Siw. Had he his hurts before? Ross. Ay, on the front. Siw. Why, then, God's soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And so his knell is knoll'd. Among the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and there are none greater in all the literature of man, _Macbeth_ was Colonel Roosevelt's favorite, and the moving words which I have just quoted I am sure were in his heart and on his lips when he faced with stern resolve and self-control the anguish brought to him by the death of his youngest boy, killed in the glory of a brave and brilliant youth. He lived to see the right prevail; he lived to see civilization triumph over organized barbarism; and there was great joy in his heart. In all his last days the thoughts which filled his mind were to secure a peace which should render Germany forever harmless and advance the cause of ordered freedom in every land and among every race. This occupied him to the exclusion of everything else, except what he called and what we like to call Americanism. There was no hour down to the end when he would not turn aside from everything else to preach the doctrine of Americanism, of the principles and the faith upon which American government rested, and which all true Americans should wear in their heart of hearts. He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end. So closes the inadequate, most incomplete account of a life full of work done and crowded with achievement, brief in years and prematurely ended. The recitation of the offices which he held and of some of the deeds that he did is but a bare, imperfect catalogue into which history when we are gone will breathe a lasting life. Here to-day it is only a background, and that which most concern us now is what the man was of whose deeds done it is possible to make such a list. What a man was is ever more important than what he did, because it is upon what he was that all his achievement depends and his value and meaning to his fellow men must finally rest. Theodore Roosevelt always believed that character was of greater worth and moment than anything else. He possessed abilities of the first order, which he was disposed to underrate, because he set so much greater store upon the moral qualities which we bring together under the single word "character."