Theodore Roosevelt | Page 9

ever written
by any man,--Tennyson's "Ulysses." And in this poem are lines which
formed the text for Roosevelt's life:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to
shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life.
This was the doctrine of "the strenuous life" which he preached,-- and
practiced. It was to perform the hard necessary work of the world, not
to sit back and criticize. It was to do disagreeable work if it had to be
done, not to pick out the soft jobs. It was to be afraid neither of the man
who fights with his fists or with a rifle, nor of the man who fights with
a sneering tongue or a sarcastic pen.
To go into New York politics from 1880-1882 was, for a young man of
Roosevelt's place in life, just out of college, what most of his friends
and associates called "simply crazy." That young men of good
education no longer think it a crazy thing to do, but an honorable and
important one, is due to Theodore Roosevelt more than to any other
one man.
As he sat on the window-seat of his friend's room in Holworthy Hall,
that day, and said he was going to try to help the cause of better
government in New York, Mr. Thayer looked at him and wondered if
he were "the real thing." Thirty-nine years later Mr. Thayer looked
back over the career of his college mate, and knew that he had talked
that day with one of the great men of our Republic, with one who, as
another of his college friends says, was never a "politician" in the bad
sense, but was always trying to advance the cause of better government
The reason why it seemed to many good people a crazy thing to go into
politics was that the work was hard and disagreeable much of the time.
Politics were in the hands of saloon-keepers, toughs, drivers of street
cars and other "low" people, as they put it. The nice folk liked to sit at
home, sigh, and say: "Politics are rotten." Then they wondered why
politics did not instantly become pure. They demanded "reform" in
politics, as Roosevelt said, as if reform were something which could be
handed round like slices of cake. Their way of getting reform, if they

tried any way at all, was to write letters to the newspapers, complaining
about the "crooked politicians," and they always chose the newspapers
which those politicians never read and cared nothing about.
If any decent man did go into politics, hoping to do some good, these
same critics lamented loudly, and presently announced their belief that
he, too, had become crooked. If it were said that he had been seen with
a politician they disliked, or that he ate a meal in company with one,
they were sure he had gone wrong. They seemed to think that a
reformer could go among other officeholders and do great work, if he
would only begin by cutting all his associates dead, and refusing to
speak to them.
It was a fortunate day for America when Theodore Roosevelt joined the
Twenty-first District Republican Club, and later when he ran for the
New York State Assembly from the same district. He was elected in
November, 1881. This was his beginning in politics.
In the Assembly at Albany, he presently made discoveries. He learned
something about the crooked politicians whom the stay-at- home
reformers had denounced from afar. He found that the Assembly had in
it many good men, a larger number who were neither good nor bad, but
went one way or another just as things happened to influence them at
the moment. Finally, there were some bad men indeed. He found that
the bad men were not always the poor, the uneducated, the men who
had been brought up in rough homes, lacking in refinement. On the
contrary, he found some extremely honest and useful men who had had
exactly such unfavorable beginnings.
Also, he soon discovered that there were, in and out of politics, some
men of wealth, of education, men who boasted that they belonged to
the "best families," who were willing to be crooked, or to profit from
other men's crooked actions. He soon announced this discovery, which
naturally made such men furious with him. They pursued him with
their hatred all his life. Some people really think that great wealth
makes crime respectable, and if it is pointed out to a wealthy but
dishonest man, that he is merely a common thief, and if in addition, the
fact is proved to everybody's satisfaction, his anger is noticeable.

Along with his serious work in the Assembly, Roosevelt found that
there was a great deal of fun in