LIFE OF MR. ROOSEVELT

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15483, 15 December 1913, Page 7

LIFE OF MR. ROOSEVELT

AUTOBIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED. DOGGED PERSEVERANCE. EXPOSURE OF "GRAFT." INTERESTING STUDY. Times-Sydney Sun Special Cable. London, December 12. The autobiography of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt has been published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. Mr. Roosevelt claims that he. was not'endowed with any special aptitudes-' or excellences, whatever honours he attained being due to conscious effort and deliberate determination. As a child, he was sickly, delicate, nervous, timid, and short-sighted, and he deliberately set himself to overcome these disabilities. He developed a passionate love of natural I history and an adoration of fighting men. He forced himself to speak in public, and trained himself to courage and self-control. The book furnishes an interesting study of the gradual growth of Mr. I Roosevelt's political convictions. | His public life was always tempesI tuous, and he once got his way with a committee regarding a Bill before I the New York Legislature by secreting a chair leg where he could easily reach it and producing it when the committee became unruly. His comments provide a terrible picture of the corruption of public life in the United States, bribery, coercion, cowaidice, falsehood, and inefficiency being prevalent. A vivid chapter deals with the Spanish war, accompanied by documentary evidence which proves that the writer's heroism at San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, during the late Spanish-American war, was not a fabrication. The book, says the Times, is filled with brilliant stories, giving a perfect idea of the extraordinary range of the man's versatility.

SAN JUAN HILL. When the war with Spain broke out, Mr. Roosevelt was Under-Secretary for War. He resigned office, raised a regiment, "Roosevelt's Rough Riders," and went to the front. College boys and cowboys young millionaires and ranchmen, rallied to him. Is there any need now to tell the story of what these boys did ? It has passed into the history of modern war. Where fighting was fiercest they were foremost, and their colonel was always in the front rank. On their greatest day at San Juan he snatched rifle and bayonet from a wounded man and rushed at the Spanish obstacles, tearing them down, heading his forlorn hope and winning victory by sheer physical courage. And at the end of long marches or fierce fighting Mr. Roosevelt's men were always cared for. He would root out food in "a country swept by a dozen armies; he shared every har3ship of his men, and he won their hearts for ever.