last two hundred years, and will not down. The New York Journal with its plethora of cash and minimum of brains has held a prolonged symposium on the negro question. Scores of ordinary men and women without one original thought or the power of thinking have sold their silly opinions to the Journal without in any single instance showing any penetration into the negro problem or giving any light on the subject. We have already discussed this problem in The Globe and in the near future intend to carry the discussion further than heretofore.

"For the present we are interested in the President and his pet, the one-fifth black man. In my opinion President Roosevelt, alike as a man and as President, had and has an undoubted right to invite any man to his house that he chooses; be he a black, half black, one-fifth black, yellow or red man. And I think the criticism and fuss made over his action in this case are simply indicative of the impertinent and half-civilized temper and so-called culture of the American people, and especially the Southerners, who have criticised his act most sharply. It simply was and is none of their business.

"I do not intend to go into the subject of the negro here. I am simply touching the presidential incident. While I think that he had a perfect right to act as he has acted, I do not admire his taste in this particular, and have very little respect for his judgment in this case; indeed, I think the act very poor diplomacy. The negro is a citizen, but no more a citizen than the white man, hardly as much so in some quarters, and Booker T. Washington has not half the intelligent culture that any one of ten thousand white school teachers in the United States may be relied on as possessing. Why he should be singled out among the so-called educators of the nation as worthy the honors of the White House does not appear to the most liberal-minded citizen.

"So much for the poor judgment of the President. As to his taste, he will live to understand that better inside of a quarter of a century. Forty years ago I dined now and again with Fred Douglass at the house of some Abolition friends in Philadelphia, and was rather proud of it at the time. Forty years afterwards, I do not regret the act or my own enthusiasm for the negro in those youthful days; but I should hardly feel honored by such colored companionship to-day. What little good—that is, for civilization, dining out and the like—there is in the negro race

^Wao ^v*** ^ood of him. How that got in everybody knows. ^7 marv or woman wants to own how much he or she

t&od't ,0Yi ^ a^ staria-s f°r vice and crime and is not a com. ^°^e proud of ox- to care about entertaining. It was bad » 0ut^Part of trie President.

^ to the ^omacy of the act, that is the worst feature of it. * President Roosevelt not only to be President of the , * eiftpvre all tbe savages in it as well as the so-called civilized white men, during the next three years—but we want him to be President for another four or eight years.

'He is the first President of the new generation of men who have grown up since the Civil War. He is every inch an American. "\N e hai\ the breeze and vigor that he brings with him. We iee\ stronger as a nation since God made him President; but we * want to iee\ that he is as long-headed as he is stout-hearted. We vjarvtVamto rule himself and the nation not by his youthful sympathies, but by the wisdom that his position demands. Perhaps, if he chose to explain, he might make it all clear, but he must never explain.

"The President's message to Congress was quite as remarkable for the things it did not say and the subjects it did not discuss as it was for the plainness, clearness and evident sincerity of its utterances on the subjects it treated. It was a new departure from the average messages of Presidents, Emperors and Kings, showing a comprehensive grasp of all the topics deemed worthy of consideration, and in being at once statesmanlike and personal and individual. The message has been reviewed and considered so thoroughly by the daily and weekly press of the country that it is not worth while to go over the ground here. We consider it as just and true to invested capital, whether in so-called trusts or railroad corporations, as it is sympathetic with labor and the laboring man; and it puts its considerations of both and of all parties on the high ground of reason and the common sense of the Anglo-American race. There is no passion, no appeal to passion or to race prejudice, or to class prejudice in the whole message. It is masterful in its simplicity and straightforwardness.

"There is one little instance in which the President's own experience as a rough-rider may have biased his judgment in favor of the cavalryman as a fighter, and at this point is noticeable the

enthusiasm that comes of personal experience. This expression comes so soon after the general verdict of military authority in Europe to the effect that the horse is an unnecessary incumbrance and expense in modern warfare that it has all the freshness of young American manhood about it and is not the less interesting on that account. But the message as a whole is sogood that we have no desire to criticise it. The President is loyal to the American notions which are said to have prompted our late war with Spain, but he is an admirable optimist in seeing the self-governing capacity of the Philippines, the Cubans, the Sandwich Islands, and Porto Rico almost at our very doors. An Englishman who was once asked by an American how to get a real English lawn, said: First select a good piece of land, and plow it and drag it and seed it and tend it, cutting the grass with a scythe, and roll it and roll it for about five hundred * years. So must it be with the mixed breeds of our new possessions, and even then they will be mixed breeds still and only half civilized."

The next thing, the President, in accordance with his ideal and strenuous character, in accordance also with American declarations in beginning the war with Spain, was represented as indicating that Cuba should be treated with consideration and some show of justice. That is months ago. He had ridden up to the imaginary ranks of Cuba's enemies during the infamous Spanish war, had shouted like a hunter at the flying game, and now, having become President by the grace of God or the schemes of the devil—as you like it—he was for treating the uncertain half-breeds with more leniency and fair play; but the lobbyists of the Beet Sugar Trust and the representatives of the American Tobacco Trust made it plain to Congress that, until their separate interests were primarily and fully secured, Cuba and her moral claims might go to hell—and the President with them, and they are having their way.

Here, again, the President has had to fluke and subside. Cuba may get a reduction of twenty per cent, on the rascally tariff, which has been an infamous outrage from the day the Spanish left and we claimed the island, but at this writing that is doubtful, and in fact will happen only so far as it ministers to American greed alike for conquest and for gain. The President is not in it. He is practically ignored.

^ Vfa ^m^***C: «lviestion attacked by the "strenuous" Presi^ s^e S>arrvpson-Schley controversy, involving not only ^ ^tatwe standing of Sampson and Schley1, but the imme. , TeVy-ta.t\orx oi Dewey and Miles, that is, the real leaders e -^^trlca/in Army and Navy. Here the dear young man did ^Uvtn pretend, to any "strenuous" life of manhood, but tum«M at once to trie dictates of the Republican machine—with a dever, sophomore argument to show that Schley was not in comma-rid at Santiago, but that the runaway Sampson was in command, -wViich is simply absurd, or that the captains were in command, a\\ of which is the stupidest babble on record—a plea, Vn lact, v/hich would rob Nelson, Napoleon, Wellington, 1??edex\ck. the Great, Grant, Lee, Dewey, and all the great generals and admirals of history of the glory we have rightly given them—hut the Republican pet admiral and the Republican pet - ca^tams have to be sustained by the Republican tool of Mark Hanna & Co., and Roosevelt had to grind the organ to the tune indicated. But you cannot change the verdict of history, Mr. President, and if you go on this way, you will make a fool of yourself and never again be President, but will have to scribble silly books in order to maintain a very superficial fame. In truth, you are becoming a hack in politics as you were and are in literature.

As to the President's reprimand of Dewey and Miles and his substituting for them two mere political nobodies, like Whitelaw Reid, to represent the United States at the coronation of Edward VII, and to tote around with Prince Henry, while he was parading this hemisphere—that is the silliest of all his acts. If there was any honor in either case, nothing could be more absurd than that "Bob" Evans, of the navy, and Whitelaw Reid, of the New York Tribune, should be selected for the honors, while greater and better men are under the censure of the President.

Another view of the case is as follows: An old Democratic citizen said to me a few days previous to this writing: "Mr. Thorne, can you recall any case in our history when the President has undertaken to punish, himself, personally, to punish individual American citizens, admirals, generals or what not?" But this man Roosevelt, who was to be the President of the whole people, seems to be acting like a school marm, or worse still, like a jealous monitor appointed for an hour to take charge of the school and, out of mere spite and envy, he is blackmarking the brightest, bravest and most heroic boys in the academy. How are the would-be mighty fallen! You can still be a commonplace tool, like Garfield, Hayes and the rest, but no more, my dear sir.

The latest word from the Philippines is in the same key. We did not expect the President to give up the Philippines and call the natives a free and independent people. We have held, and still hold, that since by the infamous war with Spain we became possessors of the islands, it is our duty, at any cost, to hold them, to subdue the natives and to give them, eventually, a stable form of government. It was a crime to gobble the islands, but having gobbled them we must rule them or become ourselves the laughing-stock of the world. But to control the islands and establish a stable form of government there does not mean that we, a boasted Christian nation, must pursue General Funston's methods of treachery, duplicity, injustice and wholesale luting and robbery. If we steal from the religious orders that have civilized the people as far as they have any civilization; if we steal from those religious orders the property that they acquired and accumulated by gift or purchase while engaged in their religious work, we are no better than the German, Italian, French and English thieves—who, for ages, have been robbing the Church of billions of dollars' worth of property in order to teach the world what advanced ideas of justice and honor there are abroad among the civilized and advanced thieves of modern times.

We have urged upon the President that some other human element besides the ultra ecclesiastic on the one hand and the ultra Yankee politician on the other was necessary to solve this problem—not only in the Philippines, but in Cuba, in Porto Rico and in every State of our own country—but after even a strenuous young man becomes President, and has been knocked and kicked about by the hard hoofs and fists of the mechanism of party politics, he begins to think that said hoofs and fists are the only forces in the universe, and so succumbs like the halftaught gentleman he is apt to be.

He had a dim outlying shadowy sense of justice toward Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines, but there is no justice in American politics, and his shadow of it has flown.