“Lieutenant Davis’s First Sergeant, Clarence Gould, killed a Spaniard with his revolver.... At about the same time I also shot one.... Two Spaniards leaped from the trenches ... not ten yards away. As they turned to run I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and killing the second [Oh, joy!].... At the same time I did not know of Gould’s exploit, and I supposed my feat to be unique.”
Surely it requires courage, rare and noble courage, for a wealthy graduate of Harvard University to boast in print that he shot a poor, ignorant fleeing Spanish soldier—very probably a humble working man drafted to war, torn from his weeping wife and children—that he shot such a man, in the back. Oh, bliss—elation—ecstasy divine! “I got him! with my revolver too! in the back!” Manly pastime of an American gentleman, a mongrel mixture of patrician and brute. Yes, reader, Mr. Roosevelt, politician, was in the Cuban War—with a purpose; and secured a military title and a “war record” worth at least 75,000 votes in his campaign for the governorship of New York which immediately followed the war. For details consult The Rough Rider. With shrewd patriotism, political foresight, rare courage—and girlish bashfulness—Mr. Roosevelt’s picture is repeatedly presented in the book, the poses expressing his usual audible modesty and ferocious gentleness.
Emerson finely says: “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
(18) The noble Professor Paulsen (Berlin University) wrote:[[198]]
“Hate impels men to seek quarrels, and pride turns their heads.... Nay, arrogance and hatred are really always the signs of an irritable, diseased self-consciousness.... [That] selfish, arrogant, vain and narrow-minded self-conceit, which the flatterers of the popular passion call patriotism.”
The distinguished Italian historian, G. Ferrero, has written:[[199]]
“Thus in destroying or creating, man can procure for himself strong emotions, and persuade himself of his own superiority.... Two passions have divided the human heart throughout the annals of human history: the divine passion for creation, and the diabolical passion for destruction.... Nineteenth-century man may seek after violent and inebriating emotions that permit him to assert his superiority over his fellows....”
Robert G. Ingersoll understood the hero-brute mongrel:
“Courage without conscience is a wild beast. Patriotism without principle is the prejudice of birth, the animal attachment to place.”
Thus Victor Hugo:[[200]]