in their various fields,
might perhaps deserve to be entitled great. Shall we say Jonathan
Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Robert
Fulton, S. F. B. Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Horace
Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Admiral Farragut, General W. T. Sherman,
James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Robert E. Lee? None
of these people were Presidents of the United States. But to the man in
the street there is something imposing about the office and title of a
chief magistrate, be he emperor, king, or elected head of a republic. It
sets him apart. Look at the crowds that swarm to get a glimpse of the
President when he passes through, no matter whether it is George
Washington or Franklin Pierce.

It might be safer, on the whole, to say that the three names in
question are those of our greatest presidents, not of the greatest
Americans. And even this comparison might be questioned. Some, for
example, might assert the claims of Thomas Jefferson to rank with the
others. Jefferson was a man of ideas who made a strong impression on his
generation. He composed the Declaration of Independence and founded the
Democratic party and the University of Virginia. He had a more flexible
mind than Washington, though not such good judgment; and he had
something of Roosevelt's alert interest in a wide and diversified range
of subjects. But the latter had little patience with Jefferson. He may
have respected him as the best rider and pistol shot in Virginia; but in
politics he thought him a theorist and doctrinaire imbued with the
abstract notions of the French philosophical deists and democrats.
Jefferson, he thought, knew nothing and cared nothing about military
affairs. He let the army run down and preferred to buy Louisiana rather
than conquer it, while he dreamed of universal fraternity and was the
forerunner of the Dove of Peace and the League of Nations.

Roosevelt, in fact, had no use for philosophy or speculative thought
which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently
practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little
imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer
or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will
and abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning
metaphysical cobwebs, doubtless seemed to the author of "The Strenuous
Life" a career of mere self-indulgence. It is not witho