Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/587



BY RANDOLPH S. BOURNE

appraisals of men in public life are more apt to amuse than to enlighten posterity, and of all public men of our time, with the debatable exception of Mr. Lloyd George, no one has been the subject of such diverse estimates as Mr. Roosevelt. Yet it is fifteen years since he first engaged national attention, and short as is such a span in history, it is long enough in a man’s life to afford a reasonably accurate perspective of his character. If this estimate of an interesting personality is wholly wrong, the error is due, not to discrepancies in the available testimony, but to the obscured vision of the critic.

To the future historian it will be obvious that Mr. Roosevelt was fortunate in the times in which he lived. The troubled period through which we are still passing will be ranked as one of the four critical epochs of American history. First came the struggle for self-government; next, the uneasy reconcilement of the Republic with political democracy; third, the death-grapple with slavery; and fourth, the battle for a completer social and economic freedom, the outcome of which no man can now foretell.

In the opulent days when Mr. McKinley was first elected to the presidency, only the prescient saw the approach of this struggle. Two classes of heroes there were then to whom all citizens deferred the men who had won the Civil War, and the men who had made the trusts. The phrase, ‘captains of industry,’ was set so high that we thought little of the significance of its French equivalent. In those days there was no periodical so poor that it could not print the portrait of the country boy who had grown up to revolutionize an American industry. Steel kings and electric princes were looked upon as great men to be emulated by generous youth. Then came the change which in the retrospect seems marvelously rapid. Strange terms like ‘social conscience’ and ‘money power’ crept into familiar speech. Rebates acquired a new and evil significance. Private envy took the place of national conceit, and loftier emotions joined in the general revolt against conditions which suddenly seemed intolerable. How far the rising cost of living, and the quixotic restlessness of the foreign hordes who failed to find in this country the paradise of their dreams, influenced the will and courage of the American people, posterity must judge. The fact which concerns us here is the indubitable one, that within the last decade and a half a new social ideal has enlarged the heritage of the Republic.

This quickened atmosphere of public life was the living breath in Mr. Roosevelt’s nostrils. It was not a rarefied VOL. 109—NO. 5