THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



485 



of President Roosevelt, which has made 

 the vast continental domain a more 

 fruitful habitat for a happier people, 

 now and hereafter, has already become 

 one of the most fascinating achieve- 

 ments of modern times. 



Theodore Roosevelt is a new kind of 

 geographer. There are static geog- 

 raphers and dynamic geographers. Mr. 

 Roosevelt is a dynamic geographer. 

 One studies and describes that geog- 

 raphy which man helps to make ; the 

 other helps to make that geography 

 which other men describe. They are 

 necessary complements in the great 

 scheme of geography, and they bear 

 something like the relation to each 

 other (if I may say it reverently) that 

 the Bible bears to the encyclopedia. 

 The dynamic geographer is the efficient 

 geographer, the constructive geog- 

 rapher, the busy geographer ; the man 

 who gets geographical things done ; 

 the man who studies the land and wa- 

 ter with an ethical purpose in the back 

 of his mind, wdth reference to getting 

 from them, for mankind, the highest 

 possible amount of use. The dynamic 

 geographer is the strenuous geogra- 

 pher, and this one has made himself a 

 practical incarnation of the principle 

 of making two blades of grass growl 

 where one grew before, without letting 

 any grow under his feet. 



Just now he is to try a new geograph- 

 ical role. He is becoming an explorer 

 in South Africa before he is to become 

 your distinguished guest at this univer- 

 sity, and, I liope, of this school of geog- 

 raphy. It is also said that he is going 

 hon-hunting. So far his special ani- 

 mosity has been the bear. He has hith- 

 erto shown no special grudge against 

 the lion, especially of the British vari- 

 ety. But if he does not make some new 

 and striking contributions to geograph- 

 ical dynamics in Africa before he re- 

 turns this way, those who know him 

 will miss their guess. 



SITUATION 



The first decade of the twentieth cen- 

 tury, or, roughly speaking, the admin- 

 istration of President Roosevelt, founH 

 the economic situation in the United 



States a most extraordinary and inter- 

 esting one. This situation discloses 

 some of the problems which his admin- 

 istration has had to face boldly, and for 

 which it had to offer solutions. Per- 

 haps one of the first things that strikes 

 the observer, if he gets far enough 

 away to take a bird's-eye view, is the 

 chaos both in the economic and political 

 conditions of the entire country ; the 

 anarchy which prevailed among certain 

 people and over certam areas ; the mad 

 and unintelligent scramble to get pos- 

 session of the raw materials and natural 

 resources of the Nation ; the prodigious 

 waste which attended the scramble for 

 these resources, and their concentration 

 and final centralization and congestion 

 in a few pairs of hands ; finally culmi- 

 nating in the stock gamblers' panic of 

 last year, whose evil effects have been 

 felt by every man in the civilized world. 



This panic was brought on by the 

 stock-gambling regime in the midst of 

 a material prosperity unknown in the 

 history of the world, in a year when the 

 production of American farms was 

 greater than the entire national wealth 

 fifty-eight years before. It occurred 

 at the close of a generation in which 

 the material increase of wealth mea- 

 sured in tons of gold coin more than all 

 Great Britain had laid up for 500 years ; 

 at a time when the United States owned 

 one-fourth of the world's wealth and 

 put out one-third of all the world's 

 manufactured product. 



A very interesting statement was 

 made a few months before the advent 

 of this panic by James J. Hill, the rail- 

 way promoter. (I might as well say 

 that there is a vast difference between 

 the railway promoter and the railway 

 smasher.) Tvlr. Hill made the statement 

 (1906) after an era of railroad build- 

 ing, which in twenty years had built 

 enough railroad in the United States 

 to reach three times round the globe 

 and leave a branch line from here to 

 Vladivostock, that there was neither 

 money enough nor rails enough in the 

 world to build track enough to carry 

 the traffic offered. 



The first decade of this century, how- 

 ever, found 100 men controlling the 



