Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
no one but the wealthy epicure who can afford to pay a heavy price for
luxuries. These systems tend to the destruction of the game, which would
bear most severely upon the very men whose rapacity has been appealed to
in order to secure its extermination. . . ."
I reorganized the Commission, putting Austin Wadsworth at its head.
APPENDIX B
THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN 1900
My general scheme of action as Governor was given in a letter I wrote
one of my supporters among the independent district organization
leaders, Norton Goddard, on April 16, 1900. It runs in part as follows:
"Nobody can tell, and least of all the machine itself, whether the
machine intends to renominate me next fall or not. If for some reason I
should be weak, whether on account of faults or virtues, doubtless the
machine will throw me over, and I think I am not uncharitable when I say
they would feel no acute grief at so doing. It would be very strange if
they did feel such grief. If, for instance, we had strikes which led
to riots, I would of course be obliged to preserve order and stop the
riots. Decent citizens would demand that I should do it, and in any
event I should do it wholly without regard to their demands. But, once
it was done, they would forget all about it, while a great many laboring
men, honest but ignorant and prejudiced, would bear a grudge against
me for doing it. This might put me out of the running as a candidate.
Again, the big corporations undoubtedly want to beat me. They prefer
the chance of being blackmailed to the certainty that they will not be
allowed any more than their due. Of course they will try to beat me
on some entirely different issue, and, as they are very able and very
unscrupulous, nobody can tell that they won't succeed. . . . I have been
trying to stay in with the organization. I did not do it with the idea
that they would renominate me. I did it with the idea of getting things
done, and in that I have been absolutely successful. Whether Senator
Platt and Mr. Odell endeavor to beat me, or do beat me, for the
renomination next fall, is of very small importance compared to the fact
that for my two years I have been able to make a Republican majority
in the Legislature do good and decent work and have prevented any split
within the party. The task was one of great difficulty, because, on the
one hand, I had to keep clearly before me the fact that it was better to
have a split than to permit bad work to be done, and, on the other hand,
the fact that to have that split would absolutely prevent all _good_
work. The result has been that I have avoided a split and that as a net
result of my two years and the two sessions of the Legislature,
there has been an enormous improvement in the administration of the
Government, and there has also been a great advance in legislation."
To show my reading of the situation at the time I quote from a letter
of mine to Joseph B. Bishop, then editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_,
with whom towards the end of my term I had grown into very close
relations, and who, together with two other old friends, Albert Shaw,
of the _Review of Reviews_, and Silas McBee, now editor of the
_Constructive Quarterly_, knew the inside of every movement, so far as I
knew it myself. The letter, which is dated April 11, 1900, runs in part
as follows: "The dangerous element as far as I am concerned comes from
the corporations. The [naming certain men] crowd and those like them
have been greatly exasperated by the franchise tax. They would like to
get me out of politics for good, but at the moment they think the best
thing to do is to put me into the Vice-Presidency. Naturally I will
not be opposed openly on the ground of the corporations' grievance; but
every kind of false statement will continually be made, and men like
[naming the editors of certain newspapers] will attack me, not as the
enemy of corporations, but as their tool! There is no question whatever
that if the leaders can they will upset me."
One position which as Governor (and as President) I consistently took,
seems to me to represent what ought to be a fundamental principle in
American legislative work. I steadfastly refused to advocate any law, no
matter how admirable in theory, if there was good reason to believe that
in practice it would not be executed. I have always sympathized with the
view set forth by Pelatiah Webster in 1783--quoted by Hannis Taylor
in his _Genesis of the Supreme Court_--"Laws or ordinances of any kind
(especially of august bodies of high dignity and consequence) which
fail of execution, are much worse than none. They weaken the government,
expose it to contempt, destroy the confidence of all men, native and
foreigners, in it, and expose both aggregate bodies and individuals who
have placed confidence in it to many ruinous disappointments which
they would have escaped had no such law or ordinance been made." This
principle, by the way, not only applies to an internal law which cannot
be executed; it applies even more to international action, such as a
universal arbitration treaty which cannot and will not be kept; and
most of all it applies to proposals to make such universal arbitration
treaties at the very time that we are not keeping our solemn promise
to execute limited arbitration treaties which we have already made. A
general arbitration treaty is merely a promise; it represents merely a
debt of honorable obligation; and nothing is more discreditable, for
a nation or an individual, than to cover up the repudiation of a debt
which can be and ought to be paid, by recklessly promising to incur a
new and insecure debt which no wise man for one moment supposes ever
will be paid.
CHAPTER IX
OUTDOORS AND INDOORS
There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other
men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a
sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible.
Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the
love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand
in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to
sneer at books. Usually the keenest appreciation of what is seen in
nature is to be found in those who have also profited by the hoarded
and recorded wisdom of their fellow-men. Love of outdoor life, love of
simple and hardy pastimes, can be gratified by men and women who do
not possess large means, and who work hard; and so can love of good
books--not of good bindings and of first editions, excellent enough in
their way but sheer luxuries--I mean love of reading books, owning them
if possible of course, but, if that is not possible, getting them from a
circulating library.
Sagamore Hill takes its name from the old Sagamore Mohannis, who,
as chief of his little tribe, signed away his rights to the land two
centuries and a half ago. The house stands right on the top of the hill,
separated by fields and belts of woodland from all other houses, and
looks out over the bay and the Sound. We see the sun go down beyond long
reaches of land and of water. Many birds dwell in the trees round the
house or in the pastures and the woods near by, and of course in winter
gulls, loons, and wild fowl frequent the waters of the bay and the
Sound. We love all the seasons; the snows and bare woods of winter;
the rush of growing things and the blossom-spray of spring; the yellow
grain, the ripening fruits and tasseled corn, and the deep, leafy shades
that are heralded by "the green dance of summer"; and the sharp fall
winds that tear the brilliant banners with which the trees greet the
dying year.
The Sound is always lovely. In the summer nights we watch it from the
piazza, and see the lights of the tall Fall River boats as they steam
steadily by. Now and then we spend a day on it, the two of us together
in the light rowing skiff, or perhaps with one of the boys to pull an
extra pair of oars; we land for lunch at noon under wind-beaten oaks
on the edge of a low bluff, or among the wild plum bushes on a spit
of white sand, while the sails of the coasting schooners gleam in the
sunlight, and the tolling of the bell-buoy comes landward across the
waters.
Long Island is not as rich in flowers as the valley of the Hudson. Yet
there are many. Early in April there is one hillside near us which glows
like a tender flame with the white of the bloodroot. About the same time
we find the shy mayflower, the trailing arbutus; and although we rarely
pick wild flowers, one member of the household always plucks a little
bunch of mayflowers to send to a friend working in Panama, whose soul
hungers for the Northern spring. Then there are shadblow and delicate
anemones, about the time of the cherry blossoms; the brief glory of the
apple orchards follows; and then the thronging dogwoods fill the forests
with their radiance; and so flowers follow flowers until the springtime
splendor closes with the laurel and the evanescent, honey-sweet locust
bloom. The late summer flowers follow, the flaunting lilies, and
cardinal flowers, and marshmallows, and pale beach rosemary; and the
goldenrod and the asters when the afternoons shorten and we again begin
to think of fires in the wide fireplaces.
Most of the birds in our neighborhood are the ordinary home friends of
the house and the barn, the wood lot and the pasture; but now and then
the species make queer shifts. The cheery quail, alas! are rarely found
near us now; and we no longer hear the whip-poor-wills at night. But
some birds visit us now which formerly did not. When I was a boy neither
the black-throated green warbler nor the purple finch nested around us,
nor were bobolinks found in our fields. The black-throated green warbler
is now one of our commonest summer warblers; there are plenty of purple
finches; and, best of all, the bobolinks are far from infrequent. I had
written about these new visitors to John Burroughs, and once when he
came out to see me I was able to show them to him.
When I was President, we owned a little house in western Virginia; a
delightful house, to us at least, although only a shell of rough boards.
We used sometimes to go there in the fall, perhaps at Thanksgiving, and
on these occasions we would have quail and rabbits of our own shooting,
and once in a while a wild turkey. We also went there in the spring. Of
course many of the birds were different from our Long Island friends.
There were mocking-birds, the most attractive of all birds, and blue
grosbeaks, and cardinals and summer redbirds, instead of scarlet
tanagers, and those wonderful singers the Bewick's wrens, and Carolina
wrens. All these I was able to show John Burroughs when he came to visit
us; although, by the way, he did not appreciate as much as we did one
set of inmates of the cottage--the flying squirrels. We loved having the
flying squirrels, father and mother and half-grown young, in their nest
among the rafters; and at night we slept so soundly that we did not in
the least mind the wild gambols of the little fellows through the rooms,
even when, as sometimes happened, they would swoop down to the bed and
scuttle across it.
One April I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep,
and I took John Burroughs with me. I wished to show him the big game of
the Park, the wild creatures that have become so astonishingly tame and
tolerant of human presence. In the Yellowstone the animals seem always
to behave as one wishes them to! It is always possible to see the sheep
and deer and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer
than the smaller beasts. In April we found the elk weak after the
short commons and hard living of winter. Once without much difficulty