Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/508

 “I will compel you to take some action,” replied the general, who says that Mrs. Van Rensselaer, who wrote a history of New York, told him that the Roosevelts were not Dutchmen but Jews. He then went to Louisiana with the determination of gathering a lot of men together and killing the Englishmen there buying and shipping horses. There were about a hundred and fifty of them. He was persuaded to the contrary by the judge and by the fact that he was entirely without money to defend his cause in the American courts.

“I made a great mistake,” he added. “If I had killed those Englishmen the American people would have been aroused and our cause would have been won. However, the Dutch have control of the government in the Transvaal, and as soon as England gets into trouble they will be independent. It is the greatest war in history and we ruined the prestige of England.”

Some time later he saw John Hay, who told him that the Dutch in the Transvaal were the vassals of the English.

October 15 and 16, 1912, the American Antiquarian Society celebrated at Worcester, Massachusetts, the hundredth anniversary of its foundation and assembled many distinguished men, including President Taft. Waldo Lincoln, the president of the society, gave us a luncheon in his house and I sat at a little square table, which could accommodate four persons, with Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts and James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, and then Ambassador from England to the United States. A thin little man, with a bright eye and long whiskers, he is utterly incapable of dressing himself and his shirt bulged out in a hump before him, but alert, knowing and wise.

“I have all the works of Voltaire in my library, a hundred 488