CHAPTER V

THE ESSENTIAL OF SUCCESS

"If a man lives a decent life and does his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and attached to him are better for his having lived then he is a success."Theodore Roosevelt.

Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people. Prov. 14. 34.

T

O Mr. Roosevelt the very contest for the right was a knightly joust which itself gave thrill and joy. In an address he once said, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world knows." He entered his campaigns in this spirit and turned life into a game where he did serious business with a happy heart.

He developed an instinct for right as an artist would the æsthetic nature or the mother the ability to intuitively interpret the needs of her child. John Burroughs relates a carefully planned attempt of political opponents at Albany to besmirch his character.

He was not caught. His innate rectitude and instinct for the right course saved him as it has saved him many times since. I do not think that in any emergency he has to debate with himself long as to the right course to be pursued; he divines it by a kind of infallible instinct.

As a "disciple" he had a right to claim the promise that the Spirit would guide "into all truth."

When 'Elihu Root left his Cabinet, though a very undemonstrative man, he wrote Mr. Roosevelt: "I shall always be happy to have been a part of the administration directed by your sincere and rugged adherence to right and devotion to the trust of our country."

Senator Lodge said:

Roosevelt was always advancing, always struggling to make things better. ... He looked always for an ethical question. He was at his best when he was fighting the battle of right against wrong.

Senator Beveridge said:

"Those who were

near Colonel Roosevelt knew. . . that . . . the motive power within him was always ethical conviction."

Eugene Thwing, after saying, "The strength of truth was always the one secret of Roosevelt's great power," quotes him as saying: "We scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world come in arms against him."

Jacob Riis reports a lady who said:

I always wanted to make Roosevelt out as a living embodiment of high ideals, but somehow every time he did something that seemed really great, it turned out, upon looking at it seriously, that it was only just the right thing to do.

Lemuel Quigg was told, when he came as Platt's messenger to question Roosevelt concerning his attitude if he became Governor, that he would try to get on with the organization, but that he would ex

pect the organization to be equally sincere in helping when he was trying to do something for the public good. In a stiff controversy, he said, later:

I know that you did not in any way wish to represent me as willing to consent to act otherwise than in accordance with my conscience; indeed, you said you knew that I would be incapable of acting save with good faith to the people at large.

Vice President Coolidge said, in an address in New York: "Theodore Roosevelt never lapsed. He was against what he believed to be wrong everywhere." While riding the range with one of his own cowboys, during the Dakota days, he came across an unbranded maverick which his cowboy caught, threw, and was about to mark with the Roosevelt brand. Mr. Roosevelt thereupon discharged the boy, who protested that he was working in the interests of his boss, and received the reply, "Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me, you will steal from me.”

He was always fearful in receiving financial remuneration lest he would not render commensurate service. When Lawrence Abbott closed the contract for him to begin his services with The Outlook, at $12,000 a year-a good salary for The Outlook to pay but only one tenth of what other concerns offered he put his arm around Lawrence and said, "Now that is very good of you, Lawrence, but do you really think you can afford it?" He refused to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Magazine at first because he could not see how a monthly periodical could profitably pay what they offered him for

an article every thirty days. He insisted, "I do not like being in the position of not being able to deliver full value," and he signed only when convinced. Gerald Lee wrote of Mr. Roosevelt:

Other men have done things that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha'd, that leaped and danced-perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked-has been reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. He has been a colossal drummer of goodness. He has proved himself a master salesman of moral values.

This sturdy personality was not an accident. The skyscraper stands because rooted in the eternal rocks and fibered by highly tempered steel ribs. He founded his life on the Rock of Ages and steel-ribbed his personality by moral standards of finest metal highly tempered in the fires of hottest testings. He accepted no substitutes nor permitted flawed materials to go into the structure. And so he stood, tall and strong, in the sunshine of approval or in the storm of most bitter vituperation.

Character is to right what brain is to thinking. Men easily and loftily assert that religion to them is contained in the Golden Rule. But it is a complex thing to apply it to daily problems. Mr. Roosevelt once said about one phase of its application:

The Golden Rule means that we ought to treat every man and woman as we ought to like to be treated ourselves. I say "ought to like" and not merely "like," for it certainly does not mean that we are to divorce unselfishness from foresight, common sense and common honesty.

At another time, in speaking of his intricate work at Albany, he said:

If I am sure a thing is right or wrong, why, then I know how to act; but lots of times there is a little of both on each side, and then it becomes mighty puzzling to know the exact course to follow.

A scholar is not made by two years or ten years of study but by a lifetime of study. A good man is built in the same way by a lifetime of watching, seeking advice, following the inner light and seeking more, and having found the right to fight for it every time to the death. To be equipped to know and to do the right is a big task. It cost Mr. Roosevelt as much to get this ability as it does anyone else. Only the shallow slide through life with ease.

The Israelites only blew away the hulk of nations decayed by wickedness when they destroyed the tribes on their march to the promised land. Theodore Roosevelt believed that he was a prophet warning America against the fate of these people and of Greece and Rome, and so he urged the nation to observe the laws of right as the sine qua non of existence. He therefore enforced righteousness in the same spirit that a patriot fought for the flag when it was in danger. This was an early ideal and is enforced in his "Oliver Cromwell"-where he insists that a nation loses its liberty by "licentiousness no less than by servility." This sin, he insists, is a sign of lost self-control and is therefore no different than if the helplessness sprang from a "craven distrust of its own powers."