' That fellow," said he, " ought to have been knocked in the head. I would rather take my chances with a blackmailing policeman than with such as he." That was what Theodore Roosevelt got out of his years at Harvard. And I think, upon the whole, that he could have got nothing better, for himself, for us, or for the college. III EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS I N the year when President Garfield died, New York saw the unusual sight of two young "silk-stockings," neither of whom had ever been in politics before, running for office in a popular election. One was the representative of vast inherited wealth, the other of the bluest of the old Knickerbocker blood: William Waldorf Astor and Theodore Roosevelt. One ran for Congress, pouring out money like water, contemptuously confident that so he could buy his way in. The newspapers reported his nightly progress from saloon to saloon, where " the boys" were thirstily waiting to whoop it up for him, and the size of "the wad" he left at each place, as with illsuppressed disgust he fled to the next. The other, nominated for the State Legislature on |