DOWN AND UNDER.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12497, 25 March 1909, Page 4

DOWN AND UNDER.

The famous Gridiron 4 Club of New B York presumably exists for the purpose of: ' 'grilling" people, and. last month (says an exchange) it invited Mr Rdoseyelt to attend a banquet so that it might give him a final roasting before he retired from office. The British Ambassador, Cabinet Minis;tors, Senators, Congressmen, and leading financiers were present to watch 'the process. Between courses Mr Roosevelt,^ his face . wreathed in smiles, was forced to listen to his last will and testament. Then the retiring president of the club handed his .successor a "big stick." informing him that it was the badge of the presidential office, and the principal instiument of the successful; administiation just ended." The outgoing club president pointed tp several spikes on the stick, stating that they had been particularly efficacious in answering foolish questions asked by Congress, subduing those whose statements did not agree with the executive's, and in the rounding up of votes. The new president was requested to perpetuate *the old administration, to ride ninety-eight miles a day, to maintain jthe "Ananias Club" in flourishing condition, and to see that Congress was kept within its own.reservations 'All these tilings the incoming president solemnly swore nbt to do. He brutally announced that he would play ; his own game, and told the retiring president that he was " down and under," and that his advice was not needed. Mr Roosevelt's fight with Congress' was "amusingly caricatured in a^musical farce, in which grotesquely dressed Secret Service men and Senators in black masks were introduced. But the chief figure of the skit was the. "Whitewash Man," who sang a song, "Everybody's flirting with the Whitewash Man," and informed the audience that he used forty pails of whitewash for Mr Archbold's Standard Oil letter files. The club presented Mr Koose'vek with .a golden grid-iron, telling him that it would be of immense use in Africa for cooking lion steaks aiid rhinoceros chops. Each guest at the banquet was presented with a little book entitled "Special Message to Congress, No. 2,323,232,323," presumably a play oir the -mystic number 23, which moans in the vernacular, "Get out." . .