THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



By Sir Harry H. Johnston 



The ex-President of the United States who died in the first week 

 of 1919 was in many ways the most remarkable man I have ever met, 

 and combined with unusual qualities of intellect and co-ordinated 

 development of bodily skill — for was he not a fine shot, a bold 

 equestrian, an untiring marcher, an adept at most games and sports ? 



— a kindness and sweetness of disposition, and a thoughtf ulness for 

 the happiness and well-being of all around him, very rare in great 

 men of the world. 



He was a field-zoologist of the new school, the school which has 

 given us J. G. Millais, Radclyffe Dugmore, Ernest Seton, C. W. 

 Beebe, and a host of young and middle-aged Americans who have 

 studied wild life with unswerving accuracy, seeking only to set 

 forth the truth in real natural history, and disposing summarily of 

 many a hoary lie and legend about wild life, scorning, moreover, the 

 vagueness of statement and nomenclature which arises from imper- 

 fect observation and inadequate study. 



Theodore Roosevelt was not only a great naturalist himself, but 



— what in its ultimate effect was even more important — he set, 

 as President, the fashion in young America for preserving and 

 studying fauna and flora until he had gone far to create a new phase 

 of religion. Under his influence young men whose fathers and 

 grandfathers had only studied the Bible, the sacred writings of the 

 post-exilic Jews and Graeco-Syrian Christians, now realised that 

 they had spread before them a far more wonderful Bible, the book 

 of the earth itself. Geology, palaeontology, zoology, botany, eth- 

 nology, were part of Roosevelt's religion. He may have been a 

 specialist in none of these branches of science, but he saw the 

 divinity pulsating through them, more glowingly apparent than in 

 narrow imaginings of theology. 



The man's memory was prodigious. I once spent some ten days 



— in two separate visits — as his guest at the White House in 

 1908. At one luncheon party the question of Mayne Reid's novels 

 came up. Roosevelt gave a precis of the more remarkable of their 

 plots, of their characters, their defects and strong points. So he 

 could with Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 

 and Mark Twain. When I was setting out to study the negro in 



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