The Complete Works. Henry Cabot Lodge
issue of his magazine immediately following my leaving the Presidency in March, 1909, wrote as follows: Roosevelt steps from the stage gracefully. He has ruled his party to a large extent against its will. He has played a large part in the world's work, for the past seven years. The activities of his remarkably forceful personality have been so manifold that it will be long before his true rating will be fixed in the opinion of the race. He is said to think that the three great things done by him are the undertaking of the construction of the Panama Canal and its rapid and successful carrying forward, the making of peace between Russia and Japan, and the sending around the world of the fleet. These are important things, but many will be slow to think them his greatest services. The Panama Canal will surely serve mankind when in operation; and the manner of organizing this work seems to be fine. But no one can say whether this project will be a gigantic success or a gigantic failure; and the task is one which must, in the nature of things, have been undertaken and carried through some time soon, as historic periods go, anyhow. The Peace of Portsmouth was a great thing to be responsible for, and Roosevelt's good offices undoubtedly saved a great and bloody battle in Manchuria. But the war was fought out, and the parties ready to quit, and there is reason to think that it was only when this situation was arrived at that the good offices of the President of the United States were, more or less indirectly, invited. The fleet's cruise was a strong piece of diplomacy, by which we informed Japan that we will send our fleet wherever we please and whenever we please. It worked out well. But none of these things, it will seem to many, can compare with some of Roosevelt's other achievements. Perhaps he is loath to take credit as a reformer, for he is prone to spell the word with question marks, and to speak disparagingly of 'reform.' But for all that, this contemner of 'reformers' made reform respectable in the United States, and this rebuker of 'muck-rakers' has been the chief agent in making the history of 'muck-raking' in the United States a National one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the Nation a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it is likely to think. And, then, there is the great and statesmanlike movement for the conservation of our National resources, into which Roosevelt so energetically threw himself at a time when the Nation as a whole knew not that we are ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can. This is probably the greatest thing Roosevelt did, undoubtedly. This globe is the capital stock of the race. It is just so much coal and oil and gas. This may be economized or wasted. The same thing is true of phosphates and other mineral resources. Our water resources are immense, and we are only just beginning to use them. Our forests have been destroyed; they must be restored. Our soils are being depleted; they must be built up and conserved. These questions are not of this day only or of this generation. They belong all to the future. Their consideration requires that high moral tone which regards the earth as the home of a posterity to whom we owe a sacred duty. This immense idea Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation until the Nation heeded. He held it so high that it attracted the attention of the neighboring nations of the continent, and will so spread and intensify that we will soon see the world's conferences devoted to it. Nothing can be greater or finer than this. It is so great and so fine that when the historian of the future shall speak of Theodore Roosevelt he is likely to say that he did many notable things, among them that of inaugurating the movement which finally resulted in the square deal, but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement for staying terrestrial waste and saving for the human race the things upon which, and upon which alone, a great and peaceful and progressive and happy race life can be founded. "What statesman in all history has done anything calling for so wide a view and for a purpose more lofty?
12 The case is known in the law books as U. S, vs, E, C. Knight, 156 U. S. Sept., p. 1.
13 Northern Securities Company et al. vs. U. S., 156 U. S., Sept., pp. 391-2.
14 One of my appointees on the Anthracite Strike Commission was Judge George Gray, of Delaware, a Democrat whose standing in the country was second only to that of Grover Cleveland. A year later he commented on my action as follows: "I have no hesitation in saying that the President of the United States was confronted in October, 1902, by the existence of a crisis more grave and threatening than any that had occurred since the Civil War. I mean that the cessation of mining in the anthracite country, brought about by the dispute between the miners and those who controlled the greatest natural monopoly in this country and perhaps in the world, had brought upon more than one-half of the American people a condition of deprivation of one of the necessaries of life, and the probable continuance of the dispute threatened not only the comfort and health, but the safety and good order, of the nation. He was without legal or constitutional power to interfere, but his position as President of the United States gave him an influence, a leadership, as first citizen of the republic, that enabled him to appeal to the patriotism and good sense of the parties to the controversy and to place upon them the moral coercion of public opinion to agree to an arbitrament of the strike then existing and threatening consequences so direful to the whole country. He acted promptly and courageously, and in so doing averted the dangers to which I have alluded. "So far from interfering or infringing upon property rights, the Presidents' action tended to conserve them. The peculiar situation, as regards the anthracite coal interest, was that they controlled a natural monopoly of a product necessary to the comfort and to the very life of a large portion of the people. A prolonged deprivation of the enjoyment of this necessary of life would have tended to precipitate an attack upon these property rights of which you speak; for, after all, it is vain to deny that this property, so peculiar in its conditions, and which is properly spoken of as a natural monopoly, is affected with a public interest. I do not think that any President ever acted more wisely, courageously or promptly in a national crisis. Mr. Roosevelt deserves unstinted praise for what he did.
15 My own belief is that our Nation should long ago have adopted the policy of merely leasing for a term of years mineral-bearing land; but it is the fault of us ourselves, of the people, not of the Steel Corporation, that this policy has not been adopted.
The Naval War of 1812