This is a thought to be borne in mind to-day. We meet to render honor to the dead, to the great American whom we mourn. But there is something more to be done. We must remember that when History, with steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of the past, comes to make up the final account, she will call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of the man or the event awaiting her verdict. Here and elsewhere the men and women who knew Theodore Roosevelt or who belong to his period will give public utterance to their emotions and to their judgments in regard to him. This will be part of the record to which the historian will turn when our living present has become the past, of which it is his duty to write. Thus is there a responsibility placed upon each one of us who will clearly realize that here, too, is a duty to posterity, whom we would fain guide to the truth as we see it, and to whose hands we commit our share in the history of our beloved country--that history so much of which was made under his leadership. We can not approach Theodore Roosevelt along the beaten paths of eulogy or satisfy ourselves with the empty civilities of commonplace funereal tributes, for he did not make his life journey over main-traveled roads, nor was he ever commonplace. Cold and pompous formalities would be unsuited to him who was devoid of affectation, who was never self-conscious, and to whom posturing to draw the public gaze seemed not only repellent but vulgar. He had that entire simplicity of manners and modes of life which is the crowning result of the highest culture and the finest nature. Like Cromwell, he would always have said: "Paint me as I am." In that spirit, in his spirit of devotion to truth's simplicity, I shall try to speak of him to-day in the presence of the representatives of the great Government of which he was for seven years the head. The rise of any man from humble or still more from sordid beginnings to the heights of success always and naturally appeals strongly to the imagination. It furnishes a vivid contrast which is as much admired as it is readily understood. It still retains the wonder which such success awakened in the days of hereditary lawgivers and high privileges of birth. Birth and fortune, however, mean much less now than two centuries ago. To climb from the place of a printer's boy to the highest rank in science, politics, and diplomacy would be far easier to-day than in the eighteenth century, given a genius like Franklin to do it. Moreover the real marvel is in the soaring achievement itself, no matter what the origin of the man who comes by "the people's unbought grace to rule his native land" and who on descending from the official pinnacle still leads and influences thousands upon thousands of his fellow men.