352   My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

defense and a great democracy in which order, law, and liberty are to prevail."

I have quoted this speech because I am under the impression that it was his first actual declar: ion of any attitude toward a proposed League of Nations. ' n the early autumn of 194 Theodore Roosevelt himself hau written an article for the New York Times syndicate in which he suggested the possibility of a League of Nations, and the fact that he did make that suggestion was frequently used after his death-and, I think, in an unjustifiable manner-by the adherents of the Wilsonian League of Nations, with the desire to make the American public feel that my brother would have been in favor of Mr. Wilson's league. In every pronouncement in connection with a tentative or possible league, my brother invariably laid stress upon an absolutely Americanized type of association. I asked him once about his article written in 1914, and he told me that while still hoping that some good might come from a league or association of nations, his serious study of world situations during the Great War had made him less optimistic as to the possibility of reaching effective results through such a possible league or association.

In another speech at about the same time, he said, in characteristic fashion: "I frequently meet one of those nice gentry in whom softness of heart has spread to the head, who say: `How can we guaranty that everybody will love one another at the end of the war?' The first step in guarantying it is to knock Germany out!"

On September r s my husband,. Douglas Robinson, the unfailing friend and devoted brother of Theodore Roosevelt, died very suddenly, and my brother and sister-in-law hurried to the old home on the Mohawk Hills which my husband had loved so well. Putting themselves and their own grief for Mr. Robinson and their own late personal sorrow entirely aside, they did all that could be done by those we love to help me in every way. My brother had always cared for Henderson House,

its traditions and its customs, and even in the midst of the sorrow which now hung over the old place, he constantly spoke to me of his appreciation of its atmosphere. At the time of my husband's death my eldest on came quickly back for two days from the camp where he w i training, to his own home adjoining mine, and his children, were with us constantly during those days, as were the children of my nephew and niece, Hall and Margaret Roosevelt, who occupied a little cottage on my place. I remember with what tender thoughtfulness my brother withdrew himself on the Sunday afternoon after the funeral and wrote a long letter to my second son, Monroe, a captain in the 77th Division, then in the Argonne Forest in France. Just as he had found comfort in his own little grandchildren during those hard days at Dark Harbor, Maine, so, while facing the great loss of his lifelong and devoted friend and brother-in-law, he turned to an affectionate intercourse with the little ones of the youngest generation of the family, and on September i9, when he had left me and gone to Oyster Bay, he writes: "I think of you with tenderest love and sympathy all the time. I cannot get over my delight in Helen and Teddy's darling children; and I loved Margaret's brace of little strappers also. Archie and Gracie have hired a little apartment in town." His son Captain Archibald Roosevelt had returned from France sorely wounded in both arm and leg, wounds and disabilities which he bore with undaunted patience and courage.

On October 13, in response to a letter of mine in which I told him that a Monsieur Goblet had wished the honor of dedicating to him a poem, and at the same time had also asked the privilege of translating my verses "To France " into the French language, he writes to me:

"I have written to M. Goblet as you suggested; I feel that you have every right to be really pleased with what he says about your poem-a noble little poem.

"How admirably Monroe has done. It is astonishing how many men I meet who speak of Douglas [my husband] not only

War

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