Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country, the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt, coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt. A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has done in it. * * * * * I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago, when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very presence, myth was already clustering,--a desire which was almost immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could, with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is (without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to the men of the north-western prairie country.