ame.

He was above all things a fighter, and the favorite objects of his
denunciation were professional pacifists, nice little men who had let
their muscles get soft, and nations that had lost their fighting edge.
Aggressive war, he tells us in "The Winning of the West," is not always
bad. "Americans need to keep in mind the fact that, as a nation, they
have erred far more often in not being willing enough to fight than in
being too willing." "Cowardice," he writes elsewhere, "in a race, as in
an individual, is the unpardonable sin." Is this true? Cowardice is a
weakness, perhaps a disgraceful weakness: a defect of character which
makes a man contemptible, just as foolishness does. But it is not a sin
at all, and surely not an unpardonable one. Cruelty, treachery, and
ingratitude are much worse traits, and selfishness is as bad. I have
known very good men who were cowards; men that I liked and trusted but
who, from weakness of nerves or other physical causes--perhaps from
prenatal influences--were easily frightened and always constitutionally
timid. The Colonel was a very pugnacious man: he professed himself to be
a lover of peace--and so did the Kaiser--but really he enjoyed the
_gaudium certaminis_, as all bold spirits do.

In the world-wide sense of loss which followed his death, some rather
exaggerated estimates made themselves heard. A preacher announced that
there had been only two great Americans, one of whom was Theodore
Roosevelt. An editor declared that the three greatest Americans were
Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. But not all great Americans have
been in public life; and, of those who have, very few have been
Presidents of the United States. What is greatness? Roosevelt himself
rightly insists on character as the root of the matter. Still character
alone does not make a man great. There are thousands of men in common
life, of sound and forceful character, who never become great, who are
not even potentially great. To make them such, great abilities are
needed, as well as favoring circumstances. In his absolute manner--a
manner caught perhaps partly from Macaulay, for whose qualities as a
writer he had a high and, I think, well-justified regard--he pronounces
Cromwell the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century. Was he so?
He was the greatest English soldier and magistrate of that century; but
how about Bacon and Newton, about Shakespeare and Milton?

Let us think of a few other Americans who,