sense,-they will be messengers of peace and amity wherever they go. We must build the isthmian canal, which will unite the two oceans and give a straight line of water communication with the western coasts of Central and South America and Mexico. The construction of a Pacific cable cannot be longer postponed.

In the furtherance of these objects of national interest and concern you are performing an important part. This exposition would have touched the heart of that American statesman whose mind was ever alert and thought ever constant for a larger commerce and a truer fraternity of the republics of the New World. His broad American spirit is felt and manifested here. He needs no identification to an assemblage of Americans anywhere, for the name of Blaine is inseparably associated with the Pan-American movement which finds its practical and substantial expression, and which we all hope will be firmly ad vanced, by the Pan-American Congress that assembles this autumn in the capital of Mexico. The good work will go on. It cannot be stopped. These buildings will disappear, this creation of art and beauty and industry will perish from sight, but their influence will remain to

"Make it live beyond its too short living,
With praises and thanksgiving."

Who can tell the new thoughts that have been awakened, the ambitions fired, and the high achievements that will be wrought through this exposition? Gentlemen, let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war. We hope that all who are represented here may be moved to higher and nobler effort for their own and the world's good, and that out of this city may come, not only greater commerce and trade for us all, but, more essential than these, relations of mutual respect, confidence, and friendship which will deepen and endure.

Our earnest prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness, and peace to all our neighbors, and like blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth.

"THEODORE ROOSEVELT has only one

fault," said a well-known New York politician less than two years ago,-"he does not know how to tell a lie." This was an expert's judgment, uttered with every assurance of settled conviction. It was as true as it was naïve. Theodore Roosevelt has never learned to tell or act a lie.

The character of the twenty-sixth President of the United States, of him who enters upon his great office, not amid pæans of victory and with the joyful acclaim of happy partisans, but bowed. with the nation's woe and stricken with its grief,

is not complex; it is extremely simple. It may be summed up in a word: Theodore Roosevelt is genuine. That means that he is natural, not affected; frank, not deceptive; true, not false. All his other traits and characteristics follow naturally from his genuineness. His private life, his public activities, his modes of thought, of speech, and of action, are those of a genuine man. They are not to be understood or explained by involved processes of reasoning, or by search for hidden causes and concealed ambitions. The simplest and most natural interpre tation of Theodore Roosevelt's words and deeds is always the truest.

Theodore Roosevelt is President of the United States because his fellow-citizens wished him to be President. He is not a political accident. It is no disparagement of the powers and abilities of John Tyler, of Millard Fillmore, of Andrew Johnson, or of Chester A. Arthur to say that those who named them for the Vice-Presidency never dreamed of the possibility of their succession to the post of chief magistrate of the nation. Each in time succeeded to the Presidency under the operation of the constitutional provision, and each acquitted himself in his own way-President Arthur, at least, with distinction. But Theodore Roosevelt, whose title to the Presidency rests legally upon the same basis as that of Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, and Arthur, was chosen to the Vice-Presidency because his party and a majority of the people wanted him for the Presidency. No one who saw the currents of feeling which flowed backward and forward during the sessions of the Republican national convention at Philadelphia, in June, 1900, doubts this for an instant. In the eyes of that great representative body, there was but one figure, one personality, of dominant and immediate interest,-Theodore Roosevelt. President McKinley's name and fame were already secure.

The convention regarded him as in a class by himself, and joyfully and unanimously accorded him the renomination and indorsement that he had so richly earned. But all this was so much a matter of course that it seemed more like a matured historical judgment than an event in contemporary politics. From this viewpoint the convention and the Republican party looked toward the future, and the future seemed to them all to take its form from Theodore Roosevelt. Others were highly respected and cordially liked, others seemed better suited by temperament than he to the routine duties of the Vice-Presidential office; but a great and digni fied office was to be filled, and Theodore Roosevelt, the man of the future, must fill it! His own eager preferences, the earnest wishes and hopes of his closest friends, all had to give way before the irresistible desire to put Theodore Roosevelt in the highest possible position of dignity and of honor. There can be no doubt that the happy cry of the great party leader who exclaimed, as Mr. Roosevelt finished his remarkably incisive and powerful speech in seconding President McKinley's renomination, "It will be you in 1904, just as unanimously," voiced exactly what the convention felt. Therefore,

Theodore Roosevelt went into the Vice-Presidency because it was the highest office open to him at the moment, because he was wanted for President, and because at the proper time it was. intended to nominate and to elect him President. So, I repeat, he is not a political accident, but succeeds, unhappily too soon and under too terrible conditions, to what was marked out for him more than a year ago. That some of his political enemies labored zealously for his nomination and were greatly pleased by it because of the opportunities it afforded them elsewhere, was provoking, but events have proved that it was unimportant.

Through Theodore Roosevelt there has been restored the spirit of the original constitutional provision, afterward modified by the twelfth amendment, by which the second choice of the electors for president became, ipso facto, VicePresident. In this respect, he stood in the same relation to President McKinley that John Adams stood in to President Washington. He was not nominated to satisfy or to placate, but to suc ceed. The unspeakably cruel and cowardly assassin has anticipated the slow and orderly processes of law.

It should not escape attention that of all the long line of illustrious Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the first to be born and brought up in a great city. Other Presidents have passed over to cities, and so have become more or less identified with city conditions and city life, notably Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison; but Mr. Roosevelt is the first President to represent and to reflect in his very fiber the cosmopolitanism of the great modern city, and that city-New York. He is also the youngest man to take the constitutional oath required of the President. Mr. Roosevelt's forty-third birthday will come on the twenty-seventh day of the present month. Of all his predecessors, only three came to the Presidency before they were fifty years of age. Grant took the oath at fortyseven, Cleveland at forty-eight, and Pierce at forty-nine.

Moreover, Theodore Roosevelt was born too late to have any other than a child's or a student's memories of the war between the States. He is the first President of whom this can be said, and it means much. His great predecessor has as truly united the nation in sentiment as Lincoln kept it united in fact. Mr. Roosevelt starts with the presumption that it is united, and for him the several so-called sections of the country are merely geographical or historical, not political, terms. He has worn his country's uniform side by side with those who once fought against it. The fortunate coöperation of 1898 is for him the normal fact; the unhappy conflict of 1861-65 is history.

Mr. Roosevelt is not only city-born and citybred, but for over two hundred years his family has been intimately connected with the commercial and the political development of New York, whose historian he himself has been. His father, whose name he bears and whose sturdy goodcitizenship he justly reveres, was prominent in the city's life. What this city experience has meant for him is not as well known as it should be, but Mr. Roosevelt has himself expressed it with emphasis in the preface to his volume on New York in the Historic Towns Series." He says:

In speaking to my own countrymen, there is one point upon which I wish to lay especial stress; that is, the necessity for a feeling of broad, radical, and intense Americanism, if good work is to be done in any direction. Above all, the one essential for success in any political movement which is to do lasting good, is that our citizens should act as Americans; not as Americans with a prefix and qualification,-not as IrishAmericans, German-Americans, native Americans,but as Americans pure and simple. It is an outrage for a man to drag foreign politics into our contests, and vote as an Irishman or German or other foreigner, as

the case may be; and there is no worse citizen than the professional Irish dynamiter or German anarchist, because of his attitude toward our social and political life, not to mention his efforts to embroil us with foreign powers. But it is no less an outrage to discriminate against one who has become an American in good faith merely because of his creed or birthplace. Every man who has gone into practical politics knows well enough that if he joins good men and fights those who are evil he can pay no heed to lines of division drawn according to race and religion. The most important lesson taught by the history of New York City is the lesson of Americanism, -the lesson that he among us who wishes to win honor in our life, and to play his part honestly and manfully, must be indeed an American in spirit and purpose, in heart and thought and deed.

The writer of these inspiring words, them. selves a lofty political creed, is now President of the United States of America.

Mr. Roosevelt's city cosmopolitanism long since became national. Educated at Harvard University; plunging into the study of the law; serving a city district for three terms in the lower house of the State Legislature; delegate-at-large to his party's national convention at twenty-five; living an out-of-door life on a ranch on the Little Missouri; traveling, hunting, and climbing in his vacations; studying and writing works of history and books on sport, on politics, and on literature; serving as civil-service commissioner at Washington, president of the police commission in New York, and returning to Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy; volunteering for service in the Spanish War, and serving brilliantly; taking up the arduous and responsible duties of the governorship of the great commonwealth of New York for two years, and finding time while discharging them well to write a critical interpretation of Cromwell's career and a history of his regiment organized for the Spanish War; and finally presiding for a few days over the Senate of the United States as Vice-President surely here is a training such as America alone can give to "one of Plutarch's men."

What other statesman or what other man of letters could have written, or would have been asked to write, sympathetic studies of two such typical but widely different Americans as bluff old Tom Benton, of Missouri, and the polished Gouverneur Morris, of New York? Theodore Roosevelt alone, of all living Americans, could penetrate to the common secret of the greatness of these contrasting types, and could reveal it. His life in New York and his college training at Harvard had brought him in touch with the characteristics and the environment of Morris, while his travels in the West, his life on the plains, and his insight into frontier standards and conditions revealed to him those of Benton.