"These are important things but many will be slow to think them his great services. The Panama canal will surely serve mankind when in operation; and the manner of organizing this work seems to be fine. But no one can yet say whether this project will be a gigantic success or a gigantic failure; and the task is one which must in the nature of things have been undertaken and carried through some time soon, as historic periods go, anyhow. The peace of Portsmouth was a great thing to be responsible for, and Roosevelt's good offices undoubtedly saved a great and bloody battle in Manchuria. But the war was fought out, and the parties ready to quit, and there is reason to think that it is only when this situation was arrived at that the good offices of the President of the United States were, more or less indirectly, invited. The fleet's cruise was a strong piece of diplomacy, by which we informed Japan that we will send our fleet wherever we please and whenever we please. It worked out well. "But none of these things, it will seem to many, can compare with some of Roosevelt's other achievements. Perhaps he is loath to take credit as a reformer, for he is prone to spell the word with question marks, and to speak despairingly of 'reform.' "But for all that, this contention of 'reformers' made reform respectable in the United States, and this rebuke of 'muck-rakers' has been the chief agent in making the history of 'muck-raking' in the United States a national one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the national a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it is likely to think. "And, then, there is the great and statesmanlike movement for the conservation of our national resources, into which Roosevelt so energetically threw himself at a time when the nation as a whole knew not that we are ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can. This is probably the greatest thing Roosevelt did, undoubtedly. This globe is the capital stock of the race. It is just so much coal and oil and gas. This may be economized or wasted. This same thing is true of phosphates and other mineral resources. Our water resources are immense, and we are only just beginning to use them. Our forests have been destroyed; they must be restored. Our soils are being depleted; they must be built up and conserved.