Chapter XVIII [excerpt]

     I was much struck during a visit to the White House, paid this very month four years ago, by the simplicity of the presidential surroundings. White House is a charming residence, commanding a far-reaching view of tree-bowered Washington, with the Potomac gleaming in the distance, and beyond, the green banks of Maryland. No military pomp attends the ruler of one of the greatest nations in the world. By the front entrance a solitary policeman yawned at our approach. He did not think it his duty to enquire by what authority a couple of strangers proposed to mount the steps of the private residence of the President. My wife and I chanced to be invited guests. That was a mere accident. Any citizen in the free-born country on the other side of the Atlantic has the right to cross the President’s threshold and insist on shaking hands with him. Thus, elsewhere, on a memorable day, came the murderer of President McKinley, with his treacherous right hand bound in a make-believe bandage. Falling in with the crowd that filed past the beaming, welcoming President, he extended his left hand. As his victim held it in friendly grip, he, throwing off the bandage from his right hand, disclosed a pistol, with which he killed his unsuspecting host.
     I talked with Mr. Roosevelt about this practice of handshaking. He told me his colleagues in the Ministry had urged him to discontinue the practice. At one of his levees he consented to the innovation. But the experience was unendurable.
     “This is the first and last time,” he whispered to the attendant Ministers, as the affronted crowd stood at [236][237] gaze. “It is much more trouble to explain why I don’t shake hands than to shake.”
     Roosevelt laughingly assured me that he regarded the exercise from the point of view of beneficial muscular exertion.
     “When I was a young man,” he said, “I mostly lived out-of-doors, always on my legs or on horseback. Now I am pretty well tied to the house. But you go and stand in my place on an autumn afternoon and have your hand shaken by from five hundred to a thousand sturdy citizens, and if, when it’s all over, you don’t feel as if you’d been felling a tree or two, you are made of harder grit than came my way.”