It was splendidly brutal, frankly heartless. It contained not a word of pity for the abused lady; and an equally striking feature of it was that it contained not a word of pity for the President himself. Surely everybody else pitied him, and was ashamed of him. It contained not a word of rebuke, nor even of criticism of Barnes’s conduct, and its approval of it was so pronounced that the spirit of it amounted to praise.

And now the President has appointed this obscene slave to the postmastership of Washington. The daring of it—the stupid blindness of it—is amazing. It would be unbelievable if it emanated from any human being in the United States except our incredible President.

When Choate and I agreed to speak at Carnegie Hall on the 22d of January, along with Booker Washington, in the interest of his Tuskegee Institute, I at first took that thief and assassin, Leopold II King of the Belgians, as my text, and carefully prepared a speech—wrote it out in full, in fact, several weeks beforehand. But when the appointed date was drawing near I began to grow suspicious of our Government’s attitude toward Leopold and his fiendishnesses. Twice I went to Washington and conferred with the State Department. Then I began to suspect that the Congo Reform Association’s conviction that our Government’s pledged honor was at stake in the Congo matter was an exaggeration; that the Association was attaching meanings to certain public documents connected with the Congo which the strict sense of the documents did not confirm. A final visit to the State Department settled the matter. The Department had kept its promise, previously made to the President and to me, that it would examine into the matter exhaustively and see how our Government stood. It was found that of the fourteen Christian Governments pledged to watch over Leopold and keep him within treaty limits, our Government was not one. Our Government was only sentimentally concerned, not officially, not practically, not by any form of pledge or promise. Our Government could interfere in the form of prayer or protest, but so could a Sunday-school. I knew that the Administration was going to be properly and diplomatically polite, and keep out of the muddle; therefore I privately withdrew from the business of agitating the Congo matter in the United States, and wrote the Boston branch that I thought it would be a pity to wring the hearts of this nation further with the atrocities Leopold was committing upon those helpless black natives of the Congo, since this would be to harrow up the feelings of the nation to no purpose—since the nation itself could do nothing save through its Government, and the Government would of course do nothing.

So I suppressed that speech and delivered one in its stead on another subject. But before selecting that subject I examined another one and prepared a speech upon it. If that speech had had a title I suppose it would have been “What is an American Gentleman?” Or maybe it would have been “America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and of the Ill-mannered”—or possibly it might have been “The Unpolite Nation.” I did not throw the speech away, but saved it, hoping for the right occasion.

The right occasion arrived, a few weeks ago, when I was to speak in the Majestic Theatre on Sunday afternoon to a couple of thousand male Young Christians who might take an interest in hearing the views of an expert upon the qualities required to constitute an American gentleman. But I was defeated again. The program was of the customary sort, where many persons are giving their time and labor to a great cause without salary and each must be allowed to step out and dangle himself before the audience by way of remuneration. A man who couldn’t speak, spoke. And a woman who couldn’t sing, sang. Another man who couldn’t speak, spoke. A mixed string-and-piano-band made some noises, and when the house rejoiced that the affliction was over, the band took it for an encore and did the noises over again. Then a man who couldn’t read, read a chapter from the Bible—and so this chaos went on and on. And every now and then God in His inscrutable wisdom would turn that singer loose again. I thought my turn would never come. At last when it did arrive I saw that I must cut myself down by half; that instead of allowing myself an hour, I must put up with 50 per cent of that. The result was that I talked upon a text—a good text, too—dropped by one of those speakers who couldn’t speak, and who didn’t know he had dropped it, and never missed it. And so once more my exposition of what the American gentleman should be got suppressed.

Now then all this has been fortunate. Still, all good things come to him who waits. I have waited, because I couldn’t help it, but my reward has come just the same. I don’t have to say, now, what the American gentleman should be—the whole ground can be covered with half a sentence, and an hour’s laborious talk saved by just stating what the American gentleman is. He is Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States.

I am not jesting, but am in deep earnest, when I give it as my opinion that our President is the representative American gentleman—of to-day. I think he is as distinctly and definitely the representative American gentleman of to-day as was Washington the representative American gentleman of his day. Roosevelt is the whole argument for and against, in his own person. He represents what the American gentleman ought not to be, and does it as clearly, intelligibly, and exhaustively as he represents what the American gentleman is. We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet to-day, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth.