118 WANDERINGS AND MEMORIES 



" I wish my boys could get over to see you, but 

 they don't allow them out of the training trenches 

 for more than a day or two at a time, and then 

 very infrequently. Just at present I am devoting 

 every ounce of energy I have to the effort to hurry up 

 our action. If I ever meet you again I will tell you 

 some of the difficulties I have met with from your 

 own people, who have unwittingly contributed to 

 keep our administration fatuously complacent and 

 inactive. 



" I grinned over Lloyd-George's proposal to 

 consult the natives about the government of the 

 African possessions. Our President gladly followed 

 suit, for it is the kind of preposterous fatuity that 

 appeals to him — appeals to him as a matter of 

 oratory only, for in practice at this time he is occupy- 

 ing Hayti, without the smallest regard to the wishes 

 of the Haytians. There never was a more ludicrous 

 proposal than that of consulting those wild savages 

 as to whom they love best. It would literally be 

 quite as rational to get from them an expression of 

 opinion as to the nebular hypothesis. 



" Faithfully yours, 



" Theodore Roosevelt." 



In the lives of all men who have knocked about 

 the world as I have done, there must sometimes 

 occur circumstances which in our present state of 

 knowledge of the unseen world are both strange 

 and often unaccountable. Amongst the hundreds 

 of times in which I have sat at dinner with the 

 unlucky number thirteen, I have only once seen 

 an objection raised, and on that occasion Matthew 

 Arnold the poet, Edgar Seebohm the playwright, 



