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294 My Brother Theodore Roosevelt
try into ignoble avoidance of its national and international duty, such defeat could only be brought about by the amalgamation of the Progressive and Republican parties, a result extremely difficult to accomplish.
On April 14 he said: "The Tribune says of tlhe approaching convention, `We are choosing which way the (country shall go in the era that is now opening, just as our fathters chose the nation's path in the days of 186o.' This sentence should be in the mind of every man who at Chicago next June takes part in formulating the platform and naming the candidat:e. The men at Chicago should act in the spirit of the men who stood behind Abraham Lincoln. . . . There is one great issue (on which the fight is to be made if the highest service is to be rendered the American people. That issue is that the American. people must find its own soul. National honor is a spiritual thiing that cannot be haggled over in terms of dollars. [He refers to the issue of the tariff which had been prominently brought forward.] We must stand not only for America First but for America first, last, and all the time and without any second. . . . We can be true to mankind at large only if we are true to ourselves. If we are false to ourselves, we shall be false to everything else. We have a lofty ideal to serve and a great mission tco accomplish for the cause of Freedom and genuine democracy, a and of justice and fair dealing throughout the world. If we are weak and slothful and absorbed in mere money getting or vapid! excitement, we can neither serve these causes nor any others. We must stand for national issues, for national discipline and ifor preparedness-military, social and industrial-in order to keep the soul of this nation. We stand for Peace, but only for tine Peace that comes as a right to the just man armed, and not for the Peace which the coward purchases by abject submission to wrong. The Peace of cowardice leads in the end to war after a record of shame."
Even the Democratic newspaper, the New York Times, spoke about that time of Colonel Roosevelt's capacity to rouse a true
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patriotism. It said: "The passion of his Americanism, his unerring instinct for the jugular vein, make him, in a good cause, an unrivalled compeller of men. He has had his fill of glories, his name is blown about the world;-by preparing America against war, to unite America in patriotism, there are no nobler laurels." And almost coincident with this unexpected appreciation of a newspaper frequently the enemy of Colonel Roosevelt came a letter from his former attorney-general, William H. Moody, written to their mutual friend Mr. Washburn, the author of the book which I have already mentioned. In the heat of the controversy which was once more beginning to rage around the figure of Theodore Roosevelt, it was interesting to read the calm and quiet words penned by the able man who had served as attorney-general in my brother's cabinet, but, alas, laid low by the painful illness which later proved the cause of his premature death. "For five years," writes Mr. Moody, "I was in almost daily association with him in the details of work for a common purpose and in his relation to all sorts and conditions of men. There are some parts of his work as President which I think no one knew better than I did, and there are results of it which ought to receive thorough study and be brought clearly to light. I have here specially in mind, the effect of his acts and preachments upon economic thought, and the development of the constitutional theory of our government. If one contrasts the state of opinion as to the proper relation between capital and labor, and the proper attitude of government toward both as that opinion existed just before the war with Spain, and as it exists today, one cannot fail to see that there has been an extraordinary change. In this change, I believe he was the one great leader in this country. . . . What was needed was a man with a great genius for leadership, great courage, great intelligence, and the highest purpose. That man came in Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps, many would scout the idea that he had been a guide in constitutional interpretation. I remember the state of legal thought and the attitude of the Supreme Court in the nineties
