"Mr. Roosevelt wants to be President again, and all he does and says is directed towards that supreme end." "Mr. Roosevelt regards his political career, or, at any rate, the office-holding side of it, as definitely closed, and will never again be a candidate for, the nomination." "Mr. Roosevelt has broken with President Taft finally and completely, and is to be reckoned as the real leader of those insurgent Republicans who deplore his wishy-washy policies and are determined, if they can, to prevent his renomination in 1912." "Mr. Roosevelt and President Taft, after a period of estrangement, are coming together again, and 1912 will find them speaking and fighting from the same platform." These are fair samples of the contradictions to which an inquirer into American politics at this moment finds himself exposed. Every man you meet seems to have his own incontrovertible opinion of Mr. Roosevelt and his views and his future; and no two men agree. That he is "down and out," a spent political force, who has forfeited the dignity of an ex-President in a wild and unsuccessful effort to maintain his influence, who has broken with his own wanton hands the halo of invulnerability that surrounded him, and is now of no more account than a dozen other leaders, is the faith of one school. That the setback he received last November was only temporary, was, indeed, more apparent than real; that his hold over the Far West is still as great as ever; that while he is weaker than he was in the Middle West and the South, he has lost no ground that cannot and will not be regained, and that in or out of the White House he will remain, as long as he lives, by far the most vital

and commanding figure in American public life that is equally the faith of the other school. One thing, at least, is obvious, and that is that America as a whole has not lost its interest in Mr. Roosevelt. Sooner or later, in whatever part of the country one finds oneself, and in whatever company, the conversation drifts round to him, finding in his character, his acts, his intentions, and his possibilities a series of inexhaustible topics. But you have to mix with the people and get away from the Eastern States to realize the existence, let alone the magnitude, of this popular concern in Mr. Roosevelt's present and future. The East, and Wall Street especially, still honors him with a quite distinctive hatred, and the New York Press practically boycotts him. There was a curious instance of this a few weeks ago. Mr. Roosevelt returned in the middle of April from a six weeks' tour through the South and West. He addressed gigantic audiences: he was everywhere received with the old enthusiasm. I happened to be in Washington at the time, and the Senators and Congressmen from the States through which he was travelling assured me that even at the height of his Presidential popularity he had never been more splendidly welcomed. Yet of all this the East heard nothing. A few brief paragraphs on an inner page were all that the New York papers thought it worth while to devote to the ex-President's trip. It may have been accident; it may have been a deliberate policy of suppression; it may have been merely one more sign of the incurable indifference of the East to whatever is happening beyond the Alleghanies. In any case, as a picture of Mr. Roosevelt's position in the country, its effect

was

nothing less than a travesty. In the past four months I have seen and talked with the ex-President several times, in his office at the Outlook, where, no doubt he is learning how much easier it is to govern a country as a journalist than he ever found it to be as President, at luncheons of the editorial staff-bi-weekly affairs with himself in the chair, and a varied array of guests, each one of them an expert or notability of some sort—and, best of all, in his own home at Oyster Bay. Mr. Roosevelt at Oyster Bay, if such a thing be possible, is a shade more Rooseveltian, and therefore a shade more delightful than anywhere else. His expansiveness and exuberance; his full, rich stream of anecdote and comment; his copiousness and variety, the infectiousness and humor and picturesqueness that make him at all times one of the most enthralling of companions, seem to take on a freer, franker, and more spontaneous range than ever beneath the genial mellowness of his own roof-tree. One could not wish for a host who was more entertaining or with so little effort, or one who poured himself with such a challenging rush into the theme of the moment, or reacted so instantaneously to the interests and temperaments of his guests. It was sheer stimulus to accompany him on the round of his household treasures, and to hear the sharp fire of explanation, criticism and reminiscence which each one of them provoked. Whatever it was, a present or a letter from some reigning Sovereign, a bronze by Remington, a shooting trophy, a book, a picture or a portrait, the Colonel pounced upon it with the same vivid exhilaration, and dashed off some pertinent, impressionistic commentary. At one moment he was recalling his tramp with Sir Edward Grey last summer through the New Forest, and extolling the song of the English blackbird. At another he was

gleefully recounting his telegraphic duel with Mr. Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch. At a third he was talking Cuban politics, or expounding the practical philosophy of good roads, or defending St. Gaudens' statue of Sherman against Mr. Henry James' criticisms, or justifying the position of the paws of Landseer's lions in Trafalgar Square as true both to nature and to art, or eulogizing the perfect taste and sense of proportion of the French on all public occasions and contrasting it with some of his experiences in his own country. From that he would switch off to display, with a satisfaction it was good to watch, the miniature of John Hampden which King Edward sent him from the Windsor collection, dwelling on the fine instinct which prompted the choice of such a present, and comparing it with other gifts from other monarchs, from one in particular, that showed by no means the same happy sense of selection, and that seemed, indeed, rather meant to advertise the giver than to please the recipient. The sight of Emperor Menelik's Psalter sent him off hot-foot to Abyssinia. The next moment he was unfolding a letter from the late Dowager Empress of China, a letter, he jubilantly declared, of far too intimate character for him to show to Mrs. Roosevelt. Trevelyan's "American Revolution" started him off on a vein of literary and historical criticism. bundle of photographs of the Kaiser and himself at the German manœuvres, each with some humorous, complimentary inscription in the Kaiser's hand, led to a character-sketch of that sedulous Sovereign which lacked nothing in friendly pungency. But above all it was on America; on American men and politics; on the events of his own Presidency; on his course of action since he returned from Europe and Africa; and on his present and future attitude towards parties, that he held

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forth most freely. It was an express undertanding between us that I should not quote bim. It was also, I think, an implied understanding that in reproducing the substance of our talks I should omit his major indiscretions. I wish, therefore, to make it clear that for what follows, even though I shall be using as nearly as possible the exPresident's ipsissima verba, I, and I alone, am to be held responsible.

His

In the ordinary sense of the words, Mr. Roosevelt is not, and does not expect to be, a candidate for the Presidency. He feels he has had his fair share of office, has done some pretty big things-starting the Panama Canal, reorganizing San Domingo, and sending the fleet round the world, are the achievements he looks back upon with the greatest pride-and has written his name deep on American history. Nobody can accuse him-he cannot even accuse himself-of having shirked the call of public duty. He has built up a monument of which he is not ashamed; after eight years in the White House he can fairly claim that he has done a good day's work. record stands, and he is willing to be judged by it. If he were ten years younger and had never been President, the White House would inevitably be his dominating objective. As it is, he is conscious of no need to apologize for not hankering to return to it. There are all sorts of interests that his absorption in politics during the past decade has compelled him to drop, and he relishes the prospect of taking them up again. He is supremely happy in his home life; he thoroughly enjoys his journalistic work; and while he has no intention of retiring from public life, and admits his constitutional inability to do the one thing that an exPresident is expected to do that is, to set up as a Sage-he is quite content to hold a position below that of the first in the land. Indeed, the

thought of becoming a Presidential candidate of the common type, hunting up delegates, manoeuvring for a nomination, conciliating A with the promise of an Embassy if he will swing the delegates from some anonymous State over to his side, rewarding B with a Cabinet post for his services in "getting in the vote," playing, in short, the petty, hackneyed, political game all this has less than no attraction for the Roosevelt of to-day. He feels he has got beyond that stage. In the same way, to be President again does not appeal to him, if being President means that he is once more to be occupied with the wearisome bartering of patronage for legislative support, the endless deals and accommodations, the necessity of "placating" this senator and that, and the whole stale, trivial routine. Mr. Roosevelt has been through that mill, and has no desire and no ambition to go through it again. On the other hand, he does not feel himself in any way debarred from accepting another nomination. But the nomination, I gather -though he is the last man to put it so abruptly--must seek him; he will not seek it. If some great national crisis were to arise, and the American people were to take it into their heads that he, and he alone, could handle it to their satisfaction; if some big job were clamoring to be done, and popular opinion pointed unmistakably and overwhelmingly to Mr. Roosevelt as the man to do it, then the ex-President would be willing to enter the race for the White House once more. But it must be a national and not merely a party emergency. Mr. Roosevelt will not again accept another nomination merely to get the Republicans out of a hole, or save them from being pushed into one. Only a call from practically the whole country will again drag him into the Presidential arena, and the prospects of such a call coming to him