“I do not think that any President ever acted more wisely, courageously or promptly in a national crisis.  Mr. Roosevelt deserves unstinted praise for what he did.”

They would doubtless have acted precisely as they acted as regards the acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, and the stoppage of the panic of 1907 by my action in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company matter.  Nothing could have made the American people surrender the canal zone.  But after it was an accomplished fact, and the canal was under way, then they settled down to comfortable acceptance of the accomplished fact, and as their own interests were no longer in jeopardy, they paid no heed to the men who attacked me because of what I had done—­and also continue to attack me, although they are exceedingly careful not to propose to right the “wrong,” in the only proper way if it really was a wrong, by replacing the old Republic of Panama under the tyranny of Colombia and giving Colombia sole or joint ownership of the canal itself.  In the case of the panic of 1907 (as in the case of Panama), what I did was not only done openly, but depended for its effect upon being done and with the widest advertisement.  Nobody in Congress ventured to make an objection at the time.  No serious leader outside made any objection.  The one concern of everybody was to stop the panic, and everybody was overjoyed that I was willing to take the responsibility of stopping it upon my own shoulders.  But a few months afterward, the panic was a thing of the past.  People forgot the frightful condition of alarm in which they had been.  They no longer had a personal interest in preventing any interference with the stoppage of the panic.  Then the men who had not dared to raise their voices until all danger was past came bravely forth from their hiding places and denounced the action which had saved them.  They had kept a hushed silence when there was danger; they made clamorous outcry when there was safety in doing so.

Just the same course would have been followed in connection with the Anthracite Coal Strike if I had been obliged to act in the fashion I intended to act had I failed to secure a voluntary agreement between the miners and the operators.  Even as it was, my action was remembered with rancor by the heads of the great moneyed interests; and as time went by was assailed with constantly increasing vigor by the newspapers these men controlled.  Had I been forced to take possession of the mines, these men and the politicians hostile to me would have waited until the popular alarm was over and the popular needs met, just as they waited in the case of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; and then they would have attacked me precisely as they did attack me as regards the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company.