Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/420

396 cations and with responsibilities so incalculable, that the statesmanship which proposes it may well be thought capable of any eccentricity ever so extravagant. This is felt even by some of the President's political friends, who are heard to say that this letter was really nothing but one of the explosions of “Teddy Roosevelt's bumptiousness,” and should not be taken seriously. I wish I could think so. But it was not a private gentleman who uttered these things in harmless badinage; it was the President of the United States who uttered them, deliberately wrote them down over his signature, to have them communicated to the world on a public occasion. Such public utterances by the President of the United States are very serious business, especially when they touch our relations with foreign nations.

No, this strange letter was not a mere unguarded slip of tongue or pen, portraying only a momentary impulse, a fleeting fancy. It was rather a manifestation of Mr. Roosevelt's real nature. He sees an object which appears to him good or desirable. His impetuous temperament urges him forward to attain this object, and in the rush he is apt to despise anything standing in the way, to forget laws, and treaties, and precedents, and adverse rights and interests, and to regard everybody opposing him as an enemy of the public welfare, if not as his own. He considers the Panama Canal a good thing, and to get it he rushes forward regardless of other obligations and of consequences. He thinks it desirable that the South American republics should be honest, and orderly, and prosperous, and forthwith he proclaims it to be our duty to make them so, in a manner insulting to them and discreditable to his own common-sense. He thinks that the pensions should be raised, and straight way he snatches the matter out of the hands of Congress, which was then considering it, and disposes of it himself