gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in _The
Crossing_ leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of
fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in _Coniston_,
though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of
constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand.

To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral
earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements
injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not _The
Crossing_--to take specific illustrations--connected with the same
central cycle as _The Winning of the West_? Is not _Coniston_, whatever
the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which
Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against
which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr.
Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into
which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and
American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the
manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr.
Churchill in 1918 in his essay on _The American Contribution and the
Democratic Idea_, "wholly defensible from the point of view of
international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President
Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile
government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our
own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And
again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of
growth."

Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr.
Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national
feeling--believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by