It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully,
intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged
to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no
time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born
leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy.
To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and
rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults
commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite
deserted him.

As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man
power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the
presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of
its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped
to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term.
Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond
the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed
against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.

There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of
mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House
would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at
Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the niece
of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protegee of the
Empress Eugenie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was
her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel
truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that
slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man
was a match for six Northern men.