While he was on the ranch the neighbors had caught a horse thief and hung him. They soon discovered that they had made a mistake and hung the wrong man. The most diplomatic among the ranchers was selected to take the body home and break the news gently to his wife. The cowboy ambassador asked the wife: "Are you the wife of -----?" She answered "Yes." "Well," said the ambassador, "you are mistaken. You are his widow. I have his body in the wagon. You need not feel bad about it, because we hung him thinking he was the horse thief. We soon after found that he was innocent. The joke is on us."Mr. Roosevelt was intensely human and rarely tried to conceal his feelings. He was to address the New York State Fair at Syracuse. The management invited me as a United States Senator from New York to be present. There were at least twenty thousand on the fair ground, and Mr. Roosevelt read his speech, which he had elaborately prepared, detailing his scheme for harmonizing the relations between labor and capital. The speech was long and very able and intended for publication all over the country. But his audience, who were farmers, were not much interested in the subject. Besides, they had been wearied wandering around the grounds and doing the exhibits, waiting for the meeting to begin.
I know of nothing so wearisome to mind and body as to spend hours going through the exhibits of a great fair. When the president finished, the audience began calling for me. I was known practically to every one of them from my long career on the platform.
Knowing Roosevelt as I did, I was determined not to speak, but the fair management and the audience would not be denied. I paid the proper compliments to the president, and then, knowing that humor was the only possible thing with such a tired crowd, I had a rollicking good time with them. They entered into the spirit of the fun and responded in a most uproarious way. I heard Roosevelt turn to the president of the fair and say very angrily: "You promised me, sir, that there would be no other speaker."When I met the president that evening at a large dinner given by Senator Frank Hiscock, he greeted me with the utmost cordiality.
He was in fine form, and early in the dinner took entire charge of the discussion. For three hours he talked most interestingly, and no one else contributed a word. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed the evening, and not the least the president himself.
I used to wonder how he found time, with his great activities and engagements, to read so much. Publishers frequently send me new books. If I thought they would interest him I mentioned the work to him, but invariably he had already read it.
When my first term as senator expired and the question of my re-election was before the legislature, President Roosevelt gave me his most cordial and hearty support.
Events to his credit as president, which will be monuments in history, are extraordinary in number and importance. To mention only a few: He placed the Monroe Doctrine before European governments upon an impregnable basis by his defiance to the German Kaiser, when he refused to accept arbitration and was determined to make war on Venezuela. The president cabled:
"Admiral Dewey with the Atlantic Fleet sails to-morrow." And the Kaiser accepted arbitration. Raissuli, the Moroccan bandit, who had seized and held for ransom an American citizen named Perdicaris, gave up his captive on receipt of this cable:
"Perdicaris alive or Raissuli dead." He settled the war between Russia and Japan and won the Nobel prize for peace.
Roosevelt built the Panama Canal when other efforts had failed for five hundred years. As senator from his own State, I was in constant consultation with him while he was urging legislation necessary to secure the concession for the construction of the canal. The difficulties to be overcome in both Houses seemed insurmountable, and would have been so except for the marvellous resourcefulness and power of the president.
When the Republican convention met in 1908, I was again delegate at large. It was a Roosevelt convention and crazy to have him renominated. It believed that he could overcome the popular feeling against a third term. Roosevelt did not think so. He believed that in order to make a third term palatable there must be an interval of another and different administration. When the convention found that his decision was unalterably not to accept the nomination himself, it was prepared to accept any one he might advise. He selected his secretary of war and most intimate friend, William Howard Taft. Taft had a delightful personality, and won distinction upon the bench, and had proved an admirable administrator as governor of the Philippine Islands.
After Mr. Taft's election the president, in order that the new president and his administration might not be embarrassed by his presence and prestige, went on a two years' trip abroad.
During that trip he was more in the popular mind at home and abroad than almost any one in the world. If he reviewed the German army with the Kaiser, the press was full of the common characteristics and differences between the two men and of the unprecedented event of the guest giving advice to the Kaiser.
When he visited England he told in a public speech of his experience in Egypt, and recommended to the English Government that, if they expected to continue to govern Egypt, to begin to govern it.
All France was aghast and then hilarious when, in an address before the faculties of Sorbonne, he struck at once at the weak point of the future and power of France, and that was race suicide.
