Theodore Roosevelt set foot on American soil for the first time in nearly fifteen months at 10.55 o'clock that morning. More than 10,000 people were massed in Battery Park, and a shout that rivaled the earlier blasts of whistles greeted the home-comer as he stepped upon Pier A and was escorted to the grandstand, where he was welcomed to the city, state and nation by Mayor Gaynor in a short speech. This ceremony was in many ways, particularly the former President's answering speech, the most notable feature of the day.

Replying to Mayor Gaynor, Colonel Roosevelt said:

"I thank you, Mayor Gaynor. Through you I thank your committee and through them I wish to thank the American people for their greeting.

"I need hardly say that I am most deeply moved by the reception given me. No man could receive such a greeting without being made to feel both very proud and very humble.

"I have been away a year and a quarter from America and I have seen strange and interesting things alike in the heart of the frowning wilderness and in the capitals of the mightiest and most highly polished of civilized nations.

"I have thoroughly enjoyed myself, and now I am more glad than I can say to get home, to be back in my own country, back among people I love. And I am ready and eager to do my part so far as I am able in helping solve problems which must be solved if we of this, the greatest democratic republic upon which the sun has ever shone, are to see its destinies rise to a high level of our hopes and its opportunities.

"This is the duty of every citizen, but it is peculiarly my duty; for any man who has ever been honored by being made President of the United States is thereby forever after the debtor of the American people and is bound throughout his life to remember this as his prime obligation, and in private life as much as in public life so to carry himself that the American people may never have cause to feel regret that once they placed him at their head."

This brief ceremony over, the land parade began. The march of the Rough Riders down Broadway on their way to greet their old commander at the Battery had been the signal for an enthusiastic wel

come all along the line. The famous troopers wore yellow khaki, with buckskin leggins and broad brimmed gray slouched hats. Their horses looked like mustangs, accoutred with heavy military saddles and blankets as though ready for campaign.

They moved in battalion formation, the ranks extending for two blocks along Broadway, with flags flying and the Rough Rider band playing patriotic airs. All along the line of march they were given an enthusiastic greeting.

As the parade started up Broadway a squadron of mounted police led the line, followed by the Squadron A mounted band. Then came the Rough Riders, proud of the opportunity to escort their former colonel. They had came together from all parts of the country, though mostly from the West, and were in their way a remarkable band. About one hundred and fifty former members of the famous regiment rode in the procession, clad in new uniforms, but carrying their old battle flags.

Colonel Roosevelt's carriage followed immediately behind the Rough Riders, Mayor Gaynor and Cornelius Vanderbilt with him. In the carriages immediately following were the representatives of the President and the various states. The committee of the New York Senate and Assembly occupied five carriages. The three hundred members of the rceeption committee followed, and after them marched the Seventh Regiment band of one hundred pieces.

The parade turned up Broadway and went west at Fourth street to Washington Square. The Abernathy boys, two lads of ten and six, who had ridden their ponies all the way from Oklahoma to take part in the reception, fell in at the arch, and 2,000 members of the Spanish War Veterans joined the procession at Eighth street. The parade marched between the ranks of stalwarts up Fifth avenue to Fifty-ninth street and there disbanded.

As the procession passed between the myriads of enthusiastic citizens of New York and the country who densely lined both sides of the five mile route, the returned traveler everywhere was hailed with a whirlwind of exhuberant greetings. During most of the time he stood erect in his carriage, hat in hand, bowing and waving responsive

greetings to the welcoming cheers. By noon the popular welcome was practically ended and Colonel Roosevelt joined his relatives for lunch preparatory to returning to his home at Oyster Bay in the late after

noon.

Thus ended the reception of the famous ex-President, soldier, hunter, hobnobber with kings and hail-fellow with emperors, yet one of ourselves, a simple citizen of the United States, of equal rank with us all.

We might follow him in his ride to Oyster Bay, where a continuous ovation awaited him along the way; but it will be best to bid him farewell at the end of the Fifth avenue triumphal march. All we can say in parting with him and in closing the final page of this book, is that in Theodore Roosevelt the world has recognized one of its greatest men, and the age in which he lives greets him as the outspoken advocate of its highest aspirations for peace, good-will and a "Fair deal for all men, high and low, rich and poor alike."

Appendix

CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC

LECTURE BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, APRIL 23, 1910.

"Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and warlike nobles; of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.

"This was the most famous university of medieval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which are incomparable with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the harddriven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.

"The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.

'As the country grows its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive