BROTHERS IN ARMS.

Great personal emergencies are the final tests of men's characters. Theodore Roosevelt, shot while making a speech in Milwaukee in the presidential campaign of 1912, insisted on finishing what he had to say. Premier Clemenceau, barely escaping from death's door has announced to Secretary Lansing that he will attend the Council of the Great Powers on Tuesday. Not even a bullet could stop the tremendous energy of the great American and the great Frenchman.

This energy backed by an unflinching sincerity is the outstanding feature in the life of these two men. It made Roosevelt a great stateman, writer, scientist, sportsman, soldier. It made him the most beloved and the most hated of any public man in America. This restless dynamic spirit carried him from the White House to the jungles of Africa and South America, from ranching on the western praries to leading his men in action at San Juan Hill. His fearless Americanism in the Venizuelan trouble with Germany made the Kaiser exclaim afterwards, at the height of his power, that Roosevelt was the one man in the world he feared.

Clemenceau as been to France what Roosevelt was to America. He has been a physician of prominence, a war-correspondent, a soldier, a teacher in a girl's seminary at Stamford, Connecticut, a duellist, a critic, a playwright and above all a journalist. Like Roosevelt a firm believer in the big stick, he has clubbed his way to the top by the sheer force of his convictions. He roused the enmity of the socialists by the vigor with which he used the military to quell the mining strikes in the Pas de Calais department in 1906. He fired the wrath of the bourgeois by his denouncement of the Russian Alliance and his firm belief in the necessity of an entente with England. His untiring support of Dreyfus, in the long years when that famous case was disrupting all France, brought him many personal enemies among the military class. But in spite of all hostility to his past record, the French nation recognized him as its most implacable foe to Germany, its greatest patriot, and, in the dreary days of the winter of 1917-18, the man to raise the French morale.

However much we may disagree with their foreign policy we must all admit that the one was, and the other is, a man. Both Roosevelt and Clemenceau gave their entire energy whole heartedly to the interests of their own country; Clemenceau is still giving it. Both are recognized as nationalists, not wholly in spirit with the new internationalism. But this was and is due to the passionate love of each for his own people, above and beyond everything and everybody else. Their spirit represents nationalism glorified.