Roosevelt on Wilhelm

Great was the friendship between the late great Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, onetime (1912-18) British Ambassador to the U. S. Last fortnight were published letters to and from Sir Cecil, among them, illuminating dark spots in history, some 25,000 new words of Rooseveltiana./- Wrote President Roosevelt in 1905:

"I suppose it is natural that my English friends generally, from the King [Edward VII] down, should think I was under the influence of the Kaiser [Wilhelm II], but you ought to know better, old man. There is much that I admire about the Kaiser . . . [but] he himself is altogether too jumpy, too volatile in his policies, too lacking in the power of continuous and sustained thought and action for me to feel that he is in any way such a man as, for instance, Taft or Root. You might as well talk of my being under the influence of Bryan.

"I get exasperated with the Kaiser because of his sudden vagaries . . . like his speech about the yellow peril ... a speech worthy of any fool Congressman; and I cannot of course follow or take too seriously a man whose policy is one of such violent and often wholly irrational zig-zags,"

In the same year President Roosevelt wrote: "I have more than once been greatly exasperated with the Kaiser myself. When I first came into the Presidency I was inclined to think that the Germans had serious designs upon South America. But I think I succeeded in impressing upon the Kaiser, quietly and unofficially and with equal courtesy and emphasis, that any violation of the Monroe Doctrine by territorial aggrandizement on his part around the Caribbean meant war, not ultimately but immediately and without delay. He has always been as nice as possible to me since. . . ."

/-The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice: Ed. by Stephen Gwynn, 2 vols., Houghton Mifflin Co.