On March 4, , Theodore Roosevelt laid down the burdens of the Presidency, or rather placed them on the broad back of his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and with that youthful exuberance which was so much a part of his nature prepared to go big-game hunting in Africa. What followed was a year of safari in which some three thousand beasts, including nine lions, thirteen rhinoceroses, and seven hippopotamuses, lost their lives. As Gamaliel Bradford once observed, Roosevelt killed lions as though they were mosquitoes, and smote mosquitoes as though they were lions.
Fascinating as he found the hunting of African game, Roosevelt did not permit it to monopolize his attention. He wrote a series of articles for Scribner's , the substance of which was later embodied in his African Game Trails ; he kept up correspondence with a number of friends; and he developed plans which had begun to take shape before he had left the United States for visiting Egypt and the principal capitals of Europe on his way back to Oyster Bay.
Fifty-one years old, blind in one eye, his amazing vitality already beginning to show signs of the strain of the strenuous life, he was still capable of laying out and following through an itinerary that would have staggered many a man twenty years younger. Among the capitals which the Colonel of the Rough Riders was determined to visit was Berlin, and among the world leaders whom he was determined to see was Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The latter, and the growing might of Imperial Germany, were very much at the center of a world which was being shaken by the alarums and excursions of power politics, and Roosevelt longed to get a close-up of the German leader and of the political figures who surrounded him. There was still another factor in Roosevelt's desire to go to Berlin. He wanted to play a part in what appeared to be a significant effort to guarantee world peace. One of the active agitators for peace was Andrew Carnegie.
The erstwhile steel magnate, who was now as zealous in the prevention of war as he had been in the accumulation of millions, was obsessed with the idea of converting the swashbuckling Kaiser into the protagonist of a peaceful world order, and he was furthermore determined to use his friend Roosevelt as a means to this great end. Carnegie spoke with the authority of millions of dollars behind him, and when he spoke men listened.
