Perceiving our widened interest, John Hay, as Secretary of State,
took our foreign relations on a grand Cook's tour of the world. He
showed us Europe and the Orient. In honor of Manila Bay he invented
that brilliant fiction, the "open door" in the East. Turning our
attention to the world we discovered the General Staff. Hitherto
our army had fought mostly with the scattered Indian tribes of the
West and you cannot use a General Staff in conducting six separate
wars at once, each no bigger than a good-sized riot. But as Admiral
Perry had opened the eyes of the Hermit Kingdom of Japan, so
Admiral whatever-his-name-was who consented to be sunk by Dewey,
the unremembered hero of this great enlightenment, had opened the
eyes of this Hermit Republic of the West to the world across the
seas.
We had to have a General Staff. Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, gave
us one, faithfully copied from the best European models. Roosevelt,
the Magnificent, stood by and said "Bully." Everything was of this
order; so it was to a tremendously interesting job that Mr. Root
succeeded when he took the place of John Hay as Secretary of State.
The mood of the hour was expansive and a luminous personality
pervaded the national life.
But public service cannot always be so interesting as it is at its
fullest moments. The luminous personality went out.
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