politics; but the impetus which
he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional
hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American
people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and
example.

Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has
given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed
elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country,
the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed
further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what
history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed
to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say
since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like
the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt,
coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that
conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of
President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the
national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.
A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's
authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more
authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has
done in it.

* * * * *

I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago,
when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of
Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person
about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very
presence, myth was already clustering,--a desire which was almost
immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him
which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the
reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a
short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the
clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could,
with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to
increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his
seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle
beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid
strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is
(withou