10 



Western United States, and therefore felt a particular interest in these 

 regions. He also fully realised the very great importance of such problems. 



Amongst ninety million people in the United States, Theodore 

 Roosevelt for several years has been, and still is, the most commanding 

 personality. To meet him is to understand how he both inspires and 

 dominates his fellow-countrymen. His rugged vitality, boyish enthusiasm, 

 and cheering grip have charmed and won the West ; while the East has long- 

 since capitulated to the restless energy, tireless industry, and driving 

 courage of Harvard's most gifted graduate. Morley has said of Gladstone 

 that he was a Highlander in charge of a Lowlander. With equal truth 

 one might say that Roosevelt was a Westerner in the care of an Easterner. 

 During his tenure of office he proved a real and helpful friend of the 

 farmer, and the various agricultural commissions which he called together 

 on irrigation, natural resources, and country life have already had a 

 profound effect on the welfare of the whole nation. 



Mr. Roosevelt always took very seriously this cartoon of 

 the old farmer reading the President's Message. The original 

 of it, framed, hung over the mantel in his private study. He 

 considered this farmer with the firm mouth and the patched 

 trousers to be a representative of the mass of the American 

 people — stable-minded, plain, patriotic, and endowed with 

 common sense. To one who urged him to accept a third term 

 Roosevelt said : " This man wouldn't like it." To Lord 

 Curzon, on a visit to the White House, frankly asking the 

 source of the President's power, Roosevelt said: "That is 

 the man I'm working for." — From Collier's Weekly, 6th 

 March, 1909. 



No apology is therefore needed— even in a dry-farming report — to 

 insert the vivid impression of the. greatest Dutchman in America from the 

 pen of the brilliant English novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward* :— 



"Washington, at this time of the world's history, was the scene of 

 one of those episodes — those brisker moments in the human comedy— 

 which every now and then revive among us an almost forgotten belief in 

 personality, an almost forgotten respect for the mysteries behind it. The 

 guests streaming through the White House defiled past a man who. 



