THE AFRICAN EXPEDITION AND ITS OBJECTS 
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fettering bonds of public duties and sought the haunts of animal life, 
not so much for the pleasure of killing as for the delight of escaping 
for a time from the trammels of civilization. 
In that critical interval when President McKinley lay between 
life and death, his strenuous Vice-President broke away and lost 
himself in the breezy depths of the Adirondacks, where a long hunt 
was needed to find him when tidings came of the President's dying 
state. In this instance, for once in his life, the hunter became the 
hunted, and proved as hard to find as the shyest of wild creatures. At a 
later date, when the cares of the Presidency lay heavy on his shoulders, 
we find him again breaking away and burying himself in the cane- 
brakes of the Mississippi in ardent pursuit of the elusive bear. 
For a hunter of this calibre, trained and ardent, a man of steady 
nerves and deadly aim, a fearless soldier who had charged up San 
Juan Hill through a rain of plunging bullets, we can well understand 
the refusal to accept again the bonds of the Presidency, the schoolboy 
delight in winning a period of freedom from work, and the gleeful 
enthusiam with which he sought a new field of hunting adventure, the 
one fullest of the spice of danger and promise of thrilling experience 
of any upon the face of the earth. 
Can we justly appreciate the feelings of Theodore Roosevelt when 
he finally set foot on African soil; made his way inland from the sea¬ 
shore to that crowded domain of wild life where roamed in freedom 
wild animals which hitherto he had only seen behind the bars of strong 
cages; saw from the train as it plunged onward into the depths of the 
land the graceful giraffe, the crouching lion, the lumbering rhinoceros, 
the various other wild animals which had learned to disregard the 
speeding engine and its rattling cars, having found it a place of safety 
rather than danger, since no bullets came from it to decimate the trust¬ 
ing herd? 
The world of civilization lay behind him. Before him opened a 
world of savagery. Men there were as savage as beasts, all alike 
scions of open nature, free to give way to instinct, destitute of training 
and education except that which adapted them to the needs of wild life. 
Here for ages the struggle for existence had gone on in its primitive 
phase, Now 1 civilization, armed with new weapons and new laws, 
