308   My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

Four years ago I declined to make a fetich of the Republican party, when to do so meant dishonor to the nation, and this year I declined to make a fetich of the Progressive party when to do so meant dishonor to honor. I agree with you that issues and men are the things that count. A party is good only as a means to an end. Nevertheless, we have to face the fact that has been made strikingly evident during the past four years that with ninety per cent of our country-men the party name of itself has a certain fetichistic power, and we would be very foolish if we did not take this into account in endeavoring to work for good results. Moreover, it is unfortunately true that the dead hand of a party sometimes paralyzes its living members. The ancestral principles of the Democratic party are so bad it seems to be entirely impossible for it to be useful to the country except in spasms.

"I believe Mr. Hughes to be honest and to have the good of his country at heart."

He was not able to visit us in our country home on the Mohawk Hills, as we had hoped he might possibly do, during that summer, but on October 5 he writes to me: "I fear I shall be West on the 25th, otherwise I should jump at the chance to lunch with you and Fanny at the Colony Club. Can I accept for the first subsequent day when I find that you and she are available? I am now being worked to the limit by the Hughes people who are the very people who four months ago were explaining that I had `no strength.' . . . I most earnestly desire to win; I, above all things, do not wish to sulk, and therefore, from now on my time is to be at the disposal of the National Committee. Of course, Teddy's nomination meant far more to me personally than anything else in this campaign. I look forward eagerly to seeing you. Do look at my Metropolitan Magazine article which is just out. I think you will like the literary style!" The "literary style" was combined with a certain amount of plain talk in this particular instance !

On October 12 Colonel Roosevelt, taking the exploits of

"Do It Now"   309

the German submarine U-boat 53 off the shores of America

as a text, launched an urgent protest. Colonel Roosevelt de

clared that the conduct of the war had led to a "complete break

down of the code of international rights." The man who as long ago as in his inauguration speech in March, 1905, inveighed against the "peace of the coward," was stirred to red-blooded indignation at the Democratic slogan of that campaign of 1916, which laid all the stress on "He kept us out of war," a sentence which Colonel Roosevelt described as "utterly misleading."

He said

" Now that the war has been carried to our very shores, there is not an American who does not realize the awful tragedy of our indifference and our inaction. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. By taking the right step at the right time, America's influence and leadership might have been made a stabilizing force.

"In actual reality, war has been creeping nearer and nearer until it stares at us from just beyond our three-mile limit, and we face it without policy, plan, purpose, or preparation. No sane man can to-day be so blind as to believe President Wilson's original statement that the war was no concern of ours. Every thinking man must realize the utter futility of a statesmanship without plan or policy until such facts as these now stare us in the face."

Such were the virile statements used many times during the following campaign. One of the most interesting human documents connected with Theodore Roosevelt during this period was written by a young reporter, Edwin N. Lewis, in private letters to his own family, from the special train upon which Theodore Roosevelt travelled for one of the most active ten days of his active life, during which he urged the American people to accept the Republican candidate. With Mr. Lewis's permission, I am quoting from these interesting letters, written by the kind of young American for whom my brother had the warmest and most friendly feeling, the kind of young American whose family