This Busy World [excerpt]

ALL the preachers preached on President McKinley; all the editors wrote about him. There was a great deal to say, and most of it seems to have been said. Of course thousands of writers and speakers said about the same things, for they dealt with the same facts, and they were moved by the same feelings. Among others who have spoken was Mrs. Eddy, the mother of Christian Science. She issued two utterances which were read in her churches, one a communication on the death of the President, the other a letter of sympathy and advice to Mrs. McKinley. Both of these discourses are seemly and kind, but they are materially different from the writings of any one else. Reciting the praises of the dead President, Mrs. Eddy says: “May his history waken a tone of truth that shall reverberate, renew euphony, emphasize human power, and bear its banner into the vast forever.” No one else said anything like that. Mother Eddy’s style is a personal asset. Her sentences usually have the considerable literary merit of being unexpected. Her letter to Mrs. McKinley was short, sympathetic, religious, and very much to the point. Her position in the country as the head and chief spokesman of an important religious body is very curious and highly interesting.

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EVERY one who knows the Roosevelt pedigree knows that the President’s mother was Martha Bullock, daughter of James Stevens Bullock, of Georgia, but it has been news to a good many persons that the new man in the White House is by descent a representative of the South as well as of the North. By an unusual stroke of enterprise Colonel Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather married the step-mother of his deceased wife. It sounds odd, but when the whole story is told, as it was the other day in a letter from Savannah to the Sun, a good deal of the oddness evaporates. The Bullocks have been people of note in Georgia ever since (and before) Archibald Bullock was President of Georgia, in 1776. This Archibald was the great-great-grandfather of Colonel Roosevelt.

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COLONEL ROOSEVELT has six children—a family which will strain the capacity of the White House. There is nothing like an object-lesson to bring a great truth home. The truth that there are not nearly enough bed-rooms and family rooms in the White House has been tritely familiar for about fifty years. If there are enough Roosevelts to contribute an object-lesson which will bring this venerable truth home to Congress, the White House may be enlarged, and considerable benefit will result. There is no particular sense or useful economy in keeping the President’s family in cramped quarters. Presidents, as a rule, have had small families, but such families as they have had have usually suffered from a dearth of bed-rooms. The White House ought certainly to be kept up with the times.