Page:Americans (1922).djvu/289

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the world-movement as Mr. Roosevelt. But in those days his exuberance was very great; for it had been two years since he had sent a message to Congress, and he found relief for his pent-up energies in bestowing advice all the way around the European circuit. Accordingly he solemnly warned the Germans that one of "the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge." At the same time he marked it as a reassuring sign of our modern period that there were then larger standing armies than ever before in the world. These words seemed to his German hearers so fitly spoken that they then and there made Mr. Roosevelt a doctor of philosophy. He lectured also at the Sorbonne, finding a text in a novel of Daudet's in which the author speaks of "the fear of maternity which haunts the young mother." The country in which that is generally true, cried Roosevelt to that country of declining birth-rate, is "rotten to the core." "No refinement of life," he continued, "can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race."

Roosevelt's mental exuberance may be suggestively measured in this fashion. Mark Twain, when he got under way, was a fairly voluble talker. But Mark Twain was silent and overwhelmed in the presence of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, then, had