LET THEM SHOOT.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1790, 8 November 1919, Page 9

LET THEM SHOOT.

WORSE WAYS OF DYING.

ROOSEVELT'S CONTEMPT FOR ASSASSINATION.

A group of Colonel Roosevelt's letters appearing in '' Scribner 's Magazine'' for October will have a wide appeal not only in their bearing on political affairs, but as well by reason of their literary quality. There are letters written to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, nephew and biographer of Lord Macaulay, and author of what Roosevelt termed "the very best history of the American Revolution," and these letters cover a period of 20 years in the life of the writer, beginning at the time when he was Governor of New York and extending through the most exciting I days of the great war. The letter reprinted below was written in answer to Trevelyan's expression of sympathy, after Roosevelt was shot and slightly wounded by a half-crazed fanatic in Milwaukee on October 14, 1912, while on a speaking tour in the West as Progressive candidate for the Presidency. The views which he set forth concerning the assassination of public men were those which his intimate friends had often heard him utter. It was a frequent saying of his: "There are worse deaths than for a man to be killed in the service of his country." It is interesting to note that the Edward Grey mentioned in the last paragraph is Viscount Grey, the new British Ambassador to the United States. . "Oyster Bay, October 29,'1912.

"Your letter touched and pleased me very much. I shall always keep it. I have riot yet reached the point where it is wise for me to write with my own hand, so I shall only send you these few typewritten lines of greeting. "It is just as you say: prominence in public life inevitably means that creatures of morbid and semi-criminal type are incited thereby to murderous assault But, my dear Sir George, I must say I I have never understood public men who get nervous about assassination. For the last • 11 years I have of course thoroughly understood that I might at any time be shot, and probably would be shot some time. I think I have come off uncommonly well. But what I cannot understand is any serious-minded public man not being so absorbed in the great and vital questions with which he has to deal as to exclude thoughts of assassination. I do not think this is a question of courage at all. I think it is a question of the major interest driving out the. minor interest. It is exactly as it is in the Army. I can readily understand any enlisted man having qualms about his own safety, but the minute that a man gets command of other's and has responsibilities for more than his own personal safety, especially when he becomes a colonel or a general, I don't see how, in the middle of his wearing anxities, he has a chance to wonder whether he personally will be shot. "As I say, 5t is not a question of courage; it is a question of .perspective, of proper proportion. If to-morrow I were to go fox-hunting I would probably j feel a little more need of hardening my heart when I approached an uncommon-; ly stiff jump than I would have felt 30 years ago; just because there would be no responsibility in the matter, no duties to tse first considered, nothing whatever to appeal to me except the chance of a smash-up as balanced against the fun of the hunting and the galloping. But if I had a division of cavalry and were in battle with it, so far as I thought selfishly at all, it would be as to whether I were handling the cavalry creditably. It would not be as to whether I was in danger of being shot. "So that I never have felt that public men who were shot whether they were killed or not, were entitled to any especial sympathy; and I do most emphatically feel that when in danger it is their business to act in the manner which we accept as commonplace when the actor is an enlisted man of the army or navy, or a policeman, or a fireman, or a railroad man, or a miner, or a deep-sea fisherman. "I am really pleased at what you tell me about Edward Grey. I have felt toward him almost as I feel toward you — and that is as' strongly as I feel toward any man not in my immediate family."